San Pedro de Atacama

After a spectacular bus ride from Salta to San Pedro, sitting next to…a Belgian, I arrive in the afternoon. San Pedro is situated 2400m above sea level, in the world’s driest desert: Atacama. It is small and very touristy, no wonder considering all the things there are to do there. I check in to hostel Florida, nice and clean and with a courtyard in the middle. That is where I meet Alice, from Brazil, and we decide to rent bikes together the next morning to go to Laguna Cejar. Not too far is what we think, but 30 km one way is far enough, especially if you add some km because we get lost on the way, twice. Laguna Cejar is a beautiful lagoon situated in the middle of the desert. Its salt concentration is very high and we can see many salt crystals and salt formations inside and outside the water. Just next to it is Laguna Piedras in which we can take a swim, or more specifically, in which we can float, due to the salt concentration, said to be higher than the Dead Sea. What a beautiful day!

photos San Pedro de Atacama

The next day, I want to try another type of activity: Sandboarding. I have never done snowboarding, so I must admit I’m a bit nervous, but as soon as I’m on the board, the only thing I can think of is to stay on it and after a while even to turn or go faster. How fun!! After two hours of walking up and sliding down (there are no chairlifts in the desert), we finish the day in Valle de la Luna to watch the sunset. I return to my hostel full of sand and exhausted.

photos sandboarding

On my last day in San Pedro, I meet up with a couchsurfer, Juan Pablo, and we walk to Pukara de Quitor, an archeological site 3km out of town. The sun is burning as we climb up to the old ruins. The English signs are quite funny. Apparently they have been translated directly from Spanish, which makes them at times difficult to understand, see for yourself!

A definite highlight of my stay in San Pedro is the Astronomy tour. I didn’t know this before, but the Atacama desert is one of the best places in the world to observe the stars. A French Astronomer recognized this and set up a dozen of giant telescopes to catch the beauty of the sky above us, and show it to curious travelers like myself. With a great deal of humor and passion he starts explaining the general principles of Astronomy: the earth is a planet, the sun is a star, the planets gravitate around the sun, our Galaxy is just one out of many many other Galaxies that are situated light-years away. He shows us some constellations and teaches us how to recognize them.  Then we move on to the telescopes where he has zoomed  in on some interesting phenomenons: Saturn with its belt, the jewel box; three aligned stars with different colors, the Milky Way, Sirius It makes me dizzy to try to think of the immensity of the universe, its creation or it’s current expansion. There at is definitely more to it than we can see and that makes me feel really small…