San Pedro de Atacama, Chile & Salta, Argentina

Our salt flat tour came to an end in the cute little town of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, just over the border from Bolivia. Even though San Pedro is quite a little tourist hub with all the Salt flat tours beginning & ending here, we hit a snag on arrival to discover that there were only two buses a week leaving for our next destination (Salta,Argentina). As a result Doug and I were forced to spend 5 days catching up on some much needed R&R in the beautiful, sunny desert...yes life is sooo hard. The delay however, did allow us to meet up again for the 3rd time with our friends Anthea and Scott, who had been on a Salt flats tour as well, two days behind ours.

We made the most of our time in San Pedro enjoying some delicious Chilean food and wine. A fine change from the fare offered in Bolivia. We also took in a couple of great little tours. We had heard good things about a star gazing tour offered by a Parisian man, Alain (an engineer in astronomy), who has a number of large telescopes in his backyard and together with his wife, held educational tours. We were thrilled to see that on our chosen night there wasn´t a cloud in the sky, and almost a perfectly full moon. Great for looking at the nights sky....or though we had thought. Obviously, the darker the sky, the better the viewing. Not great for seeing the hundreds of thousands of stars in our Universe, but perfect for taking some superb full moon photos through one of the telescopes. Despite the bright moon, we still saw a ton and we returned from the tour feeling quite a lot more educated in the world of astronomy.

One fact that was particularly humorous to me as the only Canadian in our group of four (Anthea and Scott are also from Oz), was when Alain described how different countries called various constellations by different names. While other world countries might name certain star constellations things like....¨Scorpius¨ and ¨Canis Major¨, the Australian names are....¨The saucepan¨ and ¨The shopping trolley¨. Very creative. Doug was especially proud, claiming that the Aussie way makes it a lot easier for everyone to appreciate and actually see the patterns (instead of pretending they can) as they are all so obvious. Nice one.

The next tour we did was to the nearby `Valley of the moon´. This was a fascinating place in the nearby desert with numberous stone and sand formations created through the centuries by ancient lakes, rivers and wind giving it an extraordinary color and texture, similar to the surface of the moon. The four of us were able to sit at the top of a sand dune in the valley as the sun went down and witness the incredible change of colors that came through the different rock formations as the light changed. Stunning.

Here are some photos from our time in San Pedro and Salta...

As always, click here if you can´t see the album San Pedro&Salta

Our next stop was Salta, Argentina where the four of us spent a glorious three days eating juicy steaks and drinking beautiful bottles of wine. Any extra pounds shed during our Macchu Piccu trek were more than made up for in our time in Salta. Great week or so with Scott and Anthea whom we look forward to catching up with again in the beautiful Buenos Aires.