Flavia & Gregory go LA

We’ve now been in San Pedro for 5 days. San Pedro is a stunning place, every excursion we have done has surpassed the previous one, it is crazy!! Our first visit was to the Laguna Miscanti and the Salar de Atacama, the former being a beautiful basin of water at 4,000 + meters above see level (San Pedro is at 2,700, not joking either!) surrounded by some most yellow bunches of grass, while the Salar is the third largest salt flat in the world and housing flamingos (Laguna Chaxa).
The second day we went to the Valle della Luna and Valle della Muerte. This trip is done in the afternoon to catch sunset at the Moon Valley, which is extraordinary. Between 6.10 and 6.20 pm the colors of the cordillera change to very intense and many variations of pink and yellow, it is a tremendous show! Unfortunately, in this case the pictures do not capture the real colors nor the continuous change that takes place in the scenery during those 10 minutes.
On day 3 we canceled our trip to the Salar de Tara (it eventually hit us that it costs like all other 3 trips together and, after having seen what we have seen, probably not worth the money) and we hired bikes instead, at a 10% of the Tara trip cost!! We went to visit the Pukara ruins, which date back to the XII century and are OK. From there, though, it is possible to walk up to a monument on top of a hill from where one has a view over the Valle della Muerte and other cordilleras, which is really really really great. Not happy to have walked under the midday sun up to the viewpoint for a couple of hours and having drunk out all the water, we decided to take the bikes back into the Valle della Muerte (without water…) to get a closer look at the formations of the Cordillera de la Sal which we had seen the day before in the afternoon. Wow! The last part of the valley we had only seen from the bus while exiting the valley. Being on the bike gave us the chance to cycle through the canyon amongst these high cones of red clay, chalk and salt and take millions of photos! This is a place where you could take a picture every 2 minutes and each would be different and stunning just the same.
Today we went to the Tatio Geysers. This means being picked up at 4 am in order to be on site at 6.30 am in time for the geysers to start. It is 90 km away from San Pedro, at 4,300 meters of altitude, and the road is quite rough. When you get there, the guide prepares breakfast while people wander around the geyser field, being told to pay attention to where they put their feet as the frozen ground can give away and one might fall into the boiling mud under the surface!! The way the geysers work is that the water that comes through the field from a river is heated underground from the magma that lies below (at some 700m). At night it is very cold (-10 C or less), so when you get there at 6:30 in the dark the sun is still down and it is still very cold. As soon as the sun comes out, the temperature rises dramatically and this change in temperature causes the phenomena of the geysers shooting up boiling water and steam. We were not very lucky today as it was only -5 (!!!) when we got there and it was a little cloudy, which meant that the change in temperature was a couple of degrees less than we needed, so we did not have the sudden shot of water. But we saw A LOT of fumaroles and then visited the biggest geyser, where 3 people have died when falling in….basically boiled to death. Bloody hell! One of them apparently wore glasses that had steamed up and he did not see where he was going. Gosh. As for the others, I have no idea how the hell they could fall in the geysers, it is a good meter wide and the steam is a few meters high, no idea how one can walk into it. On the way back from the geysers we could see the scenery and hey! Fabulous again, of course. Beautiful colors, lots of vicunas (cameloid family), and a wonderful blue sky.

This is our last day here, and we are sorry to go. The place is lovely, the people really nice and the scenery out of this world. But I think we can take it, since we are leaving to Bolivia on a 3-day jeep tour through the Salar de Uyuni (the biggest salt flat in the world), visiting a few lagunas and other wonders on the way. Tonight we are going back to the only restaurant we have been while here (we have noticed a tendency to go back to the same place if we like it) it is called Torres del Paine because the owner is from there. He is a lovely man who the other day saw us passing by (half dead coming back from the bike trip) and called us in to invite us for a beer, and then invited us to go back for one of his pisco sours, on him again!!! Really lovely man, he lost his wife 18 years ago, she was shot during a protest in Santiago under the Pinoshit (like many call him) regime. That really touched me.

DAY 1:

Salar de Atacama: Laguna Chaxa

Laguna Miscanti

DAY 2

Valle della Muerte

Valle della Luna

DAY 3

Pukara ruins. Gregory (serious): It must be terribly hard to get down here when it rains...!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pukara mirador

Valle della Muerte by bike

DAY 4: Tatio Geysers

Warming up the milk for breakfast...

Machuca village church on the way back