#22 san pedro de atacama, chile

Well, I didn't get to have my very own "Mad Max" moment in the Atacama desert (the dune buggies were shut the day we wanted to conquer the desert, Mel Gibson-style), but we did do a helluva lot of other things during our five-day stay in San Pedro, north of Chile.
Firstly, I had to make up for making Kris spend his whole birthday on a bus, so I booked a really nice hotel on the edge of town - Hotel Altiplanico. We had an awesome mudbrick room with little round windows and views of the nearby volcanic mountain range (okay, a mudbrick room doesn't sound luxurious, but it was!). After two nights living it up there (and trying to avoid the family of six next door with their four Aryan bottle-blond kids), we decided to demote ourselves to a more affordable hostel in town. Unfortunately this meant no heater and painfully cold nights in the desert (supposedly the driest place on earth, but it still rains here occasionally - how can that be?).
One of our first activities was horseriding (can't believe I was successful in convincing Kris to go!), and we went on a gentle 2-hour trail ride with our guide 'Sixto' through Death Valley and Katarpe. Quite surprisingly, Kris willingly donned a wide-brimmed 'gaucho' hat (think Don Quixote) for his first ride atop a horse.
On our second day in San Pedro we went sandboarding in Death Valley. I became expert at going really, really fast downhill for five seconds then falling flat on my face and eating dirt (well, sand). We had a bit of a lame instructor who was more interested in chatting up the American girls next to us than actually showing us how to sandboard. Unfortunately, both my camera and Kris' got sand stuck in it (even though I was pretty careful to keep it in its case and inside my bag), so now all my photos have annoying black marks all over them! I tried to clean it myself and just made it way, way worse... so aggravating - and the next big city where I can clean my lens/buy a new lens is probably 2 weeks away, dammit!
But enough bitchin' - back to San Pedro. We were lucky enough to be in town for an annual parade to celebrate the founding of the town of San Pedro. It was pretty cool - hundreds of guys and girls dressed up in ridiculously flamboyant outfits (a bit like gay mardi gras crossed with Rio festival - I imagine), dancing, playing the guitar, marching in twelve-piece brass bands... We saw the whole parade do one loop of the town and thought it was over. Four hours later we went back to the middle of the town and they were still doing it! All these poor, exhausted eight year olds following determined band leaders, sweat dripping down all of their faces...
We went on this great all-day tour to visit a couple of high altitude lagoons. At the first lagoon we saw a flock of pink flamingoes and one lone white Andean flamingo. The flamingos fed on these microorganisms (looked like little red tadpoles) in the lagoon, which in turn feed on the carotenoids naturally present in the lagoon. We went to another beautiful lagoon higher up at 4200m, which kickstarted the most atrocious altitude headache I've ever had, and I vowed to buy Diamox before we headed into Bolivia. On the drive back into town, our guide showed us this weird phenomena where we turned off the engine of the bus and proceeded to roll UPHILL for about 50 metres - bizarre! I don´t know what the scientific explanation for it is, but apparently the locals think that the devil lives inside one of the mountains and draws everything to him. Sounds plausible.
Our last night in San Pedro we went on this really cool astronomy night held by a French astronomer in his house about 7km out of town, which was decked out with a viewing platform and about seven high-powered telescopes. We saw Jupitor, the multicoloured "jewel box" constellation, twin planets... and the coolest thing we saw was Saturn and its rings! It looked so fake through the telescope, like a fifties sci-fi version of the night sky ("Yes, don't tell the others it's a slide," said the Frenchman drily). He also had this cool camera attachment that allowed me to take photos of the moon directly through the telescope - as you can see above...