Saturday afternoon, we grabbed a bus to Calama leaving at 3:30pm.  It was another 20-hour bus ride, so Lauren and I settled in, reading and napping (respectively).

Around 11pm that night, the bus stopped.  And waited.  And waited.  I managed to wake up and Lauren informed me that we hadn’t moved for 45 minutes.  We finally asked the conductor what was wrong, but he blabbed at us in Spanish going 90 words-per-minute.  We asked him to repeat, which he did, just as fast.

Finally, another passenger told us that the bus was broken and we’d have to change buses.  We did, but when we woke up in the morning, we realized we were at least 3 hours behind schedule based on the cities we were passing through.  Our 20-hour bus ride had become a 24-hour bus ride, and while we certainly have taken longer bus rides, the mind trip of thinking we’d be out of the cramped seats by then took its toll

By the time we arrived in Calama, we decided to scrap our plans of jumping on the next 2 hour bus ride to San Pedro and just settle into Calama for the evening.

Sometime during the last hour of the bus ride, I had started to develop a rash.  Little itchy sores popped up on my ear and right arm. 

Lauren, ever the hypochondriac, demanded that we go to the hospital immediately.   (Calama was the last city we would see with a hospital for a while.)  I begged off, first saying we should just wait and finally agreeing only to go to a clinic. 

When we asked the woman at our hostel about a clinic, she reminded us that it was Sunday — everthing was closed.  And the next day was a national holiday.

“That’s it,” Lauren said, “We’re going to the hospital.”

Wisely, the woman suggested that we go to a pharmacy instead.  Which we did.  Right after looking up the word for rash in Spanish (la erupcion cutanea).

At the pharmacy, Lauren started explaining the issue, and the clerk interrupted her, saying it was an allergy probably because of the climate change.  We kept asking questions but not entirely understanding her responses, so she sent out the pharmacist who repeated one word over and over: allergia (allergy).  He told me to take an antihistamine so we went back to our hostel and I took some Benedryl, feeling a little foolish but glad we hadn’t run off to the hospital.

Calama was mostly a mining town, with few tourists and even less to do. Lauren and I spent our time catching up on internet tasks before heading off to a bar that night, where the locals stared at us and we watched bad American music videos.

The next morning, we slept in before catching a mid-day bus to San Pedro de Atacama, our destination.

Atacama is the driest desert in the world. (A tour guide would later tell us that it was dry 366 days a year, but I’m still not sure if that was an intentional statement or just a mistranslation.)  It’s also home of the Valley of the Moon, a region of the desert famous for its resemblance to the moon and for conspiracy theories that the U.S. government actually filmed the “moon landing” there instead of on the moon.  We were also gaining altitude — the city of San Pedro is over 6,700 feet about sea level.

Getting on the same bus as us were two Brits, Nick and Gemma.  They had come back to Calama from San Pedro for the day because the ATMs in San Pedro were out of money and they were broke.  On the way to San Pedro, they told us about the great tours they had been to, seeing the Valley of the Moon and Valley of the Dead, a tour to some geyers, and a trip to an astronomer’s house to see planets through high-powered telescopes in a way that can’t be viewed from the northern hemisphere.

They also gave us tips on hostels.  When we got off the bus, we said goodbye and headed to a cheaper hostel they had been staying a few nights before.  They left it because the local dogs barked all night.  Lauren and I, ever the New Yorkers, figured we could sleep through anything.

At the hostel, the woman there told us the rooms weren’t $8 per night each, like the Brits told us, but were $10 per night.  Lauren told her that our friends were here just a few nights ago and they had only paid $8 per night.

“Depends on the people,” she responded in Spanish.  We’re still not sure if she meant the number of people in the hostel or if she was just being outright rude, but we left.  We headed over to the new hostel the Brits were staying at, the Eden, which was $10 per night and had hot water (unlike the supposedly cheaper one). 

There, we discovered a cute “garden” with several hammocks and places to sit, eat and write.  The owner confirmed it was $10 per night and we were sold immediately.

After leaving our stuff in our room, we headed out to book the trips the Brits told us about.  They sold us on them so well that we agreed to break our budget and sign up for all of the trips — two with a company called Atacama Connections and another with the office that handles only the astronomy tour.

We found the town of San Pedro to be really cute, all dirt roads and easily walkable (probably less than a mile wide).  The streets were lined with nothing but tour agencies, shops selling warm clothing made of Alpaca and cute restaurants that had set menus including a soup, a main course, and a desert (and sometimes wine). 

The set menus, however, were usually out of our price-range, generally between $8-10 for one meal — more than Lauren and I often pay for a whole day of food.  But we couldn’t resist the restaurants, so we settled on one that had vegetable soup, chicken with a paprika sauce and risotto with mushroom and cheese sauce — and even more importantly, it had fireplaces (the temperature dropped rapidly after sunset).

We chose seats right by a fireplace and ordered our one meal to be split between the two of us.  The fireplace ended up being the bane of our evening, with waiters coming by and shoving in scraps of wood, sometimes with rusty nails still sticking out of them.  The bigger problem was that they’d leave the wood half sticking out of the fireplace because the pieces were too big to fit in, and they never came back to check on it.  Several times during our meal, chunks of burning wood would fall out of the fireplace and burn on the brick tiled floor until we could get a waiter’s attention.

