San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

Early in the morning I took a bus in Salta which brought me over the 4400m high Paso Jama to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. The scenery during the bus ride was spectacular: colorful mountains (red, green, grey, and brown rocks at once), salt lakes, and volcanoes. Since you will see a lot of these things in this and the probably also the following posts, let me skip the wonderful pictures and descend from the pass and it's impressive volcanoes

down to San Pedro de Atacama, a picturesque oasis in the dry and hot Atacama dessert surrounded by snowcapped 6000m high volcanoes:

San Pedro de Atacama is just a spectacular place which seems to be out of this world. Not only the surrounding scenery is incredible, also the town itself is charming. Narrow and picturesque streets, blinding white adobe houses, a nice main plaza

a beautiful church with white adobe walls and a roof made of cactii,

and a colorful handcrafts market.

To make it short, San Pedro de Atacama is truly a small paradise in the Atacama dessert, a wonderful place. Unfortunately, I was not only the only one to discover this. There are quite many tourists strolling through the streets of San Pedro. However, if you stay off the main track you will discover wonderful views, such as the following one:

I met lots of travellers in the bus and, once we arrived, we also met a Chilean guy who owns sort of a hostel. So altogether we took over his entire house with 12 people. Our Chilean friend (sorry, I forgot his name) was a former bodyguard and so we had lots of fun practicing martial arts in his backyard.

As usual, we had a truly epic asado together with some locals and lots of beer and vine. A great first evening in beautiful San Pedro de Atacama.

The next day I got up early (without a hangover), strolled through the streets of San Pedro, and rented a bike - a really good one with disc brakes, suspension, and all the equipment you need to have fun.

Together with some friends from the hostel I cycled through the Valle de Muerte (death valley), a bizarre landscape of sand dunes, narrow gorges, sand and salt rocks (seriously!). On the pic below you can see Kathy, Nick, Jack, and Michelle cycling through this crazy scenery.

Oh yeah, and the best of it were the sandboards that we took with us :) A group of travelling buddies, sandboards, and mountainbikes... what more do you need for a perfect day in the Atacama dessert?

We made it to the end of the valley, where some pretty high sand dunes awaited us. Seems like fun, right Jack?

And it was fun although sandboarding is not as easy as I expected, not related to snowboarding at all... Well, goin' straight down wasn't hard ;)

Here Nick, our Utah local, shows how it's being done. Yeah!

After we were exhausted from hiking up the sand dunes we left the Valle de Muerte and headed North and hiked up a hill high above a fertile valley - the dessert was just on the backside of these rocks.

We found some old Inca ruins there. We strolled through the remains of an apparently larger village and had a nice view on the Atacma dessert, the oasis of San Pedro, and the volcanoes in the background.

On the backside of the hill with all the ruins we found the following mystical arch and some stone carvings. I guess at least the arch doesn't date back to the Incas, right?

We followed the narrow gorge behind the arch and entered a large cave system which has apparently a couple of kilometers of tunnels. From now on it was getting narrow and I was the only one who brought a torch...

But luckily we had five cameras with flash lights illuminating the narrow tunnels of the cave, right Kathy and Michelle?

We had a fun time in the cave until lots of boulders blocked our way, the tunnels were getting narrower, and the climbing inside the cave harder. So we decided to head back into the blazing sunlight of the Atacama dessert.

The others decided to head back to the hostel, take a shower, and regenerate from the long exhausting day. I thought that the time is till sufficient for some biking and exploring the area. So I crossed a range of salt mountains, the Cordillera de Sal, and took the road leading to Calama. How much fun cycling in the Atacama dessert is, you can't imagine it :)

I returned to the top of the Cordillera de Sal just in the right time to see the sunset high above the bizzare Valle de la Luna (moon valley), whose weird salt ridges indeed look like I imagine the moon:

Every travel guide book says that a sunset above the Valle de la Luna is one of the best views of all of Chile - it's right. Another sunset of the category "unimaginable beautiful"!

I stayed on top of the Cordillera del Sal until the last sun light faded away from the Valle de la Luna and the volcanoes marking the boarder to Argentina and Bolivia.

I had to cycle back to San Pedro in the darkness but this sunset was truly worth it. Back in San Pedro I met my friends and we went out for a delicious dinner with superb Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon. A great way to complete a fantastic day :)

I could have stayed another three or four days in San Pedro cyling through the Atacama dessert and it's beautiful landscape, but I was somehow attracted by the wild, beautiful, and undeveloped country on the backside of the volcanoes - Bolivia. Apparently the Salar de Uyuni, the biggest and highest salt flat in the world, should be one of the highlights of Latin America. That's why I and Jack decided to leave Chile behind us and take off on a three day offroad trip to Bolivia. This trip will lead us through the most spectacular scenery I have ever seen.

I hope you are all looking forward to the next post!

Florian