San Pedro de Atacama

After a 23 hour journey straight north we made it to the Atacama desert oasis of San Pedro de Atacama.  Unfortunately an Australian traveler had his bag stolen right from under his feet when he was sleeping - it had his passport in it.  Unlucky guy.

San Pedro is famous as the touristic center for the Atacama desert, as well as being the base for Chile´s largest archeaological sites.  Because it is so dry everything is very well preserved.  In the weeks prior to our arrival they had torrential rain, which occurs every 30 years or so, which meant that some of the roads had been flooded out and made some of the normal attractions either unavailable or hard (read expensive) to get to.  We settled into a hostel run by a some french people that catered to francophone tourists, recommended to us by Marc and Anja all the way back in Sucre.  While there I got some chess lessons from one of the owner´s boyfriend and played as much as I could - perhaps a new hobby in Inuvik.  The town is alright, with a chill vibe and lots of mud coloured/made buildings on streets meeting in a central square.  It has a great museum describing how Atacaman culture developed and was eventually influenced by the Tiwanakan culture out of Bolivia.  However, it was all a bit overun with tourists and gift shops and was also pretty expensive.

The view from the central square.  Typically there isn´t this much snow on the volcanoes surrounding the town, but because of the rains we were surrounded by about a dozen snow capped mountains like this.

The courtyard at our hostel, where we would read and I played some chess.

We spent two days exploring the surrounding area including visiting a pre-Incan fortress called Pukara de Quitor and then rented bikes to go into the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) - we had the whole place to ourselves for several hours as we got up early to make the 16km ride out of town.  We really enjoyed the scenery, perhaps not the sore butts.  It was all pretty breathtaking, and because of the recent rains there was a layer of salt on the hillsides that looked just like a powerdering of snow.  I didn´t really know what to expect from the Atacama desert but count it as one of the highlights of the trip so far.  It was pretty great scenery and a lot of fun getting out of town on our own. 

The Quitor fort, outside San Pedro de Atacama, is over 700 years old.  

To the east we saw snow capped volcanoes, one of which appeared to have smoke coming out (look at the right).

Welcome to San Pedro.

One of the bikes we rented.

Elise in the middle of some salt crusted hills.

From the top of a hill in the Valley of the Moon.

 
Probably the coolest thing we did while in San Pedro was visit a private observatory some 7km outside of town to star gaze.  Because of its high altitude and dry skies the region is perfect for excellent star watching.  Our explanations were all in spanish so we caught about half of what the guide told us.  She showed us constellations like Orion´s Belt and the Southern Cross,  two other galaxies called the Magallenic Clouds, Alpha Centauri (the closest star to the world), the bright stars Sirius and Canopus as well as Saturn and Mars.  It was amazing seeing Saturn through a super powerful telescope - you could see it´s rings!

Saturn´s rings through the telescope.

A cool time lapse photo with the milkyway in the background.

After San Pedro we were on our way back to Bolivia, traveling again through the Andes mountains.  We had to spend the night in Calama, Chile, where the dust from the world´s largest copper mine is visible high in the sky from town. Unfortunately tours were booked almost months in advance.  I got my haircut instead.

The third haircut of the trip.

While we enjoyed our time in both Argentina and Chile we were told the two countries are anomolies when compared to the rest of ´Latin America´.  They both have incredibly beautiful things to see and are fairly well organized, especially compared to Bolivia.  We were eager to get back to a little ´chaos´ in Uyuni once again and eventually to Peru and Ecuador.