El Viaje Espectacular: Part II

After scouting out the cheapest options for sightseeing around San Pedro, we decided on the cheapest of the cheap: taking ourselves on a tour. We rented bikes for the first part of the day, packed 2 liters of water each, and set off into the desert. The guidebooks tell you that the desert is hot, high, and dry, and they're not lying. San Pedro is situated about 10,000 ft. above sea level, making it not uncomfortable to engage in physical exercise, but certainly not easy. While riding our bikes we had to take sips of water almost every other minute and breathe deeply so we wouldn't run out of air. Riding in the desert was the strangest experience. We rode on the highway, and the landscape is so immense and empty, that all you can hear is the wind in your ears and the sound of your tires spinning. San Pedro's air is so clear that you can literally see things that are 70 miles off in the distance. On either side of us was a blanket of gray-brown sand followed by volcanoes and crazy salt-rock formations. Thank God there weren't any cars on the highway, because we surely would have gotten run over, staring as we were at our surroundings. You can lose yourself in landscape like that.

The first place we visited was about an hour's ride away, a tiny Atacamenian town called Tulor, which was built ridiculously long ago (300 BC or something). The town basically consisted of a bunch of circular rooms/huts that were only partially excavated. The fact that these people had developed agro-pastoralism and had built these abodes that survived thousands of years was pretty impressive. We took a good 5 minutes to appreciate their efforts before hopping back on our bikes and continuing on. You can only stare at circular stone huts half-buried in sand for so long.

The next place we visited was only a 20 minute ride and 3 stream crossings from San Pedro. Quitor, a community-turned-fortress on a hill, was much more impressive than Tulor, even though it was built later and was partially restored for the benefit of tourists like us. Quitor consisted of hundreds of little stone rooms scattered across a hill, connected by haphazard pathways and lacking any sort of guardrails or safety devices . Apparently frivolous lawsuits haven't yet come to San Pedro, because there were some incredibly precarious areas where you could walk right up to the edge of a huge, rocky drop off, and with one misstep, tumble to your death into the valley below (which, appropriately enough, was named Valle de la Muerte). Ignoring the burning in our legs from riding our bikes through the desert, we hiked to the top of the hill, enjoyed the view, climbed around on the walls a bit, and then booked it to San Pedro to make it back in time for a sunset tour of Valle de la Luna.

Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley) is named for its supposed similarity to the surface of the moon. It's actually only one part of a national park with all kinds of crazy sections, including salt caves, sand dunes, and rock formations that look like they've erupted from the sand. We came in through the back side of the park, where our guide pointed out a rock formation known locally as Las Tres Marias (or the three Marys). In reality there are now actually only two Marys. The third apparently collapsed three years ago when a tourist attempted to climb one for a picture. The two that are left don't exactly look like Marys either, but according to our guide, Gustavo Le Paige was supposed to have been doing a lot of drugs when he named them. Afterwards, we visited the salt caves, a series of rock passages carved out eons ago by flowing water. They were by far one of the coolest things we saw in San Pedro, but our guide (a one-armed Canadian) had to rush us through them in about half an hour in order to make it to La Duna Mayor (the big dune) in time for sunset. The dune itself is absolutely spectacular. It's about 200 feet tall and 600 feet long, but only a couple feet wide across the crest so that when you walk across it you get the feeling that you could tumble off the side at any moment. In fact some people clearly had been off the sides as there were a couple sets of footprints going from top to bottom. We were warned, however, not to go down the side, as the fall is accompanied by an 80 dollar fine administered by park officials who are on guard during the high traffic times (pretty much just sunset). Once you hike across, the sunset is nice to watch and you actually get to see the Andes change color with the sky. That was about it for the day...and this blog entry.