After a short stop in at Kristin’s in our favourite south american city we headed off north to San Pedro the Atacama.
At the time of visit 63 travel agencies, running the most popular tours, were located in the town. Some destinations can unfortunately only be reached by a tour so we had the great fun of picking some that hopefully wouldn’t at least kill us (several dangers lay in front if us: altitude sickness, boiling geysers, unpaved roads, the simple fact of being in a desert and the likeliness of a drunken driver somewhere in Bolivia). We chose based on tripadviser and a funny/creepy book to be found in the tourist office if SPDA (Sam Pedro de Atacama) collecting complains and praises of travel agencies in town.
Some questions you would want to keep in mind will talking to any tour operator: Which tour company is it? How Many thanks to Tom apeople are going to be on the tour? Does the guide speak English? How long does the tour last? How much time are we going to have at the POI? What does the tour include? Are there extra fees to be paid? Is water included in the tour? What do you have to bring? Do the driver drink alcohol?
Roaming the main street of SPDA. You will find a few locals, many tourist, 63 tour operators and even more eateries (quite good and cheap though), many hostles and lots of sand.
It’s 4:30 in the morning. Busses of all sizes are roaming the through the streets of clay and sand. Tourist are squatting in front of every hostel desperately watching bus after bus go by until at one point one is stopping and feeding them into its belly and heads off to the mountains.
It’s 4.30 in the morning but the streets are busy with tourist and minivans. Get the feeling everybody booked a tour for this day.
The advise from Paco against altItsitude sickness was to breath slowly and deeply and wait for your brain to tell the body what to do. And of course chewing coca leaves. It’s perfectly legal in Chile but don’t try to pass a drug test soon after.
Not sure whether it’s fog or steam? Better keep an eye out for the boiling geysers.
Tom got me to go in there despite the freezing temperatures outside. I regretted it immediately. Cold, slimy and my skin started itching right away.
And than finally the sun came out, unfortunately we already left the geysers behind.
A volcano relfecting it self in a puddle of water (we found quite a lot water around here, despite the fact being in a desert).
Vincunas, the desert lama. By now they are protected in Chile and only a few people have the licence to cut the fur and use it for handicraft for tourists, of course.
Lama BBQ. A bit chewy, but okay. Now way right here to proof its really lama.
But they look happy enough to not be the source for the BBQ.
Viscachas are pretty shy, so we were pretty lucky to see one. To me it looks a bit like a mix of rabbit and guinea pig („Meerninchen“ in german).
The next morning (rather night) at 3:40 we were picked up by Jorge to do what Tom said he wanted to do. Watching the stars. Jorge explained us quite a lot about the southern sky and astronomy in general. Let us play with his telescopes and pointed out stars and planets for us (we saw Jupiter and it’s moons as well as Saturn) which was really amazing and paid of for the lack of sleep.
It’s not that often you can catch a glimps of the milky way, but here you can nearly ervery night.
Saturn as we saw it through the telescope. Really impressive.
You could probably spent several weeks here enjoying this incredible landscape but we just had time for one more small trip with Tom and Jeanette from Canada. The took us up to the salt flats and insulting rock formations around San Pedro including a some acclimatization time at 4600 m. Time just flew by while chatting in their car and soon our last day in San Pedro was over. After a finally a refreshing sleep of 8 h we headed of for Salar de Uyuni the next day.
Many thanks to Tom and Jeanette for taking us to the STONES :).
Don’t tell me, what is the first thing you are thinking of, when you see this. Oh yeah a rock by a salt lake!
We always thought its not raining in the desert. We were kind of wrong, but luckily missed the floods that were to come a few days later to Atacama.