Atacama, desert and San Pedro de

When I woke up in the morning on the bus a few hours yet from San Pedro de Atacama, I opened my blinds a crack to see a barren stony wasteland stretching to a horizon broken only occasionally by brownish, equally parched hills. This was the Atacama desert, which stretches for over 1000km up the coast of Chile from a few hours north of La Serena straight on to Peru. Chile, I should mention, is as long as Canada is broad. The Atacama also stretches up over the Andes and into Bolivia and Argentina, though it may be called something different there. It is awesome and brutal in the original senses of both words.

San Pedro de Atacama, on the other hand, is (from the tourist’s point of view, and it’s very difficult to get any other point of view as a visitor there), a charming but horrid little oasis village which serves as the base of operations for all explorations of the desert’s more exotic features. Charming, because it’s all adobe, and wood signs, and a white-washed church; horrid, because aside from the church absolutely everything was tourist oriented. The adobe-walled, wood-signed shops are all, and I mean all, tour operators, overpriced restaurants, accommodation, or artesania stalls, and the only people in the streets are people with backpacks or people trying to win those people’s business. And in the downtime between excursions, you’ve got no choice but to wander the streets yourself. Or at least I didn’t: my hostel, while clean, safe, and friendly (and, for some reason, occupied almost entirely by French tourists, either couples or solo travelers), didn’t have the kind of spaces necessary for relaxing in either the heat of the day or the cold hours after the sun went down, i.e. indoor common space.

A word about the cold, for the curious: it’s cold, but it’s not, like, frigid. Probably got down to –5ish outside, most nights. Not as cold inside, though there was no heating, obviously. In other words not a big deal for Canadians (well, except Vancouverites, maybe), assuming they remember how to dress for the weather. I have no idea if it varies over the course of the year.

I spent three days in San Pedro, took a couple of little tours into the landscape that revealed all sorts of serious amazing weirdness hidden out of sight of the highway (about which tours expect future posts), and that was enough time there for me. I missed one or two things, and especially regret not having the chance to take a tour of the night sky, but it was approaching a full moon so the stars were not so spectacular anyway (he told himself by way of consolation). I left the town early Tuesday, bound for a three-day adventure in and around the Bolivian Salt Flats. I didn’t know it then, but I was going from weird to totally insane – not, mind you, in the original sense of the word.