San Pedro de Atacama
Trip Start
Unknown
1
21
45
Trip End
Ongoing
San Pedro de Atacama, Chile
Monday, July 19, 2010
The place itself is chock full of gringos, and the town caters for them with swanky bars and expensive restaurants, making it a strange mix of old and new. The roads are narrow and dusty, there are at least two powercuts a day and nearly all the buildings are traditional adobe, but inside you'll find posh bars with fancy menus playing hip hop and selling small cans of a lager for nearly three quid a pop.
Sandboarding was great fun, although it's a lot of hard work climbing up the dune each time just to spend 30 seconds sliding down it again and also, the sand gets everywhere, and I mean everywhere. On the plus side my skin has never felt so smooth. John was really good at it, winning lots of admiration from our trip companions, although the least said about the wipe-out jump attempt just before we finished for the day, the better (but I have a video if anyone wants to see it...). Afterwards they took us to (another) Valle de la Luna to watch the sunset which was quite an incredible sight, and plied us with some of the local hooch, Pisco Sours.
One thing that this part of the country is famous for is it's clear sky making it a haven for astronomers. We'd heard about a tour to a nearby observatory that people had been raving about so decided to give it a try. As it needs to be at night (obviously!) you have to rap up really warm, and when you get there you all stand outside in a circle while they point out various constellations and planets with a laser. It was really interesting, it's really strange looking at the sky and not seeing the familiar constellations you're used to seeing, now I can find the southern cross, venus and mars. Good to know that if we're ever adrift in the ocean we can navigate our way to land using the stars, so long as it's just to the right of due south. After the talk you get to look through the telescopes that they have set up, at the moon (it was amazing, you could see the craters so clearly, I have a picture taken through the telescope!), venus, saturn and various stars before going into their house for a cup of hot chocolate and a mind bending talk by the astronomer about the big bang and parrallel universes.
Our next trip that we'd planned was a three day jeep tour around the South West of Bolivia, the standard gringo way to get to the Uyuni salt flats from Chile. We'd read all sorts of horror stories on the internet - drunk jeep drivers, altitude sickness, -20C temperatures - so it was with some trepidation that we set off from our nice comfy hostel for our baptism-of-fire introduction to Bolivia, but more about that later.
