San Pedro de Atacama

On Thursday I took a 10-hour bus ride (not 20-hour as my map suggests) across the Andes from Salta, Argentina to San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. It was a pretty spectacular journey, but not the most pleasant, because I was feeling sick for most of the time. I assume this was due to the altitude, because we were above 4000m for a lot of the journey.

I've spent the last couple of days with Hiro, who's a Japanese guy that was staying in the same hostel as me in Salta, and who caught the same bus as me to San Pedro on Thursday. When we arrived in San Pedro, he knew exactly what he wanted to see, so within five minutes of arriving at our hostel we were booked onto two tours for Friday - one to the El Tatio geysers in the morning, and the other to the Valle de la Luna and Valle de la Muerte in the afternoon.

The El Tatio geysers are 60 miles from San Pedro, and the best time to view them is at sunrise, so unfortunately this meant getting up for the tour at 3:30am. Some pictures of what we saw are here and below.

There's also a photo of me at the geysers here. The temperature was well below freezing at this point. There was then an opportunity for swimming in some hot springs. Believe it or not, I did actually go for a swim, but I don't have a photo to prove it.

After getting back from the geysers, we had a break for a couple of hours, and we then set off for our second tour of the day. The first stop was the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon), so called because it resembles the moon, and it's probably about as dusty as the moon as well. We also made a stop at Valle de la Muerte (Death Valley), which was just as dusty.

This morning (Saturday), Hiro left for Bolivia, and I booked myself onto a 4-hour horse-riding tour in the Valle de Catarpe, which must be the first time I've been on a horse in over fifteen years. Here's a picture to prove it.

I then went for lunch with Lisa, who's a Swedish girl I met at the horse-riding (in the red jacket behind me in the photo). Tonight we both wanted to go on a star-gazing tour run by a professional astronomer who lives here (San Pedro is in the middle of a desert and has some of the clearest skies in the world), but tonight's event had already sold out by the time we went to buy the tickets. Also, San Pedro has had one of its rare cloudy days today, so it's quite likely the event would have been cancelled anyway. Instead I went for a meal with Lisa and the other two in my horse-riding group.

Tomorrow I head into Bolivia, starting with a 3-day 4x4 tour of the Uyuni salt flats.