Hey y’all, I’m back after touring around the south of Bolivia with a real rundown of my stay in San Pedro de Atacama. I’m going to write a separate post about my tour to the Uyuni salt flat so this is just about the things I did in San Pedro de Atacama. San Pedro is a small, touristy town out in the middle of the Chilean part of the Atacama desert which serves as a jumping off point for all kinds of tours around the area. There are about a million agencies all offering the same tours, so choosing is a bit daunting. Luckily my friend Eugene, whom I met down in El Chalten earlier in the trip, put me in contact with his friend Camila, who’s been working at a hotel in San Pedro for about 3 weeks. Camila helped me pick a tour operator and gave me some advice on which tours to do. On my first day I slept in (I had just come off of back to back 12 and 13 hour bus rides, and arrived around 1am) and then met up with Camila to stroll around and book some tours. In the afternoon I went to the Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley), which gets its name from the stark landscape’s resemblance to our favorite natural satellite. It was a cool tour, and it ended up high with huge, beautiful views and a fantastic sunset.
The next day I got up at 6 for a tour to the Lagunas Altiplanicas. The altiplano is a high plateau that slopes up to the Andes, so these are lakes (I’m not really sure why they use the word laguna instead of lago, it’s a subject of some debate with the people I’ve been on the tours with…) in the middle of the desert, at altitude. They’re examples of the interesting patches of water and vegetation that you can find even in the Atacama, the driest desert in the world. After the lakes we went down to the Atacama salt flat, where we saw a few flamingos and other birds.
That night I caught this beautiful sunset:
The day after the lagunas was even earlier – 4am wakeup to hop in a van and head to the Tatio Geysers. During the day in the Atacama it was very hot and very sunny, but at night and in the early morning, especially in the higher areas, it is absolutely freezing cold. The geysers are at around 14,000 feet, so at 6am it’s about 20 degrees. We had breakfast in the darkness and waited for the sun to rise, and as the day lit up we started to see a huge field of geysers. Chile has an incredible amount of volcanic activity, which gives the area its beautiful mountains but also creates geysers and volcanic rock piles in the middle of the desert. This field of geysers had all kinds, shapes, and sizes, and walking around was a treat. After that we went to a hot spring where Joachim, a nice Belgian guy, and I were the only ones to muster up the courage to hop in since it was still pretty cold. It turned out the water wasn’t actually that warm so the rest of the group were really the smart ones. Our next stop was a beautiful wetland (in the middle of the desert!) where we saw several different kinds of birds, and we topped off the trip in a small village where I got to try a llama shish kabob (delicious) and play with Valdivia, their adorable puppy.
That night Camila and I went on an astronomical tour. Northern Chile is famous for its clear skies and some hugely disproportionate number of the world’s really serious telescopes/astronomical investigation facilities are there, so astronomical tours are a popular activity in San Pedro. Our tour was great – we started just standing outside and getting a lesson on all the things you can see with the naked eye, the movement of the moon and stars, the difference in what you can see at different latitudes, etc… Our host had an unbelievably powerful laser so she could point out everything she was talking about and trace the constellations in the sky. After a while we went over to their set of 10 telescopes and got to look at all different things – the moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, clusters of stars in the Milky Way, nebulae (my favorite – they’re so cool!), and an entire galaxy far, far away. We ended the night with hot chocolate or tea and a Q&A with Alain, the French astronomer who founded the facility 15 years ago. The first question was something about the big bang or the history of astronomy which got Alain talking for about 45 minutes, so we only ended up having one question in the session, but it was interesting and Alain was quite a character.
All in all San Pedro was…. good. I can’t say that I was swept off my feet, but I think that was in part because I had such high expectations for the place – the Atacama desert has fascinated me since I first heard about it, and I had always pictured the most extreme part, an endless stretch of hostile wasteland. It is, in fact, an incredibly varied area, with beautiful wetlands mixed in amongst towering volcanos and huge sand dunes. It was a great few days, and I’m glad I visited. But, just to make sure we end on a cliffhanger, the tour through the south of Bolivia really did sweep me off my feet. So tune in next time!
A Phil Abroad 
Love the pictures and updates, especially about Atacama and the celestial tour & discussion. Your grasp of details and descriptive captions remain unparalleled, moon, rock, mud, sand. But most of all…estoy muy contento con el regresso del unicornio! Looking forward to the next installment. Love ya, Daddio
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The various terrains of the great desert are surprising. Your trip sounds like a “Little Prince” episode stranded in a great big desert that wasn’t! With the sky and constellations, of course, all a matter of great consequence. Loved the selfies and “moon” rocks –
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