Chile: San Pedro de Atacama
Trip Start
Dec 02, 2008
1
19
28
Trip End
Jun 03, 2009
San Pedro de Atacama, Chile
Friday, March 20, 2009
Most things were quite a way out of town and therefore needed to be done on a tour so in the end we opted to try sand boarding with a trip to the Valle de Luna (moon valley) plus a trip to the observatory to look at the stars and see Saturn. Apparently this is the driest desert on earth and they only receive 2 days of rain a year. Annoyingly they were the 2 days whilst we were there - although apparently it had rained the week before as well. Must be global warming I suppose!
The sand boarding was great fun and we would be keen to try it again - hopefully in Peru. We opted to take a lesson thinking we would get the most out of it. But this really just consisted of īstick your feet in the loops and then put your weight backī. Think we could probably have managed without the lesson... Itīs amazing the speed you can pick up and we both fell a few times although we seemed to get the hang of it in the end. Unfortunately it rained during our īlessonī which meant we travelled a bit slower despite waxing our boards up. However the benefit was the sand was cool - I was in bare feet. There was a terrific thunder storm and some amazing fork lightning. Looking back standing in the middle of the desert in a thunder storm probably isnīt the most sensible thing to do but the lightning was quite a way off.
Following the lesson we headed to the Valley of the Moon - so called because of the shape of the rocks which appear red. The rock formations are created by the wind so there are some very strange shapes. Apparently in South America any collection of weird rock formations are referred to as the Valley of the Moon and so we are planning to visit another outside La Paz. We stayed here to watch the sunset, which made the rocks glow red, but it was a little disappointing as there was still a lot of cloud around.
One of the things we had looked forward to most was the observatory tour. Apparently there around 10 telescopes set up to look at different things, including the milky way, saturn etc. You can actually see the rings of saturn and it is possible to take pictures with your own camera through the telescope. The first day the tour was cancelled due to the cloud and so we rearranged for the following day. In a way this was good as we managed to meet up with severeal people we have met earlier in our trip allowing us to go out for dinner together. We ended up in this small restaurant where there was no menu and the chef came out to tell us what was available. In the end most of us had beef in red wine with potatoes and rice. It was really cheap (2 quid) - very unusual as most of the places were charging the same prices you see at home. (We ate a lot of empanadas here as they were the cheapest option, my favourite were filled with cheese and then deep fried!). An excellent night out, despite the short power cut while the generator kicked in. The following day the tour was due to depart at 7.30pm, but was postponed to 9.30 and finally 11pm. In the end it was cancelled altogether. We were really disappointed as the sky looked clear, but in hindsight it was good of them as it was quite expensive and if we couldnīt see some of things we had been promised we would have been quite annoyed.
In San Pedro we had the difficult decision to make regarding which company we would use to take the salt flat tour. There must have been around 20 companies and we had heard horror stories of drunk drivers, drivers falling asleep at the wheel and 7 or 8 people crammed in a 4x4. After a bit of research we chose Cordillera Traveller. I would certainly recommend them, especially our driver Epy. We were 6 in the 4x4 plus the driver. But I think it will be one of the highlights of our trip, despite the feeling quite ill on the first day due to altitude sickness.
