After a very dull day travelling on Sunday, we spent the night at Calama which is the site of the biggest copper mine in the world. So it will not surprise you that first thing on Monday we came here, to the small village of San Pedro about 100ks away. SP is at 2500m, in the middle of nowhere, in the driest desert in the world, and is here primarily to cater for us travellers. It is a cool place though, with most of the buildings being made of Adobe (a mud and straw mixture) so it has a nice feel and look to it. And good restaurants too!
So Monday afternoon we got straight to it, and went on a sunset tour of the "craters of the moon". In fact we saw many different sights with the common theme being that the land is incredibly salty so most of it is covered in a white crust. It is wierd walking along and noticing that you are walking over huge salt crystals the whole time! So the views were good, and we will try to upload these asap so you can see what we mean. One of the wierd things that I didn´t know about was the number of volcanoes around here. Instead of a chain of normal mountains, they have chains of volcanoes up to 6,000 metres high, and some of them are still active!
So that was yesterday, and then this morning we got up at 3.30 to get the 4am tour to a geyser field at Tatio, which is up at 4,320m. Despite our altidude sickness drugs, we still felt a bit wierd, with headaches and nausea coming and going, and Rish making the bus stop a couple of times because she was nearly fainting (nothing new there really!) It was again a good fun trip, and not only did we see loads of geysers, volcanoes etc., but also some local wildlife (Llamas & flamingos to name a few) and a local village. So we leave Chile tomorrow (not too sad about that) and head into Bolivia via the salt flats on a 3 day 4WD trip. We are really looking forward to this, although altitude sickness should make for some interesting times with a climb up to 5,000m! We will let you know how we get on.
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