Brett and Emily in South America: Culture Shock in San Pedro de Atacama

As our day bus pulled in to San Pedro de Atacama, Chile I was expecting a bus terminal of sorts tending it is a major backpacker´s destination. Well there wasn´t. The drive from Salta, Argentina to San Pedro, Chile was about 7 hours, the begininning portion of the drive we went through much of the same area that Emily and I did on the tour of Jujuy the day before going through the mountainess desert and seeing loads of cacti. Evidently (I was sleeping) the bus driver even stopped at the 7 Colors Mountain for people to take pictures. After crossing the Argentinian-Chilean Border we had great views of our first salt flats, the Salar de Atacama. It was pretty cool because the highway basically went straight through the salt flats and all around we saw white. As we reached the outskirts of San Pedro we finally went through Chilean Passport Control (for some reason they decided to put it in town, 160km from the actual border, also as we later found out you go through the same passport control when going to Bolivia even though it is a good 100+ km from the Bolivian border). When we finally arrived in town I was a bit confused and wasn´t 100% sure we were actually there. The day before when I booked our hostel for San Pedro someone at the hostel emailed us and said they would pick us up from the Bus Terminal. Well there isn´t really a bus terminal, it is more a large open dirt area in one corner of town with a sign that said ¨Terminal Municipal.¨

Small soccer pitch with the volcano in the background

The first day in town we just walked around. The town isn´t that big (wikipedia says under 5,000 people live there). The only green in the entire city is a well maintained fútbol pitch. The town has basically a main square filled with government offices and one main street (with a few side streets) which are filled with tour agencies for trips around San Pedro and also the 3 day excursions to Bolivia, resturants, and a few watering holes. We began to search through companies just asking for prices for the trip in to Bolivia. We also enjoyed a pretty good dinner, mentionable was Emily´s lentil soup. She was pretty glad because in Argentina they don´t really believe in lentils or any other like dishes.

Moon Valley

Friday morning we woke up kind of early for two reasons. A) We needed to switch hostels, we only booked our place for one night and by the time we asked to book for another night the place was booked. The owner was real nice and even drove us over to our new hostel with our bags. B) We wanted to go in to town (by in to town I mean the one main street) and book the Salt Flats Tour in Bolivia before they all filled up for Saturday departures. After finishing that all up it was basically only noon and we had no idea what we were going to do for the rest of the day. After enjoying some delicious sandwiches (one with salmon and garlic sauce and one with goat cheese and veggies) we tried to figure out how to occupy the rest of our day. We didn´t know much about the small excursions, through the Atacama Desert, that many of the tour companies offered around San Pedro. Our roommate the first night woke up at 4am to go to a geyser field for breakfast with a tour agency. As that wasn´t really an option because it was the afternoon now and we were leaving the next morning for Bolivia we decided to inquire about some of the other trips. We found out from several agencies that there were basically two types of trips that leave at 3pm and get you back after sunset. The first option which we chose not to do was a trip to a salt lake that was literally advertised by both tour agencies we went in to as being like the Dead Sea in Israel, next you go to hot springs to mainly clean off the salt, and finally you go to an overlook spot to watch the sunset (there was also additional options as of going sand boarding before the salt lake or after sunset going to one of the largest observatories in the world, that was built by Japan, USA, and the EU, to watch the stars. The second option that we chose was a trip to several nature sites around San Pedro. The first stop was Death Valley, which was a large valley which highly resembled the surface of Mars. The original person to give the valley its present name (a European priest sometime the 1800s) actually named it Mars Valley, which in Spanish is Valle de la Marte, however the locals thought he meant Valle de la Muerte, which in English means Death Valley. Our next stop was an amazing overlook of Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon). Which like its name says resembles the surface of the moon. We then entered Los Flamencos National Reserve. In the Reserve we saw a salt crystal covered mountain valley, which was basically a huge valley that was once (thousands of years ago) part of a large Salt Lake in the region. Now the entire dry river valley is basically covered in these salt crystals which where ever you go you can hear cracking. The next stop in the Reserve was to three natural rock formations called the ¨Three Mary,¨ because they resemble three women caring for a baby. Our last stop was to watch the sunset over sand dunes in the Reserve and once the sunset we were able to turn around and watch the changing colors on the Andes Mountains in the distance. We returned to town after sunset and went to sleep highly anticipating our journey that in to the Slat Flats the next day.