Day 20 - San Pedro de Atacama / Calama

The last day in the Atacama Desert and the return journey to Calama was approaching. After a good night's sleep and a late breakfast, we had to return the Hilux and finally get rid of our unnecessary clothes. We headed to the Chilean post office where the elderly man at the counter did his best to help us fill out the customs forms, not understanding a word of English.

After 30 minutes, it looked quite promising what he was producing, and we even got a discount. Let's see when the package arrives back home, but at least our backpacks are much lighter now.

We strolled around the town, had coffee, and then made our way to the "Valle de la Muerte" or the "Death Valley." Like in the other canyons, there were many impressive rock and sand formations, as well as a huge sand dune that can be boarded with a sandboard. However, we wanted to minimize the risk of injuries and just walked to a viewpoint.

In the afternoon, we had to make our way back to Calama and return the other (small) rental car. Unfortunately, we couldn't find a rental car station directly in San Pedro in advance through the known portals, so we had to resort to the station at the airport in Calama. However, Calama is absolutely not worth seeing, and the crime rate there is quite high. The largest copper mine in the world is located in the immediate vicinity of the city, for which a town had to give way, and the residents were resettled to Calama in 2004.

However, our bus to Salta (Argentina) departed from there, so we had to stay one night. In hindsight, we could have done all of that directly from San Pedro, but we didn't know that beforehand - lesson learned.

Returning the rental car went smoothly this time as well. We took a taxi to the Ibis Hotel, which was only 500m from the bus terminal. The lady at the check-in warned us not to leave the hotel at night and to take a taxi (the bus departure was at 6 am) for the 500m to the terminal. We took such advice seriously, and at a cost of around 2.00€, we didn't want to take any risks. We stocked up on some food for the journey the next day at the huge supermarket across the street and used the hotel's restaurant for dinner. As we both probably didn't tolerate the altitude or the sun very well, there was no real sleep that night.