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After waiting on the bus at the border for ages, we made the short journey downhill to San Pedro de Atacama, a small hippy town in the middle of the dessert. The wait at immigration in San Pedro to get our entrance stamps for Chile was pretty long and tedious but fairly painless otherwise.
We grabbed a giant empanada in town for lunch before making our way to the hostel which was about 1km out of town but about half the ridiculous price of accommodation in town. After arriving we had a long awaited shower and took advantage of our first WiFi access for a while.
In the afternoon we went in search of the office of a company that does star gazing, San Pedro is one of the best places in the world to do this, and a few places offer tours. After some roaming we were unable to find the office of the place we wanted, so we just had a coffee and watched at the hippies for the afternoon.
The next day, the owner of our hostel had recommended another star gazing company so we went to see what they had on offer. Unfortunately they weren't running any tours in English for the rest of our stay there, and we had discovered other companies (for star gazing or any tour at all really) was completely overpriced.
When we arrived back to the hostel we had a bit of a disagreement with the owner. She had accepted our online reservation, but then emailed and said the room we booked wasn't available, but that she had a cheaper room available if we wanted it. After a lot of back and forth due to the cost of cancelling a reservation, we had agreed with her that she would refund us the difference between the two rooms in cash. In the end she only gave us US$20 instead of US$24, as she decided that she should keep the other US$4 to cover her cost to the booking website.
She kept claiming she didn't understand why she needed to pay us more, even after we wrote it all out for her, so we agreed that we would contact the booking site to resolve it, but half an hour later she knocked on our door and told us to leave! She ended up cancelling the whole booking, so we got almost all our money back, plus we kept the US$20 she had given us, but we now had no accommodation for the rest of our stay in San Pedro.
We spent the next few hours asking hostels if they had rooms. Some did but wanted over US$100 a night. We went to a café and had a coffee to use their WiFi, which worked for about 5 minutes then stopped. We continued on asking a few more places, and had almost given up when we finally found somewhere. It was well over what we wanted to spend but still less than most places so we decided to stay there. Unfortunately we had wasted most of a day. We were really starting to dislike San Pedro now!
The next day was Fergus' birthday. Now that we were paying twice as much for accommodation we really couldn't justify spending another small fortune on any activities, so we spent the day walking out to some ruins about 3km from town, called El Pukara de Quitor.
There was one initial climb up a hill with scattered ruins of houses and terraces, which didn't take too long, then another climb up a rocky hill to a viewpoint at the top. It was a hot climb but the view from the top was pretty cool. In front of us was a strange landscape with a horseshoe shaped crevice, riddled with folds and ridges. We hadn't seen anything like it and couldn't for the life of us work out how it might have formed. Beyond this was really just lots of desert!
After the walk back to town we decided we had earned the right to celebrate Fergus' Birthday over a few beers. There was only really one bar in town so we sat there for a few hours amongst the local alcoholics. The bar was a small, dark place with about 15 small tables, and walls covered in posters of mostly 80's rock stars and a ceiling covered in various soccer jerseys.
We noticed a few locals were having their beers with a salted rim and about an inch of lime juice in the bottom, so we asked for the same to be done with our glasses. Big mistake! Salty beer, surprisingly, is not tasty. Maybe it's an acquired taste.
Once we were sufficiently refreshed, we returned to our hostel and prepared ourselves for a fancy dinner out. We chose a restaurant from trip advisor and had a really nice dinner and a really nice dessert.
Lindsay made a secret bathroom trip to ask the waitress to pop a candle in Fergus' dessert, which she happily obliged, and also got the band to play happy birthday which they did in both Spanish and English versions. Much to Fergus' embarrassment! The band were actually just there to play a few songs to spruik their "album", and after their special effort we felt we should purchase it.
The next day it was time to move on. We made our way to the bus station bound for the coast and La Serena.
LAPFWT
- comments
Derry So the hippies in San Pedro charge you a lot of money to go outside and lie on your back and stare at the sky?