Have You Heard From Laura?

42k ride to Valle de la Luna

Part 1: Sunset
San Pedro de Atacama is a gringo village in the desert. There is not much to the village but gringo tour offices and gringo restaurants. Still, because we are gringos, there was plenty to do. I talked Markus and Anja, my two new Swiss friends, into biking to Valle de la Luna for sunset. We rented some good mountain bikes and set out not knowing that out and back was 42 kilometers. The ride out was clear and warm on a nice road with excellent views. Once out at the view point, good photos were pretty impossible to take, the vistas were just to huge. What looked great to us: wind and rain carved rock formations as far as the eye could see, looked like a thin dull brown line in the camera. Note to self: take a photography course. The return to San Pedro was dark and cold and quite a long ride.

Sunrise in the geyser gardin

A cosy morning in the desert of the Atacama

Part 2: Sunrise
There is not rest for the busy backpacker. Barely recovered from our LONG bike ride the day before, we were up at 4 a.m. with a van load of other gringos to drive 3 hours to see the sun rise up behind a garden of geysers. Cold doesn’t describe the ride over hill and vale at 4,200 feet at 4 a.m. When we finally did arrive at the geyser garden I was only coaxed out the the van by our guide with promises of hot tea. Once the sun rose all was good and we spent the morning driving around the beautiful Atacama desert.

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