La Casa de Mireya San Pedro de Atacama

... 1497;ל 93; התאטר 93;ן, אך לצערנ 93; אין משם תמונו 14; כי הקונו 96;ציה היתה קרובה מדי לאושו 93;יץ... פשוט תד ...

... on home soil. Sam from the Salt plains was also there and it was nice to meet up with her again a few times.

Our one venture out of town was to Valle de la Luna, not religiously named this time but actually so called due to itīs resemblance to the moon. After the South West of Bolivia, we were getting used to things not really looking like places belonging to the planet we know. The standard tour goes for sunset via Valley of Death and the ...

... for Geyser Tatio at 4 am they were just stumbling in.
We sat through a loooong drive to the geysers but the stars were incredible and the old Chilean driver was good entertainment rapping along to "Gangsta's Paradise", complete with gestures and some sassy head-bobbing)
We got up to 4320 meters of altitude and were FREEZING outside next to the steaming and gurgling geysers. We were able to walk right up to them and stand over them and study how the ...

... nowhere near the main square, and making friends with two Chileans who live in tents in the backyard of where we stayed.

Most of the people in our hostel had headed out to the hot springs, which were 20 US dollars each, leaving Evan and I, quite happily, sharing a liter of beer and settling down to write in our journals. The beer happened, the journaling did not.

On the way to the outside bathroom ...

... everywhere. The streets are cobbled, dusty and relatively car free. The dogs are well fed and roam freely. They do not flinch when you bend down, which tells me they arenīt used to having rocks hucked at them. This is a pleasant change.

So I really canīt complain too much about San Pedro. It is an ideal spot, particularly if you are just looking to drop out of society and stay perpetually stoned. Unfortunately I was not looking to do either of these things. I ...

... The hot water is very temperamental though and you either freeze, or like I did, get burns on my legs from the scorching hot water.

We get straight onto a 3pm tour to the Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley), called this for itīs moon-type landscapes (CLP 7000 via the hostel). It was a very amazing and strange place that is hard to explain (see pics). At sunset we climbed up a huge sand dune to take in the colours. Im so glad we got this trip in today.

We were collected at 8am from our hostel in San Pedro and taken in a minibus to the border crossing. There were two other people on our tour - Angela (from Columbia) and Felipe (from Brazil) and fortunately they both spoke fluent English. At the Bolivian border crossing we had breakfast out of the back of the minibus before getting into our 4X4 jeep which we would spend the next few days in. We drove through the desert and visited a white lagoon ...

... of its kind in the world and contains two-thirds of the world's lithium, which is used in manufacturing aluminum, glass, lubricating greases, batteries, and airconditioning units. It was possible to see crystallized salt formations as far as the eye could see...