Fiestas Patrias!

<--- Lake Chungara

10 days - 3 Countries.
I'm tired!

I've got so much to share! Lucky for you the pictures are here in case skipping through my dialogue is preferred : )

Last thursday we flew into Arica, the northernmost city in Chile, getting in late we enjoyed the fun welcome from our hostal and spent the next day exploring. We were referred to a guide for a city tour and managed to get it for half price ($12 for 4 hours) and saw all the great sites in Arica.

The first few pictures are from Arica - younch chilean girls at a celebration of the chilean independence day in their traditional outifts - geoglyphs on the hills which are preserved due to the lack of rain - the next two pictures were taken on our trip to the chilean altiplano (high flat). On the altiplano tour we went from sea level to about 15,000 feet in about 5 hours (view from one of the ledges is third). Made for a bit of a headache and an amazing view of lake changara which is the highest in the world (after titikaka which is the highest navegable lake)

We spent a day in Peru before heading a bit further south. It was a Chilean holiday and for this reason it seemed that every Chilean was heading to Peru! It took us about two hours to get through the border and had a nice time walking around the city of Tacna bought a few super cheap things and had a great big Peruvian lunch of fresh seafood, yummm.

The rest of the pictures unfortunately are not in as good of an order as I would like but ... here goes.

We took an overnight bus and made it to San Pedro de Atacama - the picture towards the end of the dirt road is it ... it's definitely a pueblo, a pueblo full of tourists - it's an interesting place to try and explain. There are about four streets in the center all of which are packed with tour agencies and overpriced cafes, bars and restaurants. There are so many amazing geographical sites near San Pedro that the entire population is supported by tourism. I learned that only for a year have they had electricity after midnight, and the atm is nearly as new.

We spent the first day relaxing and planning out the time we had strategically as to make sure that we didn't lose out on anything we wanted to see. Our first tour was the astronomy tour - insert amazing moon picture here - which was really even more amazing because one of the girls I traveled with is an AstroPhsyics major! San Padro boasts some of the worlds clearest skies and has more than 300 cloudless nights a year! Of course just seeing stars in the southern hemisphere is amazing because they are different then what we usually see, very very cool.

Thursday we spent the day in Bolivia!! So many new stamps in my passport!!
Bolivia was a totally different experience and probably my favorite of the trip. We spent the day in a 4x4 with a Brasilian and a Chilean along with our tour guide. As we made our way out of Chile we drove along a new international highway linking Chile and Argentina ... as our guide pointed this out we took a sharp left into the desert driving on ... the desert : ) The Bolivian border had no electricity, water or bathrooms and the welcome to Bolivia sign was laying sideways against the building. Very cool : ) We saw geyers (these were clay and stank of sulfur, more like bubbling pulls of clay than the geysers you would imagine), swam in natural thermal pools, and saw three amazing lagoons. Laguna Blanco (white), Laguna Verde (green) and Laguna Colorado - Bright Red!! We saw thousands of flamingoes at Laguna Colorado along with a bunch of llamas. All day there was no other people that we saw and this is definitely why the trip was the much more amazing. The whole area was a national park but we just felt like we were exploring these sites as the first and only tourists.

The next day we took the advice of our tour agent, Regis - very french, and went sandboarding instead of waking up at 3:30am for the geysers after a day of intense altitude. Sandboarding was awesome! We road bikes to the Valle de la Muerte with sandboards on our backs ... intense, right? After having mentally calculated the total cost of such a fantastic ten days we decided without a tour guide would be just fine ... so we made it ... out of breath ... (altitude at SP was still 7,000 ft) and then climbed up the dunes to try our hand at such a cool desert sport. Of course on my first try I did a cartwheel (for those of you who know me well enough you will know I can't actually cartwheel but apparently attached to a board flying down a sand dune it's possible : ) )
The next two times I did pretty good, I wasn't flying down but I managed to not fall!
The same evening we did the Salar de Atacama tour. (Picture before the sandboards) The largest salt flat in Chile, and a national park for flamingoes ... this tour was pretty relaxed. We stopped in a small pueblo and enjoyed a beautiful sunset. After digging the sand out of our ears we were pretty tired and were happy to get to bed early with a 3:30 wake up for the geysers the next morning!

The geysers at El Tatio were pretty amazing. They are the yellowstone of Chile and interestingly enough our guide told us that the government is planning a geothermal energy project for the geysers and that we would be some of the last people to ever see them. My favorite part of the trip was watching the guides put chocolate milk and eggs in the small geyser pools for warming purposes : ) We passed through a small pueblo and sampled llama meat! eek!

Getting back before 12:30 was bizarre after an 8 hour trip! We decided to walk around and do a bit of shopping ... postcards for all! Our plan was to head for Valle de la Luna on bikes around 3:30, hike around a bit and watch the sunset from the national park. This is one of the most famous tours to do and we definitely didn't want to miss it but when we got to the bike rental place the agent told us it was too windy and he wouldn't let us go out! We ran over to our friend at the tour agency we had used and he told us all the tours had left at 3:00pm! Not ready to give up we asked him what we could do and he told us to take a taxi and then join up with his tour that was already there. I have no idea why we thought we could have made it there on bikes ... winds were gusting at probably 50mph and wow sand can puncture the skin!! We were really, really lucky to get out of the taxi at the right place ... we found a tour group and were so desperate to get out of the horrible wind that we didn't care if it was the right agency. Right as we were leaving the one site the right bus came up and we hopped on! Again, so lucky. We headed with the tour to the main site and as we came up to it we saw a poor soul who had ridden their bike all the way up ... it turned out to be a friend from the same program!! Needless to say, we were happy to have had the turn of events. It was worth it in the end and the landscape was amazing (picture after sandboarding and last picture).

All in all the whole trip was absolutely more than I could have hoped for. We met so many interesting people during our tours and in our hostals. It really opened my eyes up to traveling. I have even more pictures and will have them up probably tomorrow so for now ... thanks for letting me ramble again.