Sand dunes, geysers, volcanoes, adobe houses...amazing!

San Pedro de Atacama was awesome! We did not know what to expect after our 24 hour bus ride from Santiago. When you think desert, one imagines small little town. Which is exactly what we got. This town was an adobe sensation with dirt roads and overpriced yet delicious cuisine. Every night is a weekend night here because lets be honest...there is nothing else to do at night but enjoy a pisco sour.

On our first day we woke up at 3:30 am!!! My vote was to not go to bed at all. Anyways, we headed towards the Tocano Volcano to experience the geysers. Incredible! It looked like this huge area of land with steam coming out all over the place. The magma from the volcano heats the water to 80 degrees centigrade! Thats 176 degrees fareinheit!!! We could only go within a few feet because people have fallen into the boiling water before. Rach and I were freezing to death. It was about eight degrees below zero out! Yikes. Our guide heated the coffee with one of the geysers! Using all of your resources is very important! Haha. Anyways, the geysers were aweseme, i´d never seen anything like it.

An adobe sensation!

We also did a tour of the salars de atacama (salt flats). Its the third largest in the world...the first in Bolivia and the second...guess where? In our own backyard...good ol Utah! We saw tons of flamingos. The sunset was very picturesque...as the sun fell over the volcanoes, lagoons, and salt flats.  By the way there are 150 active volcanoes (within the Andes range) in Chile alone. That is 10% of the worlds active volcanoes. The perfect sand and mountain backdrops of San Pedro look like portraits. Incredible. We were supposed to go sand boarding but Rach got a bad case of altitude sickness. Hopefully she´ll recover before our trek to Macchu Picchu in a few days. So far all is well. Just arrived to Peru today. Breakfast was only $1.50!!! Thank God...back to the land of the cheap. San Pedro was definitely a pretty penny.