The Desert of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

Last week we arrived to Chile... It was a 10 hours bus ride from Argentina...

We came together with Marie and Colm (friends we met along our trip) and we had organized a hostel... We had a private room with bathroom which was lovely...

Sunday evening we booked a tour already for monday evening.... but we had to pay for that, during the weekend the cashmachine was empty, BUT on monday they would fill it... I (Stefien :) ) spent monday morning waiting at the only visa accepting cash machine...but no money, the same for tuesday and wednesday... Luckely we had friends that could help us out..

In the evening we have a lovely dinner... the "cuisine" in San Pedro is amazing, very high standards! At 9 pm our tour to see the stars started.

The guy who does the tours is french, and has a lot of knowledge... His house is just a bit out of town in the Atacama desert.... First we got a quick introduction and then we went outside to see the stars through the Telescopes... AMAZING!!!! We also saw the planets Jupiter and Venus...

At the end of the tour he explained some other things... and by midnight we were back in the hostel....

The next day we went to explore San Pedro, the market and the museum!! Very nice and interesting... After a quick lunch our second tour started... "Valle de la Luna" (valley of the moon) The first stop was Valle de la Muerte, we walked here for 1 hr and did some sandrunning which was very funny.... :-) The minivan picked us up and we continued to our next stop, a trek of 9 km through the desert and rocks, pretty amazing.... we climbed, had to get through a cave and above all saw a lot of nice scenery.

The last stop of the tour was the actual "Valle de la Luna", we went to see the sunset here on top of a rock... Around 20.15 the sunset was over and we returned to San Pedro for another lovely dinner :-)