San Pedro de Atacama and the way home

I will keep the last post short on text but the pictures will hopefully tell you the story!

San Pedro de Atacama is a small but very touristy desert town in the North of Chile. The town is full of tour offices with all the different tours to see the beautiful desert landscapes, oddities like little round lakes in the middle of nowhere, sandboarding, horseback riding, stargazing, geysirs...The thing in SPDA is to do tours, and many of them. We had about 4 days and we chose the most interesting things for us: sandboarding and night sky observing with Lee, Nick, Kristin and Sarah, swimming in the salt lake that is even saltier than the Dead Sea and horseback riding.

Sandboarding was great fun but hard work again (walking up the dunes in the scorching sun). This time at least we had proper snowboards with bindings and all, unlike in Brazil. After some 5 times of hiking up and riding down (like the wind!) we were done and enjoyed a beautiful sunset on a hill top with pisco sours and crisps. Perfecto!

Getting ready for the sandboarding

Nick and his board

The cover of the Sandboarding magazine

Tired riders

Beautiful, happy, exhausted and sandy Kristin

Our excellent group

Sand all over the place/face

Pretty valley

Sketchy edge

Pisco sour cheers

Inka "Flash" Holopainen ;)

Chris and the jump

In the evening at 22.00 after showering all that sand off we headed to a meteorite museum next to our hostel. The museum was established by a young Belgium guy who was extremely excited about these space rocks, telling us stories about them and showing amazing pieces that he had found himself. Really inspiring! After the museum we went to our Belgium guide's backyard and started learning about the use of telescopes. We set off to find different stars and planets with these delicate but powerful machines. Wow! It was so incredible, all of the stars and planets but especially Saturn!!! We saw, with our own eyes the rings of Saturn. I could truly become a space nerd! Only problem was that it was impossibly cold and in the end everyone was freezing. The tour was supposed to end at 1.00 am but only at 2.30 am we started heading home :D

Happy space fans

Super telescope and our super guide

Bonfire eve

We had a day when we did absolutely nothing. And then a day with horseback riding in the nice landscapes, actually next to the only river around, a kind of an oasis in the middle of the desert. My horse was the type to be in the lead, all the time and no other horse was allowed to pass. Chris (or his horse to be exact) tried to overtake a few times but mine would notice quickly and immediately started running in front. It was nice to be riding after a loong time and the best part, as always, was the galloping! One feels so extremely cool galloping through those sandy roads although I can imagine that to an outside observer it looks more like a silly westerner jumping uncontrollably up and down on a big horse's back haha.



Helmets!

I should probably always wear a helmet









Riding in the river







Milkshakes and relaxing afterwards

The same day in the afternoon we hopped on a tour to the salt lake where we got to try swimming aka floating on the "Dead sea of Chile"! It felt incredibly strange. One had to be careful not to get any of the water into the mouth or the eyes. All the little wounds would also burn nicely. After a short while in the cold pond we tried to shower the layer of salt off but it was trickier than I thought. One could also try to get rid of it in the next little round lake where we headed afterwards but I was too cold for that. Chris jumped in happily and soon we continued again to the closest salt flats with some water on top. This created an impressive sight with reflections of the mountains and the setting sun.

Salty lake

Perfect beach in the middle of the desert

Sticky stuff



JUMP

Saltflats and water





Double Chris



Happy SPDA fans

Triple sun



Next day we hopped in a bus towards Salta and it took the whole day. We slept one night in a nice hostel in the center and continued with a plane to our dear Buenos Aires in the morning. In BA we had not planned much to do: mostly we walked around and did some last minute shopping, took care of some boring internet business and such. We did go to check out the bouldering gym (http://www.caba.org.ar/) in the center and wow it was quite nice! Very simple, but it did have some marked routes, and the people were great: helpful and social, like back home in the cave ;) One worker had a laser pointer and he was showing us always the next hold with that (so smart! So much easier than the constant "ööö there's a yellow jug, on the right, kind of round, ööö it's like right there, next to your nose..") I felt surprisingly strong even though I knew I wouldn't be climbing very hard back home. The thought made me sad but I decided to start training tough when back to get my strength back to the same level as it was before the trip. Motivational climbs in BA, I would say.

We also had the pleasure to meet our friends Julio and Romina and their newborn son Dante! Dante was only 5 days old which made him probably the tiniest baby I've seen so far. It was wonderful to meet them and hear about their happiness. Afterwards we enjoyed dinner with other wonderful people, Elina and Gonzalo whom we met for the first time 4 months earlier, in BA. It really is a shame that we live so far apart but I have to say I was incredibly lucky to meet them and I'm sure to see them again.

And then it was time to go home. The flight did a brief stop in London and soon we were in Helsinki, the time in the air felt like it was flying by so fast (haha). My dear mother was there to pick us up and happily we headed home. Home sweet home!

