The first day, we arrived in the morning, because the thing to do is to take the bus during the night so that you don´t have to pay for a bus ticket and a place to sleep, you just sleep on the bus, and we struck out into the city... town... pueblo. San Pedro de Atacama is the name of the pueblo and I believe there are only about 1000 inhabitants year round... aka tourism. Anyways, we got off the bus and were immediately offered some pamphlet about a B & B called Incahuasi (house of the inca) of which we didn´t think much and we continued into the town to find a place to put our bags and sleep, at least for the night, and also a place to get some grub. We ate, and walked around and talked to the hostels and camping places and discovered that everything was incredibly expensive and that no where offered us the same kind of package as the Incahuasi B&B. For Ch$ 10.000 (chilean pesos, about 20 bucks) we could use their bicycles, have a bed to sleep in, and be fed in the morning... bottom line, pretty good deal. So we went to the Incahuasi, told them that we would like to stay, at least for the night, and they showed us to our room where we put down our bags and literally turned right around and left on their bikes on our first adventure. We were to ride the bike 30k to the termas (hotsprings), the only thing was 30k is pretty far and it was all uphill and I am not in the kind of biking shape that my travel buddy, Jordan, is in, so I ¨hice dedos¨ (hitch hiked - literally meaning ¨to do fingers or thumbs¨) and a pickup of workers picked us up and hauled us up the road to where they were working on the highway, some 5k short of the springs, close enough. We did the rest of it by bike and when we actually arrived, we realized that it was completely ¨vale la pena¨ (worth the pain/effort). Absolutely beautiful, see for yourselves....
And here´s Jordan on the return trip, which was downhill the whole way.... very, very entertaining
Somos gringos locos (we´re crazy gringos). We rented these bikes that have motors attatched to them for Ch$10.000/day, and we took them out to some lagoons out in the middle of the salt flat desert where we camped over night. The stars from there (in the middle of no where) were unreal. It was about 30k one way to the farthest lagoon. We left in the morning after breakfast so as to seize as much of the day as possible. The plan was to visit the two closer lagoons on the way to the third and camp along side the third, watch the sun set and check out the stars from the southern hemisphere perspective. Excellent I must say, sadly I don´t have the high quality of camera needed to take a night photo of the stars, so you´ll just have to believe me when I say it was incredible. The milky way stretched across the entire sky directly above our heads, practically dividing the sky in two. Also the southern cross was out and I made it a point to locate it, pretty cool. And I´m sure there were all sorts of other constalations that we saw and we had no idea we were seeing, but whatevs... anyways check out some of the photos.
ready to embark
this is in laguna cejar which has enough salt content in the water that you can float without moving, much like i´ve heard of people doing in the dead sea
flamencos (flamingos-if you couldn´t figure that one out i´d be very disappointed)... they apparently eat an insect that thrives in these salty lagoons, that insect has a pinkish hue and that is where the flamingos get their coloring (just a little ubi for you guys)
Laguna Cejar
inbetween the first two lagoons and the last are two holes in the ground that are filed with water (as shown above)... check out the bikes, bad-a
at the final lagoon, Tembinquinche, we were out there battleing the elements... here we used our rain fly to create a shady spot to eat a snack, rest a bit, and wait for the sun set
confused....?
what a camping spot!
the mountains during the sun set...
the lake during the set...I´ll have to tell you about the next day in the next post
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