Christmas at San Pedro de Atakama

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Geo: -35.6751, -71.543

After returning from Bolivia I was really tired because the last 2 days we had to get up at 4:30 AM and the days were quite long. I bought tickets for a few tours of Cruz Andina that I wanted to do with my friend Alex who would be arriving the next day and I had a delicious lunch (vegetarian risotto). I texted the Cimas del Sol Hostel if they could come pick me up at the bus terminal at 2 PM but when I arrived 1 hour later, they were like : "You are late, we expected you you at 2!" and I was "But it is 2!" until I realized that I had forgotten to change my clock from Bolivian to Chilean time.... Congratulations Bianca, very smart... ! ^^

It was Christmas Eve and everyone in the hostel was preparing for a big party, but I was soo tired from the last tour that I just bought a small bottle of wine and wanted to chill. The people in the hostel seemed quite nice but I was too tired to get to know anyone and so I was really happy when everyone left for dinner at 10 PM. The only people I got know that day were Max and Marc from London and Jonas from Germany. They are really nice people and I hope to stay in touch with Marc and Max.
The first night in that hostel was aweful for me : everybody came back from dinner around 2 AM and made a lot of noise ; they turned on the music really loud and went through all the rooms - no toilets in the common area, only in the bedrooms - so that I woke up and couldn't sleep anymore. Great! :-( In addition to that, the bathroom in our room was really disgusting and so I was thinking about moving to another hostel the next day - what I fortunately did NOT do.

The next morning I was up quite early and helped Laura clean the place because it looked so dirty, well, like after a party... I started to chill on the sofas on the terrace and slowly more people came. First I met Ellie from London, who is completely crazy but sooo nice, I like her a lot. Other people came, like Leah, Luis, Andy, Joao, Ivan, Fabian, etc. and we started drinking Champagne, wine and beer, we jumped into the pool, listened to good music, got some Christmas glitter make-up and had a great time! All of the troubles from last night were forgotten and I had a fabulous Christmas day! :-D
In the evening, my friend Alex from Canada arrived and after a small dinner in the hostel and a beer, we went sandboarding by night which was sooo cool! :-D

On the next day, we went on a tour to the Altiplano Lagoons to see lagoons, flamingos, lamas, vicuñas, etc. I had seen all of this in Bolivia so it was nothing new for me, but for Alex it was. After that we went on a second tour to Valle de la Luna and Valle de la muerte which was great! It was so beautiful there and our guide was excellent : he was funny and explained a lot. We watched the sunset on the Valle de la muerte with some other people from our hostel who did the same tour with a different agency (Ellie, Andy, Max, Marc, etc.). It was very nice and I'm grateful we could do this tour. This was my favorite tour in San Pedro de Atakama.

Some people of our hostel were planing on going to a party later that evening, but we just wanted to have a few drinks, chill and go to bed early because on the next day we had a tour at 4:30 AM. But like so often when you plan to go to bed early and drink nothing, it ended in the opposite : we started a drinking game ("21"😉 and went to bed only at around 3 AM. It was a fun evening though and I don't regret anything. ;-)

So, the next day started quite early, soon after our going to bed and we were really tired. To make it worth, our guide was a complete asshole and very rude. I guess he saw that nobody liked him, because nobody answerd him or followed him so that he slowly got nicer. That morning we visited the "El Tatio" geysers, a hot spring and lots of lamas and wild animals. The tour was nice and the geysers beautiful and interesting.
When we came back to our hostel, we spend our last hours there relaxing, waiting for our bus that left on 6:45 PM and saying "goodbye" to people.

This hostel was a great place to celebrate Christmas, I met a lot of crazy, fun and nice people and had an amazing time. So I can only recommand this place, but if you don't like to party and if you want to sleep a night, don't go there. ;-)

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