The food was, of course, amazing, although we did have to send the chicken back because it wasn’t fully cooked the first time.  But I won’t go on about it, because I’m trying to keep our food ranting to a minimum.

The next morning was an errand morning but at 3pm, we headed to the Atacama Connections office to wait for the tour group to assemble.  Around 3:15, we were still the only ones there, and our tour guide came in and sat down with us.

“Look, girls,” he started, “there are really bad winds today.  You can’t really feel them here but they’re up to 60 kilometers per hour and out there in the desert, it’s a sandstorm.”

We had noticed the winds and nodded.  He continued talking, saying the we were likely not to be able to see anything and at one point he even used the word “dangerous.”

Lauren and I had no problem putting the tour off to another day and told the tour guide so, but he suddenly started changing his tune, saying that maybe it wasn’t so bad and we would give it another five minutes.

In those few minutes, two more couples came in and suddenly the tour guide started herding us to a van.

“But I thought you said it was dangerous,” Lauren asked.

“Dangerous?” one of the other women piped up.  She was a Spanish woman named Katia, and we would later run into her and her Irish friend Brendan over and over again.

The tour guide denied that it was dangerous, though, insisting that he’d take another route and without any more time for questions, we were into the van and headed out of the city.  Lauren and I were unhappy but we felt we couldn’t fight anymore and reluctantly went along.  We later realized the whole “dangerous” rouse was because he didn’t want to take just the two of us, if no one else showed up for the tour.

Twenty minutes out of the city, the van pulled off of the main road and drove down a dirt road, stopping a few hundred feet from a cliff.  The cliff gave us a great view of the desert, with mountains shooting up from the base.  Lauren and I snapped as many pictures as we could but intense winds pounded us; and I think the sand prevented our shots from coming out as clear as they could have.  And we didn’t want to get too close to the edge, as there was no fence to stop someone from falling off the cliff. 

The next stop was Valley of the Dead (”Valle de Muerte”), which our tour guide told us was misnamed.  Some astronomers had said it looked like Mars but Mars sounded like Muerte to the locals and the name stuck.

We started walking down a large hill, surrounded by red and orange jagged rocks, alternating with enormous sand dunes that were hundreds of feet high.  Lauren and I would stop to take photos, but our tour guide kept walking non-stop, probably to get out of the wind.

We tried to catch up, but between the winds, the altitude and trying to take photos and video, we fell further and further behind.  At one point, in an effort to catch up, Lauren accidentally dropped the video camera, which kept working, at least for the time being.

Towards the end of the walk through the Valley of the Dead, we ran into the Brits again, who had biked out to try their hand at sandboarding (like snowboarding but with sand).  We talked with them for a bit before being herded down one last path, past some beautiful rock formations that we barely had any time to photograph and into the van.

The next stop was Valley of the Moon.  After paying the entrance fee, our tour guide escorted us into some caves made entirely from salt.  The winding trail got rougher and darker until we were inside a cave with absolutely no light.  Some people in the group refused to enter the last cave and so the tour guide stopped, explaining that we were in the lowest part of the valley.  Millions of years ago, the whole valley had been underwater, and the water had carved these caves.  As the water evaporated, the salt rose (that’s what he said, rose…) and made the enormous salt formations we saw everywhere.  Everything that we were surrounded by was salt, and if you got the walls wet, you could see they were slightly transparent.

We left the caves and went to a curved wall where our tour guide had us sit down. 

“Be completely silent,” he told us. 

We did, and suddenly we started hearing snaps and pops coming from around us.  It was the salt.  After being exposed to heat all day, the tour guide explained, the salt expanded.  But now that it was getting colder, the pops we were hearing was the sound of salt contracting.

We jumped back into the van to go to our last spot for the day — a cliff where we would watch the sunset. Unfortunately, this time, the van wasn’t driving up to the cliff.  We were dropped us off at the bottom and we would have to hike up.

On one side was rocky cliffs, and on the other was an enormous sand dune that we recognized from the cover of the book Vagabonding by Rolf Potts.

The hike didn’t look too hard.  But that was before we started walking, realizing that with every step we took forward, the sand made us slip back a half a step.  At most, I could gain maybe 6-8 inches with each step.  Worse, Lauren and I were really starting to feel the altitude — our hearts were pounding and I was gasping for air like I was running a marathon.

By the time we reached an intermediate point, we were really struggling.  The guide asked us if we wanted to take the “soft” way, hiking on rocks, or the “hard” way, across much more sand and up a steeper hill.  He took one look at us and said we’d be taking the soft way.

By the time we reached an intermediate point, we were really struggling.  The guide asked us if we wanted to take the “soft” way, hiking on rocks, or the “hard” way, across much more sand and up a steeper hill.  He took one look at us and said we’d be taking the soft way.At the top, we had amazing views of the Valley of the Moon as well as volcanoes in the far distance.  We could also see a sandstorm in the distance that was blocking our view of several more mountains.  Lauren and I absorbed the views, having more than half an hour before the sunset (what was all the rush about?) to take photos and relax and enjoy the view.

As soon as the sun set, it started getting cold and we headed back to San Pedro.  Lauren and I went back to our hostel to clean up, since we were covered in sand up to our ears, before heading out for an early evening.  The next morning we were heading to see the geysers and we’d have to be ready to go by 4am.