Atacama I - Adventures In The Desert

Arriving in San Pedro de Atacama, Maria and I set out to explore the little town and plan our last few days together. Unfortunately, San Pedro was our last destination together, but we still had a few days here to enjoy, wander around and go on small adventures. Ruud and Kim would also join in on some of them.

So after strolling through the small but cute town, we booked ourselves on three trips over the next three days - stargazing, the moon valley, and horseback riding.

Starting with stargazing, which is the #1 thing to do in San Pedro, given very limited light pollution and dry air. We were picked up in the evening for a night of stars, stories and amazement. The tour started with a very interesting conversation about our tiny planet in the endless universe, what we would be seeing that night and how sailors used to navigate in time gone by. I definitely geeked out on the talk, while I think Maria was more excited about looking at the stars (not that I wasn't either).

After the talk, it was finally time to look through the large telescopes at the stars and planets. All I can say is WOW. It was incredible. From the Nebula clouds, to the very bright clusters of stars to the absolute highlight of seeing Saturn and its rings it was simply spectacular! I think Maria and I could've watched them for hours. We truly looked into another distant magic world. We then proceeded for a funny photoshoot with the night sky as a beautiful backdrop.
At the end, we all agreed that the tour was definitely a highlight and a must-do. For me anyway, as I love the stars and planets - guess I like to dream sometimes.

The next day, we took the day easy as our tour to the Moon Valley would only start in the afternoon. After having driven through an otherworldly landscape for three days, we were not sure if we wanted to go and see another set of big stones and rock formations. But we were told that it is another highlight in San Pedro and after all, we were here to see some cool stuff. And were we glad that we booked the tour.

The rock formations and the red colours were truly different to what we had seen on our Uyuni tour. Plus the views from some of the lookout points were spectacular. It really felt like we were on another planet, even though I would divide the valley into a moon and a mars part. A moon part because the ground was so rough, white and strange that it looks as if you could be on the moon (this is also where its name comes from). It looked as if it had snowed there, but it was just the hard salt that shaped the floor. On the other hand, we saw gigantic rock formations that were dipped into the warm evening light, which gave them an amazing reddish colour that reminded me more of Mars. Anyway, the vast landscape with not a single human-made construction in sight was truly out of this world.

To top the evening off, we had a nice little picnic prepared for us, before heading to another viewpoint to watch the sunset over the moon valley. It was our last sunset together and I could have not imagined a better place to watch it. It just made so much sense to watch it over such a landscape given our rather adventurous last two weeks including stuff like the Death Road and the Silver Mines. Watching that sunrise together was definitely a highlight for me as we just sat there and watched it in silence for a while before reliving our truly wonderful time together. I felt blessed and grateful to have had Maria by my side the last two weeks as travelling with her made my and our time a lot more interesting and fun.

The sunset wasn't the end of our adventure together, though, as there was one last activity to do the next day.Read more