San Pedro de Atacama y Antofagasta

San Pedro is, unsurprisingly, in the middle of the Atacama desert. One wonders who put it there. [Though we did see lots of mines in the desert, so that probably explains it.] One small walk through town makes it clear that San Pedro is a tourist town and not much else. Among the few dozen hostals and hotels, you can find restaurants, tour operators, and artisan shops. There are some mini-markets too. And that's it. Go a few blocks in any direction, and you're in the middle of the driest desert in the world. Nice place. Moreover, it's really weird to see Christmas decorations while you're sweating and walking around the desert.

Actually San Pedro was kind of a cute little town. The square has whitewashed buildings around it and is populated by peppercorn trees. The restaurants seemed pretty good (we only went to one and cooked the rest of the time) and some of the hostals were very nice looking. You can rent bikes or get a lesson on sandboarding (like snowboarding, only with sand). However it is the desert, and many of the streets are dirt (read: dust). From noon to about 5pm it's brutally hot, and outside those hours it's just normally hot until it gets dark and kind of cold. Since we had just left the desert in Bolivia, we weren't too keen on seeing more of it, which leaves one with not much to do in San Pedro.

We stayed at Hostal Juriques, due to its pricepoint of "cheaper than everywhere else in town without being a dorm". The rooms had a thick layer of dust, blown in from the gravel/dirt courtyard, and the kitchen was abysmal. Hilary spent the first day cleaning it so we could cook without picking up a tropical disease. The kitchen was also not stocked with things like dish soap or matches (for the gas range), and the bathrooms ran out of toilet paper. A few of these things were eventually remedied. So, not the greatest place.

We went one night to the local "observatory", which is some guy's house. He's actually a Canadian astronomer and has some very nice telescopes. The Atacama has something like 320 clear nights a year, so of course we got some low cloud cover the night we went. Still, we got some nice views of stuff in the sky, including Jupiter with 3 moons (and a shadow!); several "famous" stars like Betelgeuse, Sirius, and the Pleiades; and several nebulae. Our favorite was the Tarantula Nebula, though it didn't look anything like a spider. Jupiter was a bit too bright to look at for long, which is kind of crazy.

Our last night in San Pedro we moved to Hostal Campo Base, a block down the street from Juriques. Wow, so nice! The room was big and not full of dust, and breakfast served by a super-nice lady was included. Too bad they were full the other 3 nights we were in town. It was open for the most important night, though, since Hil picked up an infection, had to stop in for some extra drugs at the hospital, and really needed a nice, quiet, clean place to stay the last night.

We had planned on catching an overnight bus from San Pedro to La Serena, but our travel agent muffed the tickets. [As a foreigner, you can't buy bus tickets in Chile without physically being in Chile, so we were stuck using an international agent. This is at least twice as annoying as it sounds.] So we missed out on those buses and instead got plan B: bus to Antofagasta and fly to La Serena. [You can buy plane tickets from anywhere, and the bus to Antofagasta is a short and easy trip, doesn't sell out.] So we got our bus to Antofagasta, where they don't have hostals. Instead we are in the Radisson, which is actually one of the cheaper places to stay. Wow, so nice! We've got an ocean view and can hear the waves and sea birds. Our room is gimongous. There is a bathtub. [This fact cannot be overstated.] And that's really it for Antofagasta, we've just got our one-night stand and the flight to the beach is tomorrow.