Visiting Chile

Arriving to San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, was a sensory overload. Driving down from the mountains gave an amazing view over San Pedro of a tiny desert town and the volcanos around it. We stepped out of the bus into the dry desert air in the heat of the late afternoon, feeling a bit dizzy and dehydrated from the altitude, just to queue at the customs until the sun started to set and we started to look for our hostel while the weather turned into a cold, starry night.

From the first moment we loved San Pedro. Quiet town, amazing surroundings, nice people. There is plenty to do: tours to geysirs, lagoons, Valley of the Moon, salt flats , stargazing and many other things. The biggest and the most popular of them all is to do a 3-day tour to Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia, where you see many similar things as listed before. That was also our plan. Problem is that the big tour starts with an overnight stop in the altitude of 4,400m. Spending only a half a day on bus over the mountains gave us such headaches and weakness that we thought it is better to stay in San Pedro (2,400m) and get used to the altitude slowly.

So we spent over a week in San Pedro just taking it easy, doing a few small tours (geysirs and the Valley of the Moon) and renting bikes. Last one was quite of an adventure… we rented bikes to go to check out nearby ruins, but we ended up getting a bit lost and crossing a river several times with the bikes, going through a nearly crashed down tunnel and biking at least 40 km in the altitude of 2,700m without any roads, just following the bottom of a dried river just to find the way back before sunset with a pretty sunburn in the face. We were also looking forward to doing the stargazing tour. Apparently San Pedro de Atacama, being the driest desert of the world, is one of the best places to do this, but there is no messing with the mother nature. It was too cloudy for the star tour for 4 nights in a row before leaving to Uyuni.