Atacama Desert, part 1

In the middle of the driest desert in the world we knew we were guaranteed sunshine and warm days. We arrived in San Pedro de Atacama with an Irish soldier who was about to take part in the Race the World challenge. 144 people running/walking 250 km across the desert at high altitude in 7 days....carrying all their food, tent and equipment. Crazy stuff to do once, but he'd already completed races in the Sahara and Gobi desert and was planning to race the Antartic in December. In the heat and high altitude it was as much as we could do to organise tours to drive us around the surrounding desert! We were suitably humbled by the effort this challenge required but secretly thought they were all a bit crazy to do it!

The scenery was fabulous, as Rick's pictures show. Such a contrast to the mountains and greenery of southern Chile. Arriving by night it seemed very desolate, but in the bright white light of day the desert and vocanoes are full of colour. San Pedro is a small town, full of tourists from all over the world - more than we'd seen in a long time - as well as Chilean university students on their winter break (with a very high proportion of dreadlocks between them!). The night we arrived there was no room at the inn, we had to try 4 hostels before finding a bed, the first time we´d had such a thing happen.

Just outside San Pedro is the Valle de la Luna which is the place to watch a sunset. Not the romantic evening you might think as the best way to get there if you don't have your own transport is on a tour bus...and there are a lot of tour buses every evening. So we sat on top of a big sanddune with a crowd of Brits and Americans and a very nonplussed tour guide. It was beautiful though - vocanoes and deserts turning various hues of orange, red and purple before the sun disappears and the temperature plummets.