San Pedro de Atacama

A couple of weekends ago I traveled to San Pedro de Atacama with Marc and Erin where we met up with more six month volunteers from Marc’s program. In total there were eight of us, seven girls and Marc. Oh! And super crazy small world story, one of the girls was from Fort Wayne! She went to Cantebury and knows the Muttons. She graduated a year before me from Indiana. Aint that a small world? Imagine meeting someone from your small hometown in the middle of the driest desert in the world...yep I did!

Anyhoo, San Pedro, it’s super cool! It was a little expensive, but cool non-the-less! So I live in Copiapo, it’s on the southern outskirts of the Atacama Desert. San Pedro de Atacama is smack dab in the middle of the desert, and it took us 10 hours by bus to get there. Mostly because there is no direct road straight into the desert, we had to go out of our way a little to get there. San Pedro is what I was expecting when they told me I was going to the desert, completely desolate, with just sand and mountains for miles. I don’t think anyone actually lives in San Pedro and it exist solely for tourist perposes. The bus station was basically a curb with some benches and the town itself existed of a few hostels and one main road that contained restaurants, tourist shops and tourist agencies. There were so many tourist agencies! I don’t know how they all survive with all the competition.

The first day we were in town, we decided to take tour to see some flamingos that lived in the middle of this huge salt flat! It was called Salar de Atacama. The flamingos were pretty cool, we also saw llamas and donkeys! We watched the sunset in ¬¬the Los Flamencos National Reserve and headed back into town for an early night because we decided to do an early morning tour to see the geysers of Tatio, which was about an hour away. The tour started at 4 am and the reason you have to get up so early is because the morning is the best time to see the geysers. It was sooo cold in the moring, there was one point where I thought my toes might freeze off, but within an hour or two, as soon as the sun rose, it started warming up immensly. The geyser tour I think was the best tour we took all weekend, it was well organized, in English and in Spanish, and lasted close to eight hours! You could swim in these hot springs, if you wanted, and then they took us to various other small towns along the way home.

I forgot to mention, Gloria had a nephew, Piere, who worked in a tourist agency in San Pedro. He was hooked us up with all of our tours and was supper great to us! That afternoon we went sandboarding in Valle de Muerte (Vally of death). Yah, like snowboarding, but in the desert! It was a little unorganized, but I had a blast. So much fun! Only problem was, you had to walk up the hill each time. The first time was a killer, don’t forget to factor in the altitude, something like 13,000 feet or so..., but it got easier each time you did it. I totally want to do it again here in Copiapo if I can somehow get my hands on a sandboard. That evening they took us to Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) to watch the sunset which was gorgeous because it throws reds, purples, and blues on the mountains as the sun sets. They even gave us a complementary Escudo (cheapest beer in Chile) to enjoy the sunset with.

By the next day, I’m running low on cash, and it just so happens every single ATM in San Pedro isn’t working....so we all scrape together whatever cash we can and it’s enough for us to all go on one more tour to the hot springs of Puritama. It was a nice and relaxing day, and we got back just in time to catch our bus back to Copiapo. It was such a great weekend, I had so much fun! I would recommend it to anyone traveling through Chile.