Day 4 - San Pedro de Atacama

Breakfast today did not involve pancakes. It did involve some delicious homemade carrot cake but it was only that and cereal on offer. I definitely didn't get my usual breakfast fill this morning!

Tomorrow we head out on a 3 day / 2 night Salt Flat Tour which will ultimately take us to Uyuni, Bolivia. The tour operator gave us a list of things that we needed to bring with us so as our Valle de la Luna tour wasn't until 3pm, we went shopping.

Our list included:

- Toilet paper (for wild wees)
- Snacks (always very important)
- 6L water
- Some Bolivianos for entry to the parks and hot showers (yes you have to pay extra for that)
- Props for perspective shots on the Salt Flats
- A very special sun hat for Simon

We were very sad to discover that the giant empanada shop was closed today so we had to purchase our daily empanada from somewhere else and it was very disappointing and tiny. So much so that Simon had to go back and buy a second one, whilst I opted for some ice cream.

At 3pm, we headed off on our Valle de la Luna tour which means Valley of the Moon. Surprisingly enough it gets its name as it looks very similar to the surface of the moon.

Our first stop was called Cavernas de sal and involved crawling through the rock (literally crawling at some points using the light on our phones to see where we were going) to learn about the rock and how it changes when it's exposed to the elements. There was a lot of salt in the cave.

Our second stop was the Tres Marias (Three Mary's). As I am kindly demonstrating for you in the photo, you can see how they get there name. You may notice that there are now only 2 Marias as the first Maria had a tragic accident 7 years ago.

Our third stop was called Mirador de Cari and involved some serious climbing up on to a ridge where you can see over the valley and the Andes mountains. The climb down was a little bit hairy!

Once we got back down it wasn't long until the sun would be setting so we headed off to a spot just outside the park where we could watch the sunset and get a nice view over the whole valley. We were hoping to get a cool go pro shot of the sun going down but the sun went down so unbelievably quickly that we didn't even get chance to get the go pro out of the bag!Read more