Valle de la Luna, Atacama

The Valle de la Luna is the main attraction of the Atacama Desert. After a delicious lunch in San Pedro de Atacama we again met with our tour guide and were happily surprised to find the same guide from the morning tour to the Valle de Arcoiris waiting for us! This can just get better 😄
After a short ride we found ourself in the middle of a classic desert scenery (at least when ignoring the presence of hundreds of tourists): sand and rugged rocks everywhere. It was a short walk/climb up a rocky pathway to see first the „mars valley“ (name source: the guide, picture 6) on the left where the Curiosity Mars Rover is said to have been trained and tested by NASA (source: the guide again, but it‘s true that the Rovers have been tested at the Atacama desert as it is the most Mars-like environment on earth ☝🏼🤓). Further up the sandy track came a viewpoint which showed all main attractions at once: the Duna Mayor or Great Dune (yeah, very creative name; best seen in pictures 12 and 13), the Amphitheatre (best in picture 11) and the quite grey Moon Valley at the bottom (picture 14). Alina loved it very much (she‘s officially a desert girl now 🤠) while Gilles was not impressed 😂 After this very short walking experience, we were led back to the van, driven through the moon valley to some stone formations called ‚Tres Marias’ (picture 15) and then brought to a viewpoint for nothing less than a pre-sunset Apèro with snacks and (premixed, but hey 🤷🏻‍♀️) Pisco Sours! They really know how to make tourists happy in the Atacama desert 😄
The sunset itself was watched from the Mirador de Kari, Piedra de Coyote, together with 500 other people but it was lovely, too 🤗 We got back to San Pedro de Atacama, had a couple of delicious Austral beers in front of a lovely live music bar, a half-decent dinner at our hostel restaurant and an early night because we had a flight to catch the next day: Bye bye Chile for now, we‘ll be back soon!Read more