San Pedro de Atacama

Last Thursday after an 11-hour bus ride, a few of the girls and I arrived in the town of San Pedro de Atacama. The trip was fraught with peril- stolen purses, insufficient identification, and French men, but we all survived and had an awesome time!

We stayed at a hostel right in the center of town, and feasted on avocado sandwiches, cheese empanadas, ice cream, and fresh squeezed fruit juice. We got lucky and found an awesome guide (Chino) that took us to some salt lakes, an awesome dessert complete with salt mines, and some geysers. Then we took the Sunday red-eye bus home and arrived back in Arica 2 hours before class started on Monday :) Again, pictures explain better than words so not many thoughts for this one.

Las Lagonas Cejas: Salt lakes. Before this trip, I didn't buy into the idea that one would be able to float better in saltier water. It actually does make a huge difference! Don't get the water in your eyes though, it's much worse than the ocean.

So if you're friends with Karman and don't know the Llama story stop reading now and call her to find out about it.......If you don't know Karman, she is my very athletic, fast, varsity soccer player friend. Our tour stopped in a little town and we all got off the bus to take a look around. One of the villagers carried out a 4 day old baby llama to show us, and of course it wiggled free from someone on the tour. The group spent about an hour trying to herd this llama to somewhere where we could trap it, but no success. (Oh yeah, and we couldn't leave without it because the bus driver had bought it.) Suddenly, Karman comes out of no where and chases this llama for about 50 yards and wrestles it to the ground. We decided that catching the baby llama and letting the tour continue was her tip for the day. Baby Llama drove back with us to San Pedro and all lived happily ever after.

We took a rigorous hike up to some Incan ruins that overlooked the Valley of the Dead. The views were spectacular! At one point we decided to take a "short cut" off the path, and I thought we were going to slide right down into the ravine. I'm pretty sure we were all in violation of our "no extreme sports" student health insurance clause.

The day after we arrived we woke up at 3:30am in order to go see the sunrise over the geysers and hot thermal baths. While the geysers were really really cool, it was very very cold. They were definetly worth a visit...I'm not sure about 4am in the morning though. Check out my facebook for a video of one of them going off.

On our last night in San Pedro, we drove out to the valley of the dead one night to eat dinner, watch the sunset and drink strawberry wine. A great way to cap off the trip!