San Pedro de Atacama

I was up early on Tuesday to catch the bus to San Pedro de Atacama - after another tortuous trek across the city of Salta with my backpack - but I was happy to be seated next to a British girl, Julia from Watford. I broke the ice by telling her how I had to wear my woolly hat all day as my bed hair was so atrocious, and thus began a special friendship that has been through more in the past 8 days than some friends may go through in a lifetime! The journey was around 8 hours or so, but went surprisingly fast as we chinwagged all the way to the Chilean border. There we had to present our bags for inspection. I was dreading this bit, not because I was smuggling any contraband, but because I'd spent hours the night before packing it nice and neatly and I didn't fancy the guard undoing all my hard work! Luckily enough, a quick poke around the outside was all that was required. I could have had a revolver or a kilo of crack in the centre of it all, but never mind!!!

Anyway, rather than chill out in San Pedro, we traipsed around like Benny Hill extras for most of our free time there. We'd been handed a few flyers for hostels at the 'bus station' (i.e. dusty space) and after we found that the Hostel International did not include Internet, we thought we'd try one that did. So, after asking for directions, we wandered around for ages and ages, which was ridiculous in a town so small. Eventually, we found it and I realised that I'd got my left and right mixed up, whoops! So, once someone finally appeared in reception, we checked in. Unfortunately, the Internet was broken, but it was slightly cheaper than we expected, so we dropped off our bags and headed out again to price up trips to the Valley of the Moon and the Salt Flats in Uyuni.

We went to every agency in San Pedro and it was clear that they all offered the same itinerary to Uyuni. I was well prepared for the fact that it wouldn't be a particularly luxurious excursion, to say the very least, but we didn't want to go with utter cowboys, especially given that the Lonely Planet states that no agency gets glowing reviews! We bumped into a British couple who recommend that we visit the tourist information office as there they had a guestbook with comments from people who had done the tours already. From that, it became clear that our initial choice of operator was probably not a good idea and so we settled on the one that seemed to get the least number of complaints, (plus some good comments too), Estrella del Sur.

So, off we went back to the office to book it and pay. Now, I had plenty of US Dollars from Salta, but Julia needed to use the ATM as Estrella could not accept card payments. However, there are only 2 ATMs in San Pedro, one accepts only MasterCard, the other Visa. Both were empty at that point and may or may not have been refilled the next day. The lady at Estrella did initially say that we could pay at the ed of the tour, but really, really wanted us to try the ATM again first thing in the morning as well. I offered to pay for my ticket there and then, but she said we should both pay together.

So, thus began an evening of slight worry that she would sell our places to other people with hard cash and that would screw up our plans to leave on Thursday (7th), which was particularly bad for Julia as she needed to be in La Paz by the 12th. There was no room for error. So we walked to the ATMs just to double check. No money. I changed the remainder of Julia's Argentinian pesos into dollars so she at least had some spendable currency, but we had no money for dinner as the restaurants would not accept US! We asked about cash advances and even found a gas station that would effectively give Julia cashback, but would charge 10% and have to put split the amount required into 2 transactions, hences 2 fees and thus a really bad rate of exchange. We decided that if the ATMs were not working first thing on Wednesday morning that this would have to be the best option, just to guarantee our places.

The next morning, we were both awake at 7.30 and got up to wait for the ATMs to open at 9am. Now, I'd realised at some point the night before that we had gone to the wrong hostel after all! We had received 2 flyers, one for 5,000 pesos with broken Internet, one for 6,000 with free Internet. Somehow, I completely missed the fact that I got the flyers confused when we went to the cheaper, broken one! I WAS VERY TIRED! Plus, my extremities had started to randomly tingle because f the altitude sickness tablets! We decided to swap hostels so we could use the Internet while we waited to go on the Moon tour at 3pm that afternoon. Now, getting up so early meant that he wait for the ATM to open was really tedious. The MasterCard one was open, so I offered to take out the money for Julia on my Cirrus card and that she could pay me in pounds when I got my statement. She would have to pay more than if she could use here own Visa card, but i would be the silly cost of the gas station. So, we did that, returned to Estrella, bought our tickets and felt like we had actually achieved something positive since arriving in San Pedro!

We went back to our new hostel and at 10am, we were the first people online, in order to get our blogs up to date before leaving for Bolivia. At 10.20am, the computers went off as the electricity for the entire town went out! So, we could have stayed in the cheaper (and slightly warmer) hostel after all! We killed time before the Moon tour by buying alpaca socks, water, cookies, doing a bit of laundry and organising our backpacks for the jeep tour. That afternoon, we went out into the Atacama desert and the landscape was stunning. We visited Death/Mars Valley before the Valley of the Moon at sunset. This was the reason I came to San Pedro. Unfortunately, the guide spoke little English and because I was pretty much the only person who did not speak Spanish, he didn't bother to try any English at all. I have no idea what we saw really, which didn't matter until we stopped for sunset.

Rather than at least check that Julia and I roughly knew where to go and what time to be back on the bus, he rambled on in Spanish and then off we went up a mountain ridge. At the top of the slope, we couldn't see the rest of the group, so we continued onwards right to the end of the ridge. Stunning views, but no other people there that we recognised. "We'd better go back!" I said, and so we paced back along the ridge to the top of the initial slope. It then became apparent that that was the best point to view the sunset, looking away from the setting sun to watch the mountains in the distance glow red. By the time we had actually made it along the correct path in the correct direction, the sun had practically set and we had all but missed the sunset. I was livid. You may well imagine. I just had to try to get over it and hope that things would go a little more according to plan the next day...

After the Sunset...