The desert is cold and starry
Trip Start
Aug 10, 2008
1
10
21
Trip End
Sep 20, 2008
San Pedro de Atacama,
Chile
Friday, August 29, 2008
Chile. San Pedro is a tiny little town (about 2000 inhabitants) that
has become a tourist haven because itīs surrounded by mountains, salt
flats, canyons, etc. It is truly a stunning landscape here, and weīve
only scratched the surface.
We got here yesterday, and last night did an astronomy tour. There
are absolutely no lights once you get about 10 minutes out of town, so
you can see thousands of stars, as well as planets, the milky way, and
even some nebula with the naked eye. We even saw a military sattelite
and several shooting stars. They also had several telescopes set up
which let you see things in much more detail. John was able to get some
nice photos of Jupiter through the telescope. I was proud that I can
still find the Southern Cross, the only constellation I learned to
identify while living in Australia.
Today we did a tour of the Atacama salt flats-they werenīt quite
what I expected being very flat but not at all smooth. We saw lots of
flamingos (3 of the 6 species in the world live here, we saw 2 of
them). We could also see Chileīs most active volcano smoling away in
the distance. Afterwards we went hiking up to some freshwater lagoons,
we were up at about 4000m, but the altitude medicine weīre taking seems
to be working itīs magic as we both felt fine during the hike. Our last
stop was the Valley of Jire which is an unusually fertile valley in a
canyon. It has a little stream running through it which the villagers
have built an ingenious system of channels and sluices near to share
the water evenly among their fruit orchards. We were with a group of 13
people-a mix of US, British, Chilean, and Peruvian nationals. Most
people were quite friendly and we had fun swapping travel stories.
Tomorrow we have a tour to the Velley of the Moon, and on our last
day here we have the joy of being up at 4 am to go see geysers and
thermal springs before we catch an evening flight back to Santiago. At
that point our trip will be halfway done, itīs hard to imagine.
