San Pedro de Atacama

A short flight from Santiago and we are in the deserts of the far north. We arrived in Calama and then went by bus for 1.5 hours to arrive in the small oasis town of San Pedro. The landscape is stark with mountains in the distance and all sorts of colours in the smaller hills around. Peru has many volcanos and we can see many from here; one, a perfect cone, is said to be building up for a big explosion at some stage. Our hotel is lovely with a rustic, Indian look built of local products like pink mud bricks, rushing for the roof and the round rooms like the roundavels in south Africa. Our first outing was around the town which is small and mainly catering for tourists going out to the desert regions. We had a menu of the day lunch for 7000 pesos including drinks, which was excellent. Also went into the local church built in 1534ish which had wooden plank floors and a ceiling built like a ship but using cactus planks. In the afternoon we were taken out to the Valley of the Moon and later Death Valley. We were sand blasted as the wind sprang up and later as the sun went down and the wind rushed through the gorges it got quite chilly.Our last activity was to watch the sunset from a special point and there were a few others there for the same reason. As there were no clouds the sunset wasnt special but it did light up the Andes in the opposite direction with some pretty colours. We had a pisco sour and some snacks up on the view point to celebrate a birthday of one of the women on the trip.