San Pedro de Atacama - Troy

ATTENTION TO READERS OF TIM'S BLOG:

Please read on no more, he and the lovely Vanessa will tell the next chapters in their own words...

After spending a day wandering the picturesque town of San Pedro, enjoying great food and wine, re-acclimatising from the altitudes of Uyuni (san pedro is only at just over 2000m) and recovering physically from the gruelling riding; Tutu and I decided to go camping at Laguna Chaxa on the Salar de Atacama.

The Salar is a flat plain offering 360 degrees of amazingly different mountain ranges and terrain. We found a nice spot next to the Laguna, pitched the tent and were rewarded with complete isolation and a spectacular sunset.

The next day we headed back to San Pedro to meet her friends Sophie and Thierry from France. We decided to keep camping because accomodation at hotels was expensive and booked out since it was the Easter weekend, so we found a camp spot in town, recommended to us by a New Zealander couple Tim and us had met in Villacabamba in Ecuador, who we had suprisingly bumped into.

I'm going to diverge because they had a fascinating story to tell us... After we left them in Villacabamba (they were both travelling on motorbikes also) they took a different route to Tim and I into Peru. They crossed a small border post at La Chonta, where they thought all the appropriate paper work was done for their entry into Peru. When they went to leave Peru into Bolivia, they found out that their bikes hadn't been checked in!!! Thus they "illegally" entered their bikes into Peru. On the border out they were informed of this and despite explaining that it wasn't their fault, the border police wouldn't let them leave, unless they paid a bribe of $2000 AU. Being seasoned travellers they weren't going for this so they argued to no effect and thus ended up on a bridge between Peru and Bolivia, in no mans land, where they pitched their tent, and then spent the next few days calling their embassy (which they luckily had with them) and reporting their dilemma. The long and short is that the embassy official had a connection to the higher ups in Peru and the whole story plus bribe attempt was reported and they eventually got into Bolivia with the added satisfaction that the border official who asked for the bribe was now in big trouble...

So back in San Pedro, we met Tutu's friends and spent the next few days visiting:

The Pukara de Quitor - west from San Pedro are the ruins of the Pukará (fortress), constructed by the Atacameños to protect them from other people who lived in South America.

Riding through and "sand boarding" the dunes of Valle de la Muerte - a mountainous and sandy valley near to San Pedro that looks like the surface of mars (I presume ofcourse, never having been there).

El Tatio Geysers - a geothermal field located in the Los Andes Cordillera (4.200 mt over the sea level) which at sunrise presents impressive steaming fumaroles produced by the high temperatures of their watery craters.

Once again it is impossible to explain the beauty and strangeness of these landscapes, it's another "must see for yourself"...

PS. ok there are a lot of shots of me "laying about", but if you had been through what I had in Bolivia, I'm sure you would have been too...