Travelling is adventure is <3 br="">

Salt flats of Uyuni

After a super bumpy but otherwise surprisingly comfortable ride from La Paz to Uyuni we were in a hurry to contact our tour operator not to miss our spots on our salt flat tour! 8.30 am we were supposed to be at the office to register but the bus was late and 8.30 precisely we were at the bus terminal. Helpful bus company called for us and soon we were picked up by Red Planet employee.

There were about 20 tourists and we were divided into 4 jeeps; 2 jeeps, one guide. Soon we noticed that we were the unlucky ones with our guide, Evert (?). He did speak English but he was not at all interested in his job, I had the feeling from the first moment that he couldn't wait to get rid of us. The other group had a nice guide who actually spend time with the group, voluntarily, even at dinners and such when Evert was nowhere to be found. Actually, Evert was never there when we needed him and we had to hear the itinerary from the other table usually. Great.

Also, since we were divided into two jeeps, we were supposed to always stop together so the guide could tell the stuff also to the people in the other car. This hardly ever happened and the people in the other car were guided by the driver who spoke no English...not exactly fair now, was it?

Anyway, now that I started off with complaining, I'll continue with the merrier part. Our nice group consisted of a great Slovak couple: Viki and Andrej, Sarah from Canada and in the other car were three Chinese guys living in Brazil and a group of friends: Lee from Australia, Nick and Kristin from the States. The other people from the other two jeeps we didn't get to know so much unfortunately.

We started our tour with a short ride and then a stop to a train graveyard: an area full of rusty trains, locomotives from the richer times of Uyuni. Apparently the thing here was to climb on those train wrecks and take pictures, millions of pictures.









Pictures, that's what the whole tour was all about, we soon figured. Driving from one spot to another and taking pictures, with hundreds of other tourists: first of you on train carcasses, then of you and Dakar Rally salt statue, then of you and a hotel made of salt, of you and your friends on the salt flat making funny poses with weird perspectives, then of you on an "island" with some cactae (there we could also walk a little!) and then of you and the sunset on the salt flats. After all this picture taking and posing we made it to our first night's accommodation in a basic hotel that was made of salt, at least partly. We got a spacey private room with a bathroom and were happy with it! And the dinner was nice, we got to slowly know also the other great part of our group from the other jeep.





































Evert's way of handling the morning wasn't exactly spot on. We were supposed to have breakfast at 7.00 am but since the other group was about 30-60 min ahead of us, we had to sit down to a table with no utensils (or used ones) and a plate of cold scrambled eggs. The other group had apparently taken whatever they were missing from our table. When I asked Evert for knives and forks to eat eggs with, he brought me a knife. I asked again for a fork, explaining that eating eggs with a knife only is difficult and I got a response of sighing and eye rolling, like I was being difficult. Of course everyone else was missing these too so Chris went after Evert to the kitchen for some more utensils. Everts response: "You have already". Ehm, nope. Same strange behaviour would continue when asking for milk powder or more hot water or anything really. Frustrating.

After the eventually successfull breakfast we hopped in the car and drove all day with short breaks for more picture taking and lunch. It was really a long day with a lot of sitting in a car but at least the views were nice, very similar to Iceland with colorful mountains and weird rock formations, volcanoes and in the end of the day, geysirs! Walking in the geysir area was an experience. The geysirs and bubbling mudholes we had seen before but in Iceland they were fenced off. In Bolivia no fences were needed. At some point we came to a pretty wet looking pothole the guide goes: "Wow, this is a new one, it wasn't here last week!". What now!? After that I went back in the car, I didn't feel too safe walking next to bubbling 300 celcius mud when the ground could break anytime :D































Our second night's hotel was very very basic which generally I wouldn't mind but with food poisoning that hit half of the group, two toilets for 20-30 people and no running water, whatsoever, it was somewhat inconvenient. Chris fell asleep immediately on arrival, he was feverish and suffering from stomach ache. A Hungarian girl puked in front of the main door and the toilets were pretty nasty after half an hour from arrival. The guides blamed the altitude (we were at 4400 m) but we knew better: we had just come dowm from over 6000 meters :D Also, our driver was sick. I really doupted the altitude explanation.













Those who were able still enjoyed dinner and headed to the thermal pool afterwards, others went to suffer in their beds. Evert was nowhere to be seen since we arrived and the next time I saw him was in the morning when he was shouting: "Let's go, vamos, hurry up". We of course had no idea about the schedule of the day so hurrying us wasn't exactly fair. I was so annoyed with Evert.







Not all was bad on the tour eventhough one might get this perception from this blog post (sorry :D ) I enjoyed the time with our group and we saw beautiful landscapes, lakes with flamingoes, and the salt flats which I hadn't seen before. We were missing a bit more action, better guide and of course the food poisoning didn't exactly help but there were as I said, things we liked too.

On the third day after visiting a "Green lake" (that wasn't green at all :) ) We were dropped of at the border of Chile with Chris, Sarah, Lee, Nick and Kristin where we found a bus that took us to San Pedro de Atacama. Good bye Bolivia, it was a pleasure!