San Pedro de Atacama

Back at the end of June we treated ourselves to a long weekend in San Pedro de Atacama. This was the third time in six years we made it up there, and June is a great time to visit, with plenty of sun and pleasant temperatures. It's also a nice time to escape from the wintery Santiago, which this year has been fairly wet (for Santiago standards, all you UK folks would laugh).

Our first visits to San Pedro in 2011 left us pretty fascinated and we had a lot of fun exploring some of the sites nearby. The second time though, in 2013, our picture changed a little and we realized that it's a bit of a tourist trap really. For example, our "star-gazing" tour turned out to be watching our "guide" fumble with a star-gazing App on his iPad while trying to point out some stars from the roof of his house... inside the village... with the nearby street lights blighting the night sky. Anyway, maybe this was a bad example and there are definitely more memorable tours available, but the point is, a lot of random folks are trying to live off the tourists in San Pedro these days and unfortunately it's not always easy to work out beforehand which experiences are worth their money.

So this time we went with the attitude that we'll mostly do our own thing, enjoy a couple of nice days with our friend Sandra who had also traveled to San Pedro from Caldera to meet up with us, sample the veggie food that is available around town (tourist traps sometimes also result in good things!) and apart from that not get too sucked into this whole tourist thing.

Sandra and Patricia on Caracoles (the main street of the village)

We booked ourselves into a quiet B&B a little way outside the village and on our first afternoon went to the Puritama hot springs, some 45 minutes by car from San Pedro. This place is located at nearly 3500m above sea level and is essentially a canyon through which a river with geothermally heated water runs, and where a handful of natural rock pools provide pleasant opportunities for one or the other dip.

Flollopping in the Puritama Hot Springs

We don't really remember what we had paid to get in there last time we visited but somehow couldn't help the feeling that in only a few years the price had trebled or something like that... oh well.

One relatively fail-safe way of having a good time in San Pedro is to hire a mountain bike, though it's worth going with the more expensive of whichever options are on offer, which is still only around ten thousand pesos (or less than 15 Euros) per day. So on our second day we did exactly that and set off to what ended up being a 6 hour circuit to the Garganta del Diablo (a dry river bed that has cut itself steeply into the surrounding terrain), then following the old road towards Calama, and switching back towards the Valle de la Muerte (or Valle de Marte) before returning to San Pedro.

Mountain biking in the Garganta del Diablo

A brief route description can be found here (for the first part to Garganta del Diablo) and here (for the second part). Once leaving the old road towards Calama one follows the edge of a plateau which offers pretty spectacular views across the Valle de la Muerte and towards the Andes.

Crazy martian landscapes

Upon finishing this beautiful circuit we got ourselves back to San Pedro for a nice meal, only to head out again right on time for one of the San Pedro signature experiences: watching the sunset at Valle de la Luna.

Watching the sun set from Valle de la Luna.

It was great to get out of  Santiago for a bit, meet up with Sandra, enjoy some sun and the amazing landscapes. A few more photos from this weekend are available here or in below slide show: