Before The Weekend

Well this is it, our last week in South America. On Friday, we board a late night flight to New Zealand and don´t get off the plane again until it touches down in Aukland on Sunday - the weekends are just flying by these days (bada boom). Unfortunatley that means that we have only a few days left until this weekend to enjoy on this continent, a continent that it has been a fantastic experience to explore - the rest of our trip now has a lot to live up to!

Mandi has already covered the Salar de Uyuni and Bolivia part of our trip which was absolutely amazing, especially the three hours on the Salar. However, despite coming close, it still hasn´t knocked Easter Island off my top spot of experiences so far. I therefore won´t go back over our experience on the Salar in this blog entry, but will quickly cover the area in Northern Chile which we used as our base for the trip into Bolivia and enjoyed a fun few days on the edge of the Atacama desert.

San Pedro de Atacama is a great place to visit - with its adobe homes and intermittent electricity supply, it has the initial appearence of somewhere that is completely off the beaten track. That is until you notice all the buildings are being used to house either internet cafes, restaurants or places offering tours around the local natural wonders - oh, all the people walking the streets in backpacks also gives things away a bit! But, despite being on the well trodden backpacker route across this part of the continent, there is a good reason it is so well visited and it isn´t only its proximity to Bolivia (which is probably easier to travel through coming from Peru). This part of Chile is blessed with such natural wonders as geysers, volcanos, amazing rock formations, a salt lake of its own (although not as big as the Salar de Uyuni), lots of high altitude lakes and an abundance of wild life from the wild vicuñas to the gentle flamingos and the tame llamas. The Atacama desert is also one of the best places in the world for looking at the night sky and is the location for a current project to build the worlds largest telescope.

We only had a limited number of days to explore this area (2 days before leaving for Uyuni and 2 more when we came back) so we had to be a bit picky about what we were going to see. As Bolivia would provide us with more than enough volcanos, salt lakes and wildlife, we went for a visit to the geyers at Taito, a sunset at the valle de la luna (an area of rock which has a huge sand dune and massively changing colours) and an evening star gazing with a local astronomer.

The geysers were a lot of fun - we had an early start to be at them by sunrise, but it was great to learn about them and wander around as huge pockets of steam erupted form the ground nearby. We also had a great breakfast which included a hot chocolate made from geyser heated milk - beats the Starbucks steaming machine any day!

The valle de la luna was also a great experience, but unfortunately the star gazing had to be cancelled as the oncoming clouds of the wet season meant that we never got a clear night sky every night we were there (despite some wonderfully clear mornings). But overall, it was nice to visit that part of Chile and there is definitely more to do there than we managed in our visit (the same could be said for much of Chile and definitiely for South America as a whole).

So now we are back in Santiago and soon will be catching a flight for the next stage of our trip in New Zealand. We´ll then begin to see if the rest of our journey can live up to the high expectations that the wonderful and diverse South American continent has set.

Steve