You only want to be in the desert once...

San Pedro de Atacama is on the border between Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, basically the middle of nowhere. San Pedro is the most deserty-desert I’ve ever seen. On parts of the drive from Calama to San Pedro, there were no plants, no cactus, no water, no anything living. Just pure red rock. We spent our first day of the trip waking up at 4:30ish and catching a flight at 6:50 to Calama. After a nap on the plane and a nap in the hotel, Hannah, Munika and I headed out to the largest open mine in the world. As Hannah pointed out their logo looks like an evil villain’s from some Disney movie, or evil corporation that’s out to make as much money as possible while meanwhile destroying the world… Oh, wait… It was kind of breath taking to see those ginormous trucks (where the wheels are larger than a six foot man) look like little Lego cars I played with when I was 5. After returning from the mine, we ate, slept, ate and slept some more.
The next morning, we headed out to San Pedro and spent the day planning the next couple of days which involved Salt Flats and flamingos, lagos altiplanicos, geysers at 6:00 in the morning with the sunrise, hot springs, the sunset over sand dunes and, of course, sandboarding. Oh there were also some ceramics tossed in there. San Pedro is a strange town. It’s where all the rich people go to see something strange. Kind of like Puerto Natales. So there are some really nice hotels and restaurants and everything has dirt roads, pitted with rocks. Luckily, it’s slightly warmer than anywhere else in Chile (except in morning and night). San Pedro is also an oasis, literally. So there are plants and living things (like lots of stray dogs) there. The first night, we went star-gazing with a silly Frenchman, who showed us Jupiter and it’s moons, Vega (which looks like its having a epileptic attack), and pointed out a few constellations to us, like the Southern Cross and Sagittarius. The next morning, a huge group of us headed out to go see the Salt Flats, flamingos and lagos altiplanicos (I don’t now what the translation for that is). It was pretty beautiful and my camera battery didn’t die! That night we made ceramics with this crazy old drunk man down the street, who then forgot to fire our ceramics. Sad panda. Fun nonetheless. Next morning we dragged ourselves out of bed at 3:30ish only to get picked up 40 minutes late by the bus company who drove us out to go see the geysers. At about 7:30 the sun reached the top of the mountains and began to spread over the geyser valley. It was a lot warmer once the sun was out. That night, we headed out to Valle de la Muerte in the Cordillera de Sal. The Cordillera de Sal looks like a bunch of dinosaur backs lined up and Valle de la Muerte is a gorgeous maze of canyons and sand dunes. To see the sunset, we hiked across one such sand dune in Valle de la Luna (which looks exactly like the Moon). And watched the sunset, which looked surprisingly like the sunrise (yay for lack of pollution!) The sky did turn a little rosy, but let’s just say this was no L.A. on-fire sky. That night we treated ourselves to Will Ferrell in “Blades of Glory,” in which Hannah and I found our song. Now I’ve had Aerosmith stuck in my head for the past week. It’s not a really happy place. The next day, we went sandboarding, which is like snowboarding only on sand dunes, so it doesn’t hurt. It was slightly windy, which prevented us from sandboarding quite as much as possible and made it possible to get sand everywhere, nuff said.
We headed back to Calama that night for an amazing sunset, some ice cream, and some more sleep and TV and were up and back the next morning to have lunch at [OH!] Salad before class. Oh, salad! How I missed you!
In other news, I’m going to try to make manjar tonight, have been café hopping around Santa Lucia and have yet to find a bad café, have begun to add es to anything that is plural (which doesn’t really work with some words,) also couldn’t tried to use solamentely as a word last night and start speaking in English without realizing it to my host family. Hmmmm…strangeness. And now back to the Spanish essay!