Alien landscapes in the desert

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San Pedro de Atacama is an oasis town in the driest desert in the world. After Calama, San Pedro was an oasis to me. The town is small and full of homely buildings made from adobe. In a word it is quaint. On the downside it is very expensive and a little unreal as gringos seem to outnumber locals 2 to 1.

I arrived the day of a full moon and naturally decided to head to the Valle de Lunar that afternoon. I took a tour due to limited time (i was rushing around like a blue arsed fly) and we walked through an amazing landscape of rock, sand and a multitude of minerals. In a narrow spot we stopped to listen to the rocks cracking around and above us, a very strange experience and slightly unnerving. After running down an enormous sand dune we had a view of some sandboarders poodling down behind us - a totally pointless activity as far as i´m concerned. We got to the Lunar valley about 45 mins before sunset and with a couple others i walked across the crest of a sand dune for a km or so to climb a rock which gave a full panorama of the surrounding landscape, and what an amazing landscape with multicoloured rocks jutting from the desert in a dreamscape of forms (photos to follow). At sunset many of these forms glow red. On our day the sunset had a yellow light and the falling sun cast an unusual hue accross the lanscape, similar to a solar eclipse. It was an amazing place and back in san pedro a few of us went star gazing with a few drinks that night. The night sky is incredible, and the moon rose massive to cast it´s blanket or reflected light across the desert landscape. The moon and some constellations are upside down, down here.

...the sunset had a yellow light and the falling sun cast an unusual hue accross the lanscape

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The next morning i was off to Bolivia to see multicoloured lakes and the largest salt flats in the world... with a sore head.