San Pedro de Atacama: a desert marvel

I've had a pretty busy week here in Santiago with an exam, paper, and of course trip planning (more on that later), so I'm sorry I'm just getting around to my updates. I spent the past weekend in San Pedro de Atacama, a tourist oasis in Northern Chile, with 3 other friends. Northern Chile is dominated by the Atacama Desert, the driest place in the world. Many places have not recorded any rain in recorded history! The relatively watery town of San Pedro (A booming metropolis of less than 2000 residents in the town proper. At any given time, there are thousands more tourists.) receives one sprinkling of rain a year. It is a beautiful desert town, carefully maintained so as not to become a sterilized tourist destination. The roads are all dirt (and rough!), the buildings are nearly all adobe, and I can't remember a single building that was over 1 story. Yet the truly awe-inspiring part of this area is found outside of the town. In a jam-packed weekend, we rented bikes, visiting Valle de la Muerte (Death Valley) and Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley), both incredible natural rock/sand/salt formations that are hard to comprehend. I've tried to capture the beauty in the photos above. We also rented sandboards one day (basically a snowboard) and rode down the massive sand dunes. It turned out to be easier than I expected (and easier than snowboarding), yet this doesn't mean I didn't have my fair share of wipe-outs. The most arduous part of the experience was however climbing back up the sand dunes. Climbing was made all the more difficult by the obnoxious tendency of sand to erode away every time you apply pressure! It was like putting in 3 times the effort for the distance you actually climbed.

We also took tours to Laguna Chaxa (Chaxa Lake), where we admired the Atacama Salt Flat (the 3rd largest in the world) and saw flamingos naturally inhabiting a salt lake, Lagunas Miscanti y Miñiques (Miscanti and Miñiques Lakes), a pair of intoxicatingly deep blue lakes at over 13,000 ft, Laguna Cejar (you get the translation by now right?), where we bathed in an incredible salt lake. The lake couldn't have been more than 200 ft across but is rumored to be up to a kilometer deep. This was likely my highlight of the trip, as the high salt content made the sensation of floating high in the water seem otherworldly. The last organized tour we took left at 4:00 am, catching a van to the El Tatio geyser field 14,000 ft high in the mountains. Despite the cold (nearly 10* F), the excursion was incredible. We had a truly unique breakfast including hot chocolate and hardboiled eggs prepared in a bubbling thermal pool and after went for a dip in the volcanic hot springs nearby. Getting out was near torturous, as the outside air temperature was probably barely above freezing.

The weekend was quite a bit different from my time in Santiago. Here in the capital, finding an English speaker (at least a decent one) is very hard. A very small percentage of Chileans speak English. In the tourist mecca that is San Pedro however, every tour guide spoke English. We did however always chose to conduct the tours in Spanish of course. It was also incredible to see how much the whole area is dependent upon tourism. At least 90% of the buildings you see in the town are hostels, restaurants, or tour agencies. On our tours we made small detours into towns with populations between 4 and 500, most of which greatly relied on tourism as a way of life. Thankfully, I found this didn't really sterilize the experience as much as I had expected. The town management has really done a great job of preserving the desert outpost feel.

San Pedro also allowed me an opportunity to fine tune my cooking skills. Despite the fact that about 15 of my friends from Notre Dame and Marquette were in San Pedro this weekend, I split off with 3 friends to make the planning and mobility easier. Despite curring myself ourselves off from many of our friends, I definitely found I prefer the smaller group experience. It simplifies all logistics and makes it a lot easier to meet other people. I did much of the cooking for the weekend. I kept it simple with pasta, rice, canned veggies, canned tuna, and instant oatmeal (and of course my trusty jar of peanut butter which I have found is invaluable as an easy breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack option on weekend trips), but the food turned out great, probably in large part because of the appetites we worked up during the days. Three things I learned from the cooking: 1)Rice cooks very slow, all the slower when you're starving, 2)1 kg of rice is an absurd amount of food for 4 people, especially when 2 of them are girls, and 3)Cooking isn't that bad, and can actually be kind of enjoyable (No this doesn't mean I'll cook every night back home mom!).

A couple last thoughts. My homework load here in Chile is so little that I find I spend more time every night planning trips, writing this blog, or even sorting through pictures than I actually do studying. This doesn't even consider my 1 hour commute to and from school every day or the time I spend with family/friends. It really is a nice work/leisure balance that I'll miss when I get back to ND. Also, much to my real mom and dad's dismay, in returning to Santiago from San Pedro, I actually had the sensation I was returning home! Kinda crazy seeing as I've only spent 4 months here, but a nice reflection. I guess Minnesota now has to compete with Notre Dame and Santiago for my home (just joking mom, please allow me to come back home...). Lastly, with summer arriving here, I've seen my brothers wearing the Minnesota Twins jersey/t-shirts I brought them as gifts. It's great to see, and they love them, even though they have no idea who Joe Mauer or Justin Morneau are (baseball isn't even a consideration here, completely supplanted by soccer, and to lesser extents tennis and basketball).

On to the last 3 weeks of classes before summer vacation! Can't wait to travel around the South and to show my family around Chile.