From the moment we got on the 1am bus from Salta, we knew that we had squarely arrived back on the Gringo trail as we headed for San Pedro de Atacama. Located in northern Chile on the boarder of the Andes, the Atacama desert is renowned for being one of the worlds driest. These days, San Pedro sits in a bubble in the desert, split in two parts. The initial part is now over run by tourists, tour agencies, hotels, and restaurants. The other appears to be the town where people live.
This is an amazing place to stop. Whether it be for a few days, a week, or even longer, the beauty of this place is there are lots of things to do but you can equally sit back and enjoying the sun and slightly less oxygen that comes at 2400m. Coming over the Andes with a boarder crossing at 4500m in the 8am cold, our first priority was to relax and take in the town.
The next afternoon we headed out to Valle de la Luna. Whilst there are heaps of options for things to do here, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who wasn't keen to take the afternooon/sunset tour out to this strange land formation. Years ago the area was mined for salt until it was turned into a national reserve. It lies about 13km from town and can be seen by renting a bike and doing it solo. However even though the road is mostly flat, the altitude and strong afternoon sun leave are enough excuse for most travelers to hop on a tour and see it with ease.
Every tour finishes the same. On a hill. Watching the sunset over the valley. When I was last here 10years ago, there was only about a fifth of the tourists that are here now. Sunset was still a popular activity then too but we watched it from the sand dune in the picture above. Unfortunately as the tour popularity increased so did the amount of rubbish left on the dunes until the national park closed off the dune and the tours now finished on top Coyote hill.
We got back to town in the dark and after finding a little bit to eat we headed back to our hostel, which was located about 10min drive out of town. There was one very good reason we wanted to stay here, and that was to see the stars
View from the hostel gate
The hostel
Unfortunately we couldn't stay out all night looking at the stars because the next morning we were up at 4am to hunt the local Geysers. Leaving San Pedro, the bus went up to 4500m where we stopped to pay an entrance fee before heading further into the mountain to see the waking geysers as the sun started to pierce the horizon.
After a little breakfast watching the geysers, we slowly headed back to San Pedro. Along the way we stopped at high altitude lagoons, checked out roadside Vicuña and Llamas, and stopped at a little historic town where they were making Llama Kebabs. Of course we had to try it. And they were grand.
Llama Kebabs
Vicuña
It was a quick stop in San Pedro and we could have stayed for many more days but at the same time we were super keen to get to Bolivia and so after we arrived back in San Pedro from the geysers, we headed to Calama for the night, ready to get the bus the next day to Sucre.
31 562 Km (14011Km Flights, 7876Km Sailing, 9545Km Bus, 112km Hiking, 18Km Horse riding)