Friday, April 25, 2008

San Pedro de Atacama (Chile) ..a short trip to the Moon.

In San Pedro I arrived late morning, after another night on the bus, which was full of control stops and police searches. They probably looking for drugs, but who knows, they were searching through spontaneously selected luggage.

So, why San Pedro de Atacama? Well I was told by quite a few people that it’s a very pretty place located in the Chilean high desert with many things to see and do over there for tourists and an incredible night sky, thanks to the lack of industrial light pollution. And, since it was on the way south, why not!:))

After a short hostel search/tour in the town, I’ve realized that the one I was originally offered and brought to is the cheapest option in already fairly expensive town. On top of that, once I returned to it I met two Polish girls getting ready to go out into town. Shocked and happy as they were to hear me speak the home language they informed me that there is another young polish couple in the same hostel, which they’ve met a few minutes earlier. I have to say, after hardly meeting any polish travelers I was quite excited about this whole encounter. If that wasn’t enough, when we all set off into the town looking for excursions into the “Salar” and the geysers, we’ve run into another small of group of young polish travelers. How cool was that!!

The first little excursion we did was into the Moon Valley. The tour left our hostel at 3:00 in the afternoon and took us to few places in the desert with amazing rock formations and unbelievable sceneries, reaching the Moon Valley right before sunset. You could say that in the light of the setting sun the place looked like the surface of the Red Planet, but when the sun disappeared behind the horizon, all that changed into a lunar desert. What an amazing place; and the views were simply mesmerizing. I could not stop taking pictures.

With the next morning came a very early wake-up, at 4:30, to catch a tour to Tatio Geysers. They always go off in the morning, but the whole point of such an early endeavor was to see the geysers blowing up plumes of steam and water in the rays of the rising sun, which turned out to be another truly incredible sight. Nevertheless, since it was a high altitude desert (4500m again) and on top of that early morning, the temperature was about 15-20 degrees below zero Celsius (-26 to -28 Fahrenheit). I was actually rapidly dipping my hands in the nearly boiling water to warm them up, despite the fact that I had gloves with me. And, to give you all an idea of what kind of place it was, at one point I was standing in the midst of the forest of water vapor plumes, beautifully illuminated by the rays of the rising sun ..it was, yet again, simply amazing!!

Finally, the last excursion we’ve decided to do, the same day as the geysers, was to the “Salar” itself, which constituted a white and flat, endless desert of crystallized salt. The perception of size and scale can easily be lost in such a place, which allows for very cool photographic effects. The two places we’ve paid a visit to on the Salar, were: Ojos de Atacama, nearly perfectly circular pools of water with unknown depth and saline content very similar to that of ocean water; and, small lakes with salinity similar to the Dead Sea, where we floated with our hands and feet above the surface. What a cool feeling it was to just lay in the water without any effort.

That evening I caught a bus to Calama, from where I was headed to Santiago the next morning. It was easier to find connections from there rather than San Pedro, which sometimes was referred to as a tourist trap, due to difficulties with getting out of there. Well, I got out :)).

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