South American Solo Adventure

Woke up very early (3:15am ew) to get my flight to San Pedro de Atacama. Once I arrived I tried to get my head around all the possible tours, booked one slightly randomly for this evening and headed off for a well deserved 3 course meal for 5500 pesos.

San Pedro is fun because it's super dusty and has insane mountains in the backdrop minus any trees so they have loads of impact. It's weird seeing dust and desert and also snow on top of the mountains. Sadly I was too busy sleeping to see the views from the plane window.

I'm writing this from my loner table in the restaurant eating a bright orange wobbly desert of some sort. I'm torn between socialising with the gaggle of Brits in my hostel and having a pre tour nap. Decisions!

I had a pre tour nap and it was good. Then off I marched to my first tour: the Valle de la Luna
(the valley of the moon). The guide was insane and constantly chewing Coca leaves which he claimed both relaxed and simulated him. I met a girl from Norway who was a boss and only a baby at 19 but was actually hilarious. We shuttled about in our mini bus to various parts of the valley. They were all great. We licked some of the salt from the ground which scattered over the rock and dunes to look like snow, which began with my new friend waving a rock at me and demanding 'Lick it!!'. It's hard to explain what it looked like because there were so many shapes in the ground and these jagged shapes were interspersed with long smooth swooping dunes. We had to do a bit of walking up to ridges and because I am extremely useless I felt the altitude at 2700m and had to go suuuuper slowly. The view from one of the ridges, which totally lacked tourists, was absolutely amazing; 360 degrees of spikey bits, lumpy bits, etc. with volcanoes in the background. Our guide took his shoes off for the walk for no apparent reason and then nearly left them behind. He also told us nothing about the scenery and when asked just replied with 'I don't know, I'm not a geologist'.

We drove to a viewpoint to watch the sunset which was rammed with other people doing the same thing; it was pretty but we had to be back too soon to the bus so we missed the best colours- the problem with tours.

I had a delicious pasta dinner (it actually was delicious) back at the hostel and met a trio of a nurse from bham, her brother and her brother's girlfriend and then went out for a glass of vino with them. We exchanged nice stories of how one of them was nearly stabbed by a random man in Bogota, but the random man was chased away by a second guy with a knife. Good. This and the fact that I read a blog post about how Bogota is like Manchester made me decide to spend minimal time there when I head to Colombia!

The next day I basically did nothing apart from wander around San Pedro and book a star tour in the evening (and have another evening three course meal, oops). The star tour was great. It started at 11pm and we were driven to a house about 20 mins away from San Pedro where they had telescopes set up with chairs and blankets which everyone immediately put on like lord of the rings cloaks. We were split into two groups and our group was given wine and a lady with a laser pointer told us about what we could see, constellations, Jupiter, a red giant etc. Some of the constellations are dubious at best. There is one she called 'small dog' which was two stars. Apparently one is the head and one the body. I was a teacher's pet and kept answering all the questions smugly and often wrongly. The stars were so clear and you could easily see the milky way and at least one other galaxy as a smudgey cloud type thing. It was great. We then got fed hot chocolate and some neon coloured rice puff sweets then used the enormous telescopes to look at the moon, Jupiter, and some star clusters more closely. Jupiter has 60-something moons and we saw 4! Apparently they got the biggest telescope off eBay (!) for a bargainous 8000 USD. Back by 1:45 and off to bed.

Hilarious day. Woke up late after star tour and chilled for a bit before heading off for an enthusiastic and apparently short bike ride with two very hungover Brits who I would then shadow for the next two days, Chris and Henry, and one less hungover motorcycling American who nobody knew the name of and so is now referred to as Doug. The plan was to go to .... but after renting the bikes we discovered that these places were closed following recent rain (I thought this was a desert). Thus our bike ride extended and we headed off semi- enthusiastically to Valle de la Luna (round 2). It was much better at own pace and cycling, and a lot less busy cos it was furingtje day. It was pretty hot and there was a large hill which I was stubborn enough to make it up (Doug didn't, not that it matters, but I did beat him). Doug had to leave early as he had a bus to catch but distributed cereal bars to us before he left like a kind of hairy mum.

While we were waiting for Henry to have a nature toilet trip, Chris and I discovered a puncture in my bike which of course none of us knew how to fix. A pair of more competent cyclists came by and told us we didn't have the right sized inner tube to fix it. Joys. This in addition to Chris' helmet being about 100 sizes too big shows the dubiousness of the bike rental guy.

The three of us had a look up the nice ridge and a contemplative moment, during which Henry announced the low quality of Chilean empanadas and how he would not be eating any in Chile as protest. We began the rigourous task of cycling back, stopping every 2 minutes to repump my tyre which everyone valiantly took in turns. I was too enthusiastic going downhill and hit a sandy patch then fell off and got an obligatory Katy Does The Outdoors scrape. The tyre on the bike completely fell apart at this point and we started carrying the bloody thing along a sandy road in the baking heat, running out of water supplies and imagining mirages of the ranger gate in the distance. The whole thing was actually completely hilarious so I spent most of the time LOLing. We made a genius contraption where we put the broken bike on top of the non broken one and the boys pushed it while I just laughed helpfully. We made up a story about Doug sabotaging us because we had all made it to the top of the hill on the bikes and he hadn't.

