Days 61-62: San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

On Tuesday, October 14th, Dan and I departed on a long bus ride for northern Chile. In fact, the ride ended up being much longer than we had anticipated: 10 hours on a day bus. Not only did border control take a long time, but scarily, someone started seizing on the bus so we pulled over at a hospital so she could receive attention. The driver only stopped for a short time, though, for fear that more people would fall ill from the increasing altitude. Dan was also feeling sick throughout the ride, and slept almost the entire way. The only redeeming aspect of the bus ride was the beautiful scenery. The landscape seemed to transform every hour or so, offering a variety of picturesque views.

Around 6pm, we finally pulled up to our destination: San Pedro de Atacama. On first sight, I was utterly confused. All I saw were dusty, dirt roads and a couple of shacks. However, once we went into the center of "town," which was literally one road, we discovered the charm of San Pedro. Nearly everyone in town was afoot and the small adobe shops and restaurants were shockingly clean. We would later discover the food was also really good;surprisingly so, since we were essentially in a desert in the middle of nowhere. After our long bus ride, we had a very low-key first night, and just hung out in our unexpectedly nice hostel.

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Dan and I spent the next morning sorting out our plans and activities for the coming days. That afternoon, we went on our first San Pedro excursion. We drove just 10 minutes outside of town to go sandboarding in a place called Death Valley, so named because of all of the previous sandboarding accidents. I joke... There are a number of theories of how this region got its name, the most prominent of which is that it was a simple mistranslation between a Belgian explorer and the Atacaman people.

Death Valley was a beautiful area with jagged hills that were covered in dirt and sand. 

Our excursion group drove through the landscape for a little before arriving at a massive sand slope. There, we all exited the van and were give a brief lesson on how to sandboard. It was essentially the same concept as snowboarding, so I hoped I would have better luck than my one previous attempt on snow. We helmeted up and walked with our boards to the top of the large hill. There, we went in succession through the sand. My first attempt was surprisingly successful, and I had varying performances after that. Dan and I had a lot of fun riding through the sand, though the heat and the exhaustion of repeatedly climbing back up the large dune stopped us from going at it forever.

Before long, it was time to get back in the van. Once all in, we drove to a lookout point where we had incredible views of the wide open landscape. There, we ran into three of our friends from Valparaíso and got a chance to catch up with what they had been up to since we last saw them. Together, we drank the provided pisco sours as we watched the sun set over the Atacama Desert.