Travelling back in time to San Pedro de Atacama

A dusty little town in the middle of absolutely nowhere in the centre of the world’s driest desert. This was San Pedro de Atacama, and we arrived hot, sweaty, tired and already boiling from the searing sun at 10am in the morning.

Grabbing our bags (we have seven items between us and seriously need to think about repacking for Asia!), water bottles and hats we set off searching for out hotel – a little haven in the barrenness of the desert. In fact, San Pedro itself is like an oasis in the middle of the desert.

The town seems like it is straight out of a Western movie, but also totally charming with its dusty streets, slow pace of life, stray dogs and mud-slabbed buildings.

However charming, San Pedro mainly cosists of tour agencies and restaurants so it is clear that travellers keep this town alive. We wandered around for a while, until the heat drove us straight into an ice-cream shop. What a coincidence!

However, early in the afternoon the clouds started gathering and we were woken from our afternoon nap (as you do when on holiday) by wild thunderstorms. The sky was black and angry and our optimism dropped… We came to San Pedro mainly for the star gazing opportunities and this was not looking promising.

Star gazing was the one thing we, and in particular Derek, were looking forward to most. The Atacama Desert is one of the best places in the world to view the night sky as it has very little light (or any kind of) pollution, and is the driest non-polar place in the world. San Pedro only receives about 10mm of rainfall each year, while some locations within the desert have never had any rainfall whatsoever. So six months ago Derek found and booked an evening with a French astronomer who has about 10 telescopes in the desert and, according to raving reviews, gives a fantastic introduction into astronomy.

Our tour was booked for the following night and was going to be one of the highlights of our trip. There are two things that obstruct star gazing. The first is the moon – during the week of the full moon it is too bright to see the stars and we had purposefully planned our trip to take this into account. The second thing is something we could not control – clouds, which we thought were pretty much non-existent during summer but now threatened our trip.

In addition to the space tour, which was only scheduled for 9pm, we also had a tour to the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) booked for our second day. After breakfast and coffees by the pool, catching up on our blog and emails, we slapped on as much factor 50 as could soak into our skin and headed into town for lunch. And with the afternoon came the clouds…

The Valle de la Luna trip would go out regardless, so we packed our raincoats. The tour included several stops, the first being Valle de la Muerte or Death Valley. While it was very pretty walking along the ridge line with the valley 200m below, our attention was taken up by the approaching storm. The clouds were unbelievably dark with lightning and thunder raging very close to us. The wind was also picking up and stopped us in our tracks several times.

After climbing down a few rocks, we realised we were standing on a huge sand dune. The only way was down. The wind was relentless and blew find sand everywhere. It felt as if our legs were being grated, or as our guide kindly pointed out, we were getting a sand exfoliation. Nice.

While a few people stepped gingerly down the dune face, Derek and I were never going to take that approach. So we counted to three and started running. Derek went ahead immediately and, being 6’4”, his downhill running quickly turned into some sort of moon leaping where he would fly more than 5m with each step. It was hilarious and I couldn’t stop laughing. Problem number 1. Problem number 2 was that we were still 2500m above sea level so oxygen wasn’t in abundance. Between fits of laughter, I was actually desperately trying to take a breath of air to aid my (by now very fast) downhill sprint, but could only manage small gasps of breath that just about got me down alive. It was hilarious and fantastic fun!! Derek was wetting himself laughing at me. The second dune still needed to be conquered so we sped down this one too. At the bottom we needed five minutes to clear all the sand out of our shoes but this was so much fun we didn’t care.

 

The rest of the trip seemed like we were just passing time before we got to climb a ridge in the moon valley before sunset. Derek and I were both a little bored by the pointless stops and by now it was so cloudy that even seeing a sunset seemed impossible.

We walked up a small sand dune then along a rocky ridge until an outcrop into nothingness. On either side of the ridge was a drop of about 200m. When we got to the end, we waited for the sunset.

The clouds parted and the sun finally made an appearance, lighting up the whole valley and changing the rock into different shades of orange.

The clouds turned to gold, then pink and purple, with lightning and rain on the horizon. This was undoubtedly one of the best sunsets either of us had ever seen. We could not tear ourselves away.

We finally got back to the bus and now we were hoping to be back in time for the star gazing tour – if they were going out. 

We weren’t very hopeful, given the cloudy sky, and our premonition was proved right when we saw a notice on their office door that all tours for this evening were cancelled.

Incidentally, they didn’t have a single tour the whole week, so while we didn’t miss out on anything, we could not help but feel incredibly unlucky given that this was the main reason for our visit to the Atacama Desert. Perhaps this gives us a good reason to return.

On our last day in San Pedro we didn’t have anything planned so we did some laundry, walked to the bus station to check on our bus for the following day and then settled down with a couple of beers. This afternoon delivered the best storm yet – completely dark skies with one of the biggest thundershowers. Even the power was cut off! We stumbled across a cute burger van that could cook without power and ended up eating our meal with a local family, just to stay out of the rain.

We also had one last task left. Our friends are coming to San Pedro in March and we wanted to leave a secret message for them to find somewhere in the town. We have already successfully left them a message in Iguazu, but this one would have to stay hidden for almost two months. We selected a spot in a flower garden in the town square and have taken some cryptic photograph clues to help them find it. I hope they have better luck finding both the stars and the letter than we have had in lovely San Pedro.