Atacama Desert

January 10-11

We took a short flight from Santiago to San Pedro de Atacama – our big draw to stop here before leaving Chile was to see the desert but most importantly to see some incredible stars. We were still pretty exhausted when we arrived, so we just hung out the first day and checked out the town for a bit. It is a really cute adobe style town. It is very tourist focused, but we were still able to find some really good food including meals with veggies. There was a slight hippy vibe to the town so every restaurant juiced stuff. I’m not typically a juicer type of girl, but coming off so much meat and red wine, I was totally game. We stayed in a really cool adobe style airbnb that was super hot… all the time. So we had a few nights of terrible sleep. Our second day we did the rational thing: we rented bikes and went on a 6 hour bike ride in the desert. Idiotas.

We took a ton of water and sunscreen and felt super prepared.

We rode out to Valle de la Luna, so called because much of the landscape looks like that of the moon. The brochure was in all Spanish and we didn’t have a guide, so… here’s some info from the internet.

Valley of the Moon is 8 miles west of San Pedro (which is too far to ride a bike in the desert). Some areas have not received a single drop of rain in hundreds of years. Also – a prototype for the Mars rover was tested here because of the dry and “forbidding” terrains. I’d like to think some movies have been filmed here, but no guide and no online guidance, so… just my best guess for now.

Duna Mayor:

And the Tres Marias formation:

I might not be taking the picture the right way but it kind of looks like three and a half Marias with a few baby Marias.

And then some salt mines which were cool:

But the real highlight of the day was when we came back from the hike on the major dune and found one of Michael’s tires completely flat. Now they sent us with stuff to replace an inner tube, but Michael and I have never done it before, so it was quite the experience. We were doing ok, not great, but ok when the first Chilean came to help. He sorted us out a bit and then we promised we could finish on our own. We kept working when a group of 20 something Chileans came up and immediately the one guy just took the pump out of Michael’s hands and finished for us. A bit pathetic from our standpoint but really struck a cord with how kind and helpful the Chileans are. It would have taken us another 20 or 30 minutes without their help. And at this point, it was getting really hot. I don’t have any pictures of our helpers, but I have this picture of Michael finishing the job. Look at how good we are at changing tires!!

We rode the 8 miles back to town and it was terrible. At this point, both of my tires were pretty low on air and I was super low on energy. This was a terrible idea. But we made it back and headed back to the Airbnb for hot naps before dinner and star gazing!!!

Dinner was delicious (more juicing!) but unfortunately, star gazing got canceled because it was too cloudy. ☹️

We went to bed early and tried to get some sleep since we had an early wake up to head to Bolivia the next morning. I slept terribly again, so around 2am I went outside to see if there were any stars and it was really clear. I woke Michael up and made him go outside to see the stars. After glancing at the sky he said “Southern Cross”, pointed, and went back to bed. I enjoyed the Southern Cross along with the Milky Way and a bunch of other constellations I cannot name for a few more minutes and then went back to lie in bed and wish there was some sort of air flow.

So Atacama wasn’t the most successful, but we were pumped to head off to the Bolivian Salt Flats next!