It was an early start for our drive over Paso Jama to San Pedro de Atacama. We tried to see the sunrise on the Cerro de Los Siete Colores, but the blanket of cloud limited the effect. Once on the road, it zigzagged it’s way up and up, and even up some more and finally we popped out over the cloud. We kept driving up passing some llama farms until we reached the high point of 4170m. Seeing the llama farms at this height certainly gave new meaning to high country farming.
The roads straightened and the valleys widened and we came to Salitral Grande salt flats, our first surreal experience of the sky’s reflection in the shallow water. The roads had amazingly long straights through desert like areas with lightning storms surrounding us. We had another land border crossing into Chile and this was another relatively painless experience, particularly because they came out to the vehicle to check our luggage.
Once we reached Licancabur volcano the road dropped consistently downhill towards the oasis of San Pedro you could see in the distance. There were a number of emergency run offs for vehicles with failed brakes and you could see why they were necessary when we descended about 2000m with barely any turns.
San Pedro wasn’t much of a town with one main street, a few side streets and a square. It was seriously hot and everything was a browny red colour with most buildings built in the adobe style. It was a busy place, but pretty much just full of tourists. The majority of places on the main street were tour agencies trying to sell you different activities and the other half were restaurants. There were some shops ranging from tacky tourist to artesan silversmiths, as well as quite a few outdoor stores. There was also an interesting museum, Museo Gustavo Le Paige, with a lot of information about and artifacts from the local indigenous people. It had previously housed some mummies, but they had been removed to preserve and respect them and the indigenous people.
We were only having one full day in San Pedro so we couldn’t do any of the other trips, but we had a tour out to Valle de la Luna with CTS turismo. Funnily enough it was a sandy, sparse area that looked like what you could imagine the moon being. It had an odd crust with variations of salt crystals and a white bubbly surface. Mining had been allowed until it become a national park and the remnants of the miners houses and their machinery were left as they had been. It was a busy area with many tour buses, but it was easy to get away from them all just by going for a bit of a walk.
The tour finished outside the national park so we could enjoy the sunset with cheese and wine. From this point we could also see Licancabur volcano, which our guide was telling us you cannot walk on the Chilean side because of land mines laid during wars with Bolivia. As the sun dropped lower, the sky became even more spectacular and I think we took a few hundred photos between the three of us. It was a perfect way to finish the tour and maybe the wine helped, but I would highly recommend the tour with CTS turismo.
Given there were so many restaurants, we didn’t have any problems finding places to eat in San Pedro. Our first find was Red Deli, which was recommended to us by our hotel. It turns out the owner, Carolina, is friends with the managers of our hotel and it was a great recommendation. The iced coffee was perfect to escape the desert heat of Atacama and we tried Chilean Empanadas, which are much larger than the Argentinian version, with meat, onion, hard boiled egg and olives in them. It was the lead up to Carnival and Carolina thought we might be there for the costumed parade, but turns out, after her tracking us down and leaving a message via the hotel, that it was happening on the day we were leaving, so we would miss it.
Another fantastic place to eat was Adobe restaurant. It had been recommended a number of times and it lived up to expectations. The whole place was pretty much outside under verandas with a fire burning in the centre. There was a local group performing folk music which added to the atmosphere, plus a random Storm Trooper walking around the restaurant, no idea why, but it did add to the photos.
Given all of the tours you can do in San Pedro, including lagoons, geysers, mountain biking, and hiking, I think it would be easy to spend a few days here to do some of them and there is enough food options to keep happy.
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