Moonlit Sandboarding in Death Valley

The midnight trip to San Pedro was going so well. We had comfy seats, it was dark and quiet. Just as we were lulling ourselves into a half sleep we were rudely awakened by a police control. We were asked to get out of the bus and collect our luggage for an inspection. It felt like we were in a prison movie. We got out to the very cold night not being able to see anything beyond the inspection tables and a burnt out car. After 15 minutes of standing around in the cold, having found nothing, we were allowed to go back to sleep. Two hours later we were dropped off in Calama to wait in the freezing cold of the bus terminal for two hours. Nothing was open, not even the promised cafeteria. Luckily for us we bought a couple of good sleeping bags in NZ and how we needed them then. Cold and tired the morning bus took us the last steps to San Pedro dumping us in a dusty middle-of-nowhere. Luckily for us San Pedro is very small so only short walk to somewhere. After an unimpressive welcome we found San Pedro to be an absolutely wonderful place. Small but stock full of cafes and restaurants with open fires burning all night in the middle of them to keep off the desert chill. Unpaved dusty roads infested by lazy ownerless dogs and adobe built buildings with thatched roofs make up San Pedro, home to some 4000 peoples. Although most of these people seem to be young, hip and trendy Chileans who work here helping the passing gringos.

So what do you do in the middle of the driest desert in the world? Well, you go on tours and so did we. We took a tour to Death Valley, walking through stunning scenery and running down massive sand dunes (that was soo much fun). Then through the tiny narrow salt caves we clambered before finally ending in the Moon valley to watch the sun set and full moon rise. Wow, what a view, what colours! We even saw an UFO, well it could have been a satellite, but we know they are out there. Back to the hostel to grab some food before we took a 4x4 back out to the Death Valley for some pisco sours and sandboarding under the light of a full moon. It was an incredible experience. Nina was more interested in sampling the local produce then going up and down, up and down but Rob managed to utterly exhaust himself by trudging up the sanddune muttering to himself that the trip down wasn´t worth this walk, only to decide to go down again once he reached to the top. In the end we both succeded to have a few good runs and lots of fun and of course some spectacular wipeouts. Good thing the sand was soft and the headfirst falls were not as painfull as they looked.

Utterly exhausted the next morning we went onto another tour of the amazing desert. First we went to the Atacama salt plain to check out some flamingos. That was a really weird place. It was absolutely massive (third largest in the world) covered with crust of white/brown salt and mineral crystals. It looked like a massive field of dead coral, with a couple of small fresh water lakes which are used as a breeding ground for flamingos. They were not as pink as we though they are going to be but they were cute none the less. After that we went to the antiplano to see some lakes (sorry lagoons) over 4000 m above sea level nestled between mighty Andean volcanos. There we saw a herd (or whatever the collective noun is) of vicunas. Apparently the jumper made of vicuna wool can fetch around $25,000 US. This is because the only way you can get the wool is to find it where the animal has shed it up in the high mountains, and on top of that the animals are rare. On our way to the antiplano we took the freaky road where the water flows upwards. That is what it looked like anyway. The driver switched the engine at the bottom of the road and then suddenly the mini van started to roll backward up the hill. So immediately we all jumped out to investigate. There were some experiments involving water, waterbottles and lots of head scratching until we decided it was an optical illusion. Content that Newton hasn´t deserted us we jumped back onto the bus.

The next day we were sad to say good bye to this cute little hippy town of San Pedro but we had no choice and so we took another bus to the capital of the second region - Antofagasta, a town seemingly famous only for a little green replica of Big Ben. We went to see it of course and it didn´t look much like the real thing but we took few photos anyway. It´s amazing though how an empty and desolate place can look as pretty as the 6 hours bus ride to Antofagasta did. The washed out reds, greens, greys and browns of the rugged hills like waves of rock drifted past creating the perfect landscape for daydreaming.