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.

Leaving Argentina

From Cafayate we took a bus to Salta, the main city of the state with the same name. We read that it has a population of over 500'000 people and as we both aren't big fans of cities we weren't expecting too much....

The drive towards Salta leads through the Quebrada which we visited last week and we were able to see all these amazing colours and rocks again! Somewhere on the way the driver went out to check the tires and at the next bigger village we stopped at a "gomeria" and the mechanic worked hard for almost an hour with help of the driver to change the one tire that had blown up with loads of "helpful" advices from locals that gathered around our bus... The weather changed rapidly when we got out of the gorge and it was overcast and cold in Salta.

 

There aren't many attractions in the city, it's basically just a place to stop between two buses or to do tours from. One "attraction" is a cablecar on the hill next to the bus station called "Cerro de San Bernardino" (almost sounds like home for swiss people...) with a view over the city and the mountains (the last only with good weather though). We were glad to have spent another couple of hours and spent another few with looking for a museum which we eventually found closed....

Salta from the hilltop

Happy to move on we took another bus the next morning toward San Salvador de Jujuy - normally just called "Jujuy" - this time on the top front seats with a great view of everything happening on the road (much more than back home...) and arrived in Jujuy in the late afternoon in the same weather, just a bit colder again.

Jujuy

Jujuy is quite a big city it appears much smaller though, with hundreds of market stalls in every place not taken by the traffic and mostly run by indigenious people from Argentina and Bolivia. The hostel we booked was called "Yok Wahi" and we recommend to stay far away from this place as it is run down, barely warm water in the freezing cold bathroom next to the freezing cold bedroom and staff that leaves you wait outside the hostel on the street for 10 mins... (later it turned out to be a different hostel than we booked over hostelworld.com but with the same e- mail address and way description but both hostels accuse the other of cheating and using the same name...)

Jujuy

The next day we took a local bus to Humahuaca, again on the top front seats, able to see the amazing gorge we drove through! Humahuaca is a pretty town in the mountains on 2400m, full of Indios (and herds of tourists) surrounded by nicely coloured mountain ranges. It's also the place were we dropped our postcards with stamps worth over 60€... On the way back we caught the local, local bus which seemed to stop at every house we passed.

Humahuaca

Finally, the next morning we boarded our coach toward Chile, again on the best seats! (Yes, on purpose) We highly recommend this trip over the Andes, with superb views changing after every bend and climbing over a pass at almost 5000m, passing several salt flats, herds of donkeys and llamas and this all with walking speed, the big bus gasping for air so as everyone aboard (and at least one lad puking because of the altitude). The exit stamp at the argentinan border was quickly done and we kept on moving. After the highest peak the road went steep down, flattening out in the desert of Atacama where San Pedro the Atacama is located where we stopped at the customs and had to queue for over an hour and they even scanned our backpacks, the first time so far in south america. Just after the sun dropped we found our hostel where we will spend the next week adjusting to the altitude and doing trips to nearby sights...