Around Town and the Valle del Luna

Today we decided not to do a trip in the morning, got up late and had a leisurely breakfast.  It was great.  Problem today was that it was threatening to be 49 degrees.

We went out for coffee, sat in the square and watched the world go by, wandered around the market and bought a small woolly llama and some wool baubles they put around llama ears!  By that time it had reached 49 degrees, we were melting.  We gave in and went back to hotel and the shady veranda.

San Pedro de Atacama.  What a place.  Its sole purpose seems to be for tourists to visit the Atacama.  The main central part is made up of Adobe mud houses, and the roads are all made of mud.  It has many parts.  A whole street of tour companies, offering similar tours out.  Lots of cafes, restaurants, and gift shops.  During the day it is quiet, as everyone is on tours, and in the evening suddenly teeming with people, little kids and dogs.

There are lots of artisan workshops and is a mecca for metalwork and art.  Much of it beautiful and I fell in love with some metal llamas, but they are just too heavy to carry for the rest of the trip.

The place is quite hippyish, and I think a lot of people come here and just don’t leave.  A few down and outs, a little worse for wear in the morning, lots of stray dogs everywhere, all of which appear to be looked after.

In the afternoon the place becomes full of bleary eyed backpackers just off the bus, carrying enormous backpacks, trying to find a hostel to stay in.  I do thank that my backpacker days are over.

The place seems to cater for every one.  There are numerous hostels, some that look distictly scruffy, to nice hostels, little places just like the one we are staying in, which is beautiful, to the Atacama Altiplano Lodge, the hotel used in the James Bond Movie, just out of town.  We did look at the possibility of staying there, but thought that £800 a night burst our budget.

Anyway at 4pm we caught a tour to the Valle del Luna and were happy to have Eric back as our guide.  The range is called the Cordillera de Domeyko and again the landscape was completely different to everything else we had seen.  Its called Valle de Luna for two reasons, one of course because so much of it looks like the surface of the moon, the second is because  Nasa used it in the 1960s to test the Lunar landings.

All of the Atacama landscape has been caused by volcanic activity and strong winds, carving out gorges and creating sandscapes. We walked through deep gorges, went into caves, trudged up huge sandunes, and saw amazing sculptured rocks.

.

On one side The Andes, with the Licancabur volcano at 5,916 metres, and the Lascar volcano with snow still on the top.  On the other side wrippled hills leading down to the Salar.   The action of wind and the occasional rain still carving out the stone.

We then drove to the Valle de Muerte, valley of death which sounds bad, but it seems to have been named in error, by a catholic priest whose spanish wasn’t so good. Should have been the valle de martes, which means Tuesday.. don’t know why he called it this.  We drove over barren shale and did wonder at one point why we were here.  But then the valley below opened up, and knew why.    Spectacular.

Our last stop, with about 500 people, was to watch the sunset.

Back to the hotel, a shower and out to dinner with a band playing.  You couldn’t want more.