San Pedro De Atacama, Chile

After border crossing a couple days ago, San Pedro de Atacama was our first true destination in Chile. As we couldn’t easily visit Bolivia (as explained in previous posts… due to the high visa costs and logistics), we still wanted to visit the great salt plains of this region. San Pedro has the second largest salt plains in the Americas… an area 1,800 square miles. One of our stops included Los Flamencos National Reserve… and, sure enough, we got to see flamingos in the wild feeding on brine shrimp.

The salty, still water created an incredible mirror effect.

A little further up the road, some high altitude lagoons in the desert. All the mountains in this area are volcanic (and not part of the Andes).

A British couple we met on the tour, James and Vicky. They’d been living in Chile for the past year as James was doing astronomy research in the area. The Atacama desert is the ‘driest desert in the world’ and is home to the biggest land-based telescope, the VLT. We were scheduled to go on a space tour this night, but as our unfortunate luck would have it, we picked one of the very few cloudy nights of the year (as seen in the pictures above!).

Valley de La Luna (Valley of the Moon)

The previous day, we rented bikes from our hostel in town, and went for a ride around Valley de La Luna… another park about 30 minutes away by bike.

We didn’t have a guide per-se, but after giving this dog a drink of water, he followed us for most of our ride!

Our hostel in San Pedro De Atacama

Another house-guest

A stop-light in town would warn of high exposure to the sun at high altitude. We slathered on the sun block and stayed out of the sun between 11am and 3pm.

After 3 great nights in San Pedro de Atacama, we are headed on an eight hour bus ride to Salta, Argentina. We’ll be back into Chile before too long as we make our way further south towards Patagonia.