San Pedro de Atacama, Día 1: Valle de la Luna

From January 6-8 my dad and I visited San Pedro de Atacama, a small town close to the Chilean/Argentinian/Bolivian border. It was about a 16 hour (overnight) bus ride from La Serena: a bus ride that begins in the dry yet not-completely-desolate Chilean transition zone and finishes in the utterly-arid, practically unlivable, astonishingly beautiful Atacama Desert (yeah..I'm a desert-lover). S.P. de Atacama is a small town smack in the middle of the desert & is easily one of the most expensive places I've been in Chile due to the huge influx of tourists that come to explore the natural marvels in the surrounding desert.

During our three days in San Pedro, we took three different tours to natural marvels (and smaller, a bit less-touristy-than-San-Pedro towns) in the surrounding desert. These tours ranged from 5-hour excursions to all-day affairs, and were mainly given by Spanish-speaking tour guides--a fact that somewhat irritated my dad. In the next three posts I will take you along with us, explain a bit about the cool stuff we saw, and mostly show you a ton of cool pictures!

Day 1: Valle de la Luna
We arrived in San Pedro, pretty exhausted from a long, highly uncomfortable bus ride, in the early afternoon on January 6. We also had to spend a few hours in Calama, the nearby big city, waiting for a smaller, more uncomfortable bus to take us the final 2 hours to S.P. Then we got a relatively-cheap hotel room (which turned out to be a strike of luck, as almost every place was full), and hit up a tourist agency for our first trip, to the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon--so named because it apparantly is supposed to look like the moon..i.e. desolate!).


The town of San Pedro de Atacama. It's small and swimming with tourists.


On our tour, we first stopped off at a 'preview valley' to el Valle de la Luna that was off the road just north of the town. This definitely gives an idea of how desolate the Atacama desert is!


"I can see our house from here!"


"Woooo!! I'm finally not sitting on a bus!!!"


Next we trekked down into a canyon that was amazing, even with extremely strong winds that blew sand into our eyes the entire way.


The layering on the rocks in the canyon was pretty spectacular, especially transposed against the sand, other layering patterns, and two of the most handsome men you'll ever see!


Next we went to some really spectacular salt caves. Here is a salty wall with the rising moon! The surrounding rock was all very very salty due to years of salt deposits, and if you were quiet enough you could hear the salt slowly cracking due to stressing. The sound was very cool....


...but made us a bit scared about being crushed by massive amounts of salty rock!


But we trekked on, and even braved places on the trail where we had to duck under low-lying arches.


We then entered the Valle de la Luna, which was full of fascinating structures like "Los Tres Marias (The Three Marias)". If you look carefully (and use a lot of imagination), you can see three women in the three towers (and a really cool guy in front!).


As a grand finale to our trip to Valle de la Luna, we hiked up a big dune to catch the sunset. We hiked, ...


...and hiked, ...


...and hiked, (my pace may have been a bit too much for my dad)...


...and saw some cool sites from the dune, ...


...and took a short break to look at more cool sites, ...


...and stopped to rest and snap some more pictures, ...


...and finally made it up to the top!


The sunset was pretty nice, but my dad didn't think it was worth the length of the hike! The large volcano in the background is Licancabur, and is located on the border of Chile and Bolivia.


A nice end to a long afternoon....with two more days in San Pedro to come ........