Backpacker = typical tourist?

May 29

Backpacker = typical tourist?
Can that even be true?!?!?

If someone had equated backpackers and typical selfie stick tourists a few months ago, I would have instantly declared them insane.

The budget of backpackers and regular 3-week tourists is as different as night and day...

Well, if I'm completely honest... for 3 days, we became bus-stop-get-out-take-a-photo-get-in-and-go-on tourists. 😅

How did it come to this?

Well, listen closely.

Sarah and I had already inquired at various agencies on the first day.
I still can't quite comprehend how speaking Spanish for 2 hours can advance you...

By the evening, a favorite had more or less emerged. But as it so often happens, plans are thrown out the window faster than you can make them.
So it happened (slowly, I'm becoming a storyteller) that a better offer appeared right in front of us the next morning.

4 tours for 65,000 pesos (90 €). It's not cheap, but it's the best we could find in San Pedro.
By coincidence, the first tour was in the afternoon. So we had some time to stroll around.

I noticed that almost all the shops had very colorful and vibrant items. I had already heard that the north had a very colorful culture, but this exceeded my expectations.

Time passed faster than we thought, and soon we were sitting in the tour bus, eagerly listening to our guides Yaviera and Don Feli (the driver).

Right from the start, both of them seemed very friendly, open-minded, and not interested in quickly feeding us tourists with some information.

We made several stops at various places in Valle de la Luna. The rock formations were gigantic.
Occasionally, we heard a cracking sound. Somewhat frightening, but Yaviera explained to us that this was due to the high salt content in the rocks.
With particularly strong sunlight, the salt expands, and at night it contracts again.

Somehow, this place already had something reminiscent of a lunar landscape. Barren, branching ravines that led deeper into the valley, and small or large craters.

We made the last stop on a small plain, where we were supposed to watch the sunset. However, the sun only set behind a quite tall mountain.

Somewhat disappointed, we had already resigned ourselves to the end of the tour, but that wasn't all.

The sun had a great effect that you couldn't see until this point.
Suddenly, the mountain range above San Pedro began to glow in various shades of red.

If you looked away for 5 minutes, the view had already changed a bit.

But the highlight was yet to come.

The first moonrise of my life!

We could watch as the moon slowly rose above the mountain peaks.
At first, only as a weak light, but then in its full size.

The first moonrise of my life in the driest desert in the world!