Valle de la Luna and Laguna Baltinache

Today we went to Valle de la Luna - Moon Valley first. It is called that because it reminds us of the images of the lunar surface. After a short briefing at the main entrance, we started. At the first stop there were two trekking routes to choose from. One route of 30 minutes and the second one hour. We decided on the shorter route. We walked through sand up a hill, past black sand dunes and always had an amazing view of the rock formations. Some rock edges glowed blue, green and white in the sunlight. That looked crazy. It was a “look here and look there” tour. Neither of us expected it to be so beautiful. We were actually rather skeptical beforehand as to whether we should even go to Valle de la Luna :-)! We took all the stops and were very satisfied. Luckily we got there relatively early, so we were finished with the Valle de la Luna in the midday heat.

We went to the salt Laguna Baltinache. The journey there was again a nightmare for over 25 km. These gravel roads are just awesome! There were also an endless number of broken car tires on the “gravel edge”! I was afraid that a tire would burst on us in the middle of nowhere. Luckily it didn't happen. But the exertion of the journey was definitely worth it. What can I write... the view from the various lagoons was WORLD, FANTASTIC, GREAT, etc. :-). The first salt laguna was reached via a long wooden footbridge. This was suitable for swimming. We were in the water in no time, okay... well I was in the water in no time. With Daniela it “sometimes” takes a little longer (water too cold) :-). It was incredible the buoyancy the salt caused. You could have read a book. It was really difficult to push your legs down in the water. We lay on our backs for a while and let ourselves drift. Of course we did a little nonsense and then we got out. We also looked at the other lagoons. However, swimming in these was forbidden.

Then we went back and yes, exactly the same..... slope. Wow, I was so happy when we finally had asphalt under our tires again. We went back to Calama to an airport hotel. We're spending one night here because we're flying on to Buenos Aires tomorrow, ole!

We had to bring the rental car back to the airport by 8:30 p.m. today. We managed that really well. We wanted to walk the short distance back to the hotel in the evening sun. Daniela really had a Top Gun feeling as we walked towards the sunset right next to the runway :-) Hmmm, the sun went down quickly, very quickly... and it was already dusk. But we weren't afraid because there was a busy road right next to us. Then a car with a woman stopped next to us and she asked us where we were going. It's very dangerous here :-(! Oops, okay, we want to go to our hotel over there. She immediately said, no, you can't go any further, I'll drive you there. It's no longer safe on the streets at this time. We looked at us and we were sitting in the woman's car. She took us to the hotel entrance and didn't even want anything in return. She was happy that she was allowed to drive us safely to the hotel. Phew, that was really nice of us the woman and we are now asking ourselves whether we were too naive or simply still in the San Pedro feeling.

Hmmmm, ..... Good night and best wishes from Calama... :-)