Once at the ranger gate we immediately bought and gulped down loads of fizzy drinks like we'd not drunk for the last week. Chris bought an empanada and Henry threw his earlier morals aside and ate at least half.

After a bit of me repeatedly stating that my bike was roto, I got a lift back from the park ranger, phew.

That evening we had a team cycling dinner of a massive delicious salad with everything imaginable in it, even a homemade viniagrette! It stands as the healthiest thing I've eaten in a hostel so far and basically had every vegetable in it, avocado and the powerful combination of raw onion and raw garlic. It was very civilised with place settings on the outside table and beer.

The next day I woke up nice and early for my tour as I was being picked up at 5-5:30am. Horrifying. As I sat eating my cereal and worrying about the upcoming altitude there was a knock on the door which I assumed would be the tour, but instead in burst a drunk Henry with a stray dog he'd picked up from the street. The dog had become so attached during the walk home that it began scratching and throwing itself at the door of the hostel to be let in.

My tour was to the Tatio Geysers which is the third biggest geyser field in the world and has a cheeky hot spring. The geysers were quite cool but a bit crowded and the hot spring literally (not actually literally) burned my foot it was so hot! Apparently a woman was taking a selfie last year and fell into a geyser and died. Yikes. The guide made us breakfast of coffee, coca tea, scrambled eggs, avocados and cake! He was infinitely more knowledgeable than my last guide. On the way back we stopped at a wetland which was the most beautiful place I've seen so far on my whole trip as the colours were genuinely spectacular and the landscape was so swooping. We saw some kind of llama camel type thing with long legs. We also stopped at a random village which seems to exist for the church and to sell llama kebabs to tourists. It was tasty. I was living it large at the back of the bus and ended up in a complex conversation with a Chilean who only spoke Spanish, a French woman who spoke slightly improvised Spanish and a bit of English, and a German who spoke no Spanish.

I got back and immediately went out again with da lads to book a salty lake tour. I was weirdly determined to have a floaty dead-sea-style experience. I had a coffee and an ice cream from the corner shop to wake up before we headed off (great call).

We were very chirpy on the long drive to the lake with a long conversation about children's names in which C&H showed their St Andrews roots with names like Roland and Elspeth. The driver was insane and as we were at the back again it was the bumpiest experience ever, leading Chris to throw water in his face while trying to drink water with a totally non-sympathetic laughing fit following from me. I got taught the banter song.

The lake lived up to my hopes and dreams because it was SO FLOATY. It was great! Apparently 60-70% salt. Our guide was hilarious. He didn't seem to know much about the lake and claimed it would cost 30,000 USD to get to the Dead Sea from Chile so this trip was far superior, basically ignored our questions by talking about other things, and said I was loco because 'she always screaming'. He told us about his ex girlfriend who also works at the Lagos. He then said I was the perfect woman which is obviously accurate but then was leery towards a Brazilian girl who knew no English, and i had to try and awkwardly translate and defend her. He then called Henry 'fatty', but all in all he was pretty entertaining.

We drove to a spot somewhere in the desert with a nice view, with Chris becoming mardy becsusnehe thought we were just being driven back to San Pedro to watch the sunset (which wouldn't have been surprising given the quality of the tour so far). We had a cute picnic of olives, sultanas, pringles and pisco sours which was almost entirely eaten by us three. We sat on a rock and watched the sunset which was super nice.

Afterwards there's no rest for the wicked so we bought more pisco, washed the salt off, ate fajitas (which were really kindly made for us by some of the other guests of the hostel... I had a 'this is so nice' moment when I saw the place settings...I really enjoy cooking with people and formal settings when I'm away because they remind me of home), made a small campfire in the hostel grounds, and headed out for a desert party with a Norwegian guy whose name I forget.

Apparently it's illegal to dance in San Pedro so the locals party in the desert. I can't remember dancing but there was a fire, lots of people and men selling beers from coolers, and I did not one but two desert wees where I drunkenly tried not to pee on my trainers. It's all fairly blurry until the police came and broke the party up which led to some mild panic running away from everyone and a lot of gushing from me and the boys about what a great crew we are as we walked home.

The next day our entire room was up at 7am for various tours and I had to say bye to mah boiz as they were off to Uyuni. Sad moment. So my two and a half hours sleep plus hangover plus 7:30am-6pm bus tour of the Atacama desert began. Luckily I'm a boss and cracked on. A few of the people from the geysers tour were also on this one, including a completely adorable couple from Switzerland. The guy loves photography and so kept taking photos of everyone in an endearing and comedic paparazzi style. I later discovered that he is a trainee orthopaedic surgeon and she an anaesthetist! We took about 100000 photos of extremely nice scenery and us jumping around in it, and there was a fair amount of group bonding as it was such a long tour. Personal highlights were the piedras Rojas, can't describe it but will attach photo, and a trip to see flamingoes in the Atacama salt flats type place. So many flamingoes. All they did was put their beaks in the water. Apparently they feed for 16hrs a day! They were beauts. That evening I had a great time watching TV, eating and going to bed early.Read more