Tag 98: San Pedro

After a two-hour flight, we arrived in Calama yesterday morning around 8:30 am. From here, we directly took a bus for another 1.5 hours to San Pedro de Atacama. San Pedro is a small town in the middle of the desert and a popular destination for backpackers, evident by the huge selection of souvenirs and tours. Otherwise, San Pedro is very dry and dusty, very hot during the day and very cold at night, typical desert weather. Our hostel is very basic but cheap, and the people are nice. Overall, we really like it here. The past two days, we spent gathering information about the three-day tour to Uyuni and other tours in San Pedro. Ultimately, we spent most of our time going from agency to agency because there are about 30 agencies in this small town, all offering the same tours. We decided on two tours. One of them is an astronomical tour, which we started at 8:30 pm tonight. We were taken out of the town in a small bus with a group of 10 people to a small private property, where we were introduced to the universe in a small enclosed area, along with coffee, tea, and cookies, and shown a range of stars and planets through four different telescopes. The whole tour lasted about three hours and was very interesting for both of us. Here in the Atacama Desert, you can admire the largest starry road in the world at night when it's dark, including the Orion Arm and the Milky Way. Very impressed, tired, and half frozen, we then returned to the hostel, where we ran into our friend Tobias after some time.