Northern Chile - 17th March

The quiet streets of San Pedro

San Pedro de Atacama

Our next stop after Salta was a small town in northern Chile called San Pedro de Atacama. This was somewhere I was really looking forward to and had been recommended to me by several people. It took us 9 hours to get there and we were taken through amazing landscapes of dusty deserts, salt lakes, and past huge looming mountains and snow capped volcanoes. The trip also meant we had to go to very high altitudes and I felt constantly sick and short of breath the whole time.

I was relieved when we arrived at San Pedro at 4pm! We checked into a lovely house owned by a kind local lady who couldn't speak a word of English, but my limited Spanish seemed to fool her and she constantly spoke to me in Spanish which I usually replied with either a nod and a smile!


Cycling the Valle de la Luna

San Pedro is a lovely quaint town and the people were so kind. Despite there being lots of things to see around San Pedro we decided to only go to the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the moon) as we were planning on going to Bolivia from here and would see a lot of similar things. We hired two bikes and set off in the morning. It was amazing cycling through the Atacama desert and the Valle de la Luna was stunning, such strange rock formations it was easy to see why it was called the valley of the moon.