San Pedro de Atacama, Chile
San Pedro de Atacama is the gateway town to the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile. This desert is the driest desert in the world and has some amazing landscapes like flamingo filled lagoons, salt flats, geysers, lunar landscapes, weird rock formations and more. This remote desert landscape also makes it a perfect star gazing location and is rated a certified International Dark Sky!!
We arrived to San Pedro de Atacama by way of the Hito Cajón border crossing at the southern tip of Bolivia. We basically kept driving south until the hypothetical road ended. This border crossing is only open from 9-11am for Uyuni Salt Flat tours to enter and exit. We lined up at a tiny house to get our Bolivia exit stamp and drove down the road to a warehouse to enter Chile. Bolivia does not have any ocean/port access and therefore there is a big smuggling issue (most drugs) across the borders. Therefore, exiting Bolivia into any neighboring country is a thorough process requiring all bags and vehicles to be searched. Our crossing was pretty uneventful since we had a few older workers who were lax, but sometimes the younger workers really make you take everything out of your bags and throw away all produce and opened food.
Once in San Pedro de Atacama, we settled in for a pretty chill week. All of the activities in Peru and Bolivia had done a number on our budget and as mentioned above, the scenery was very similar to what we had just seen on our tour in Bolivia. Did we need a full week in San Pedro de Atacama? Probably not but we made the best of it! We spent a lot of time in the communal kitchen/living area since the wifi didn’t reach our room and caught up on admin stuff, played cards, and started planning the second half of South America. We also found the local futbol bar to watch the Argentina vs Croatia game! Go Argentina!!
However, we know that Susan doesn’t understand the concept of sitting still, so she figured out how to do a budget friendly excursion on one of our days. The Valley of the Moon is an area 7 miles outside of San Pedro de Atacama known for its lunar landscapes caused by wind and water erosion. You can take an air conditioned van tour of the area or you can rent bikes and do a 20 mile round-trip bike adventure in the driest desert in the world. Guess which one we chose?
We picked up our bikes at 10am and headed out to The Valley of the Moon. Matt had been charged with looking up directions prior to leaving the hostel, and didn’t pay attention to the bike shops directions, so we started out on the highway headed west. We saw a massive 10ft sign for Valley of the Moon with an arrow south and after some debating if we should trust “I looked on google maps and I think the entrance is off this other road” vs the massive 10ft highway sign, we decided to ignore the sign and continue west to another massive highway sign before finally turning around and following the first sign. We made it to the Valley of the Moon entrance eventually and had a lovely 6 mile bike ride inside the park amongst some wild landscapes. We biked(walked) up a few massive hills that no one mentioned to us and made it to stop 1, the sand dunes. We took a lovely walk up and around the dunes to get some great views of the surroundings. We continued on past an amphitheater rock, the old salt mines and finally made it to Tres Marias rock formation. This signaled the end of the road and our time to begin riding back to town. It was a very fun and interesting ride despite the crushing sun and dry conditions. We treated ourselves with some ice cream when we got back and then a nice afternoon nap!
One of the main reasons we knew we wanted to go to San Pedro de Atacama was the stars! Due to the remoteness, low humidity, and high altitude of the Atacama Desert, it has earned the title of an International Dark Sky. ALMA Observatory is the largest astronomical project in existence with 66 telescopes clustered together. Unfortunately, they only allow tours on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and we flew out on Saturday. It would’ve been really cool to see these massive telescopes in person, but what we really wanted to see was the night sky itself! We arrived in San Pedro de Atacama on a Monday and left on Saturday. Of all the days we were there, it was only clear on Friday night! We booked a stargazing excursion with Atacama Stargazing and had a wonderful night! They drove us out into the desert where they have an astronomy compound with large telescopes set up. We took some great photos with the stars and had time to practice astrophotography on our own before heading to the telescopes. We were able to see 2 nebulas (Orion & Tarantula), which are giant clouds of dust where new stars are forming. We also saw a beautiful star cluster called Toucan 147 located right by the southern pole, Mars and Jupiter. The southern cross was still below the mountains so we haven’t seen it yet, but fingers crossed as we continue to head south!
