The driest desert in the world!

If it`s not one of my mates bugging me to update the blog, it`s Jen! so here I go again.

Having spent some time by the sea side, we thought it was time to do the exact opposite, and surround ourself in sand, and what better way to do so than visiting the driest desert in the world, San Pedro de Atacama. 

Arriving in the morning, we jumped on facebook and got in touch with our mate Cyrille who was in the same place, and went out for lunch with him along with our new mate Tori who followed us from La Serena (and for some reason decided I was awesome as I managed to order the three of us a bus ticket in my limited amount of Spanish, which turned out to be better than Jen`s and Tori`s combined.....De Nada).

The hostel was pretty awesome, with the sun beaming down onto the open style communal area we relaxed in the hammocks and played some table tennis until 1pm when we agreed to meet Cyrille.

Walking down the streets to lunch, the town was like something out of a Western movie, simple dirt roads lined by one story buildings....very dingy but quite cool at the same time. Grabbing lunch we all ordered some kind of burger (annoyingly there were no chips on offer and even more annoyingly...no beer!) and the other three burgers came out all looking delicious. Waiting on mine I was getting even more hungry and a little annoyed as they all sat there yamming food, but eventually mine came out which turned out to be two pathetically small patties on a plate with no bun, and a bit of salad on the side. Now when you order something described as "two hamberguesas and salad" you`d expect an actual burger to come out! With Jen taking pity on me she cut her massive awesome looking burger in half and i gave her half of my stuff so we both had a kind of burger chicken thing cross over which ended up being pretty nice. 

After that mishap of a lunch we were keen to book into one of two of the main activities to do here in San Pedro....sandboarding! (the other being star gazing as its one of the best places in the world to do this).

This sandboarding would turn out to be a little different to the kind of sandboarding that we had expected as fortunately we had timed our trip alongside a full moon. Meaning instead of the normal afternoon sandboarding, we would go at midnight lit by the full moon. You can`t turn down an experience like that! Unfortunately Tori fell ill so it was just the 3 of us (along with the randoms on the group).

After a pretty hair-raising minibus ride through the sand dunes down tiny little path things that they described as "roads" we rocked up to a massive sand dune which was in ´death valley´,where there was already our very own personal DJ blarring out music. Seeing as we were in the desert with the nearest town San Pedro being a good 30 minutes away by car, no one could hear us so we could make as much noise as we wanted!

Kitting up with music cutting through the darkness, we posed for a few photos.....

....told you we were posing!

Then we set off up the sand dune which was a right mission! We were already at altitude, just shy off 3000 metres above sea level, and with sandboard we trudged up the sand, with it giving way with each step it took an age to get up there.

Finally up there we got our feet into the foot clamp thingies and were given a few tips by the guides. However this is all we would recieve and with no practice run we were just told to do it!

No problem for our mate Cyrille who snowboards all the time in his hometown of Lyon, we watched him effortless glide down (even though he did fall over himself claiming that the two sports were entirely different). After much persuasion, Jen finally plucked up the courage to do it herself, as I was taking photos so she had to go first.......and she got all of about 3 metres. You can just about make her out here.

I wasn`t much better though but managed to slide down at least 10 metres before I wiped out (I believe thats the term right?!)

Having had a bit of a rush on our first ever sandboarding experience we had forgot that we needed to do the same walk back up the dune to go back downwards again......which I felt with the altitude but also my accummulated mass of steak and wine sitting in my belly. After taking a good five minute lie down at the top I was ready to go again.

But I used the excuse of a team photo to catch some more breath before heading back down to inevitably crash again.

And unsurprisingly, I was on the floor again, which Jen thought was hilarious as it was quite a harsh fall. As she came over to what I thought would be her helping me up, she instead unzipped my pocket to get my camera and take this shot of me trying to wriggle my way up which is pretty tricky when you`ve never had a sandboard strapped to your feet before.

Back up at the top again I caught a pretty cool photo of Jen sandboarding. No wait, no I didn`t, this is a picture of Jen stationary at the top, but it does kinda look like it`s an action shot. And at no point was Jen this good to actaully be standing up on her board....sorry Jen! (er Jack, you must of missed me that time I went down almost the whole way without falling over!)

After three walks up the dune we thought it was time for a beer courtesy of the tour guides. The only thing to mention about this photo is Cyrille`s attempt at rivalling my beard. Don`t think he achieved the awesomeness that my beard did before shaving it off.

After asking the tour guides how many times people normally took the walk up the dune and being told it was usually 6 or 7, the three of us begrudingly went up another 3 times seeing as we had only done 3 ourselves, stopping for a beer inbetween each and progressively getting worse on the sandboard as a result. It was a pretty awesome experience though, being in the desert with only a handfull of people, the fall moon in the sky and so many stars, whilst listening to some rave music.

The following day Jen and I went on an afternoon tour of the moon valley (actually lunar valley), named so because of the terrains similarity to that of the moon. It was a surreal place, and kinda did look like the moon I guess (not that I`ve ever been) but more importantly we could see the sand dune in the picture below that we had to trek up with boards the night before.....yeah, that big thing on the left!

There was also a overhanging ledge over the valley which everyone stopped for a pic on. Me and Jen have never edged into a position so slowly (no jokes please) with a massive drop beneath us.

Next up on the tour was a salt cave in the valley where we would have to be back on our hands and knees to get through.

Brought back memories of Ilha Grande, but no awesome views whilst snorkeling at the end of this cave.

However, with a much smaller ledge of about a metre outside the cave, I did what any normal person would do in this situation, and make Jen take a picture of me doing some sweet Matrix moves. Neo ain`t got ish on me.

Apparently these rocks on route were famous, called the three Marias, even though there are now only two of them (the one of the left was broken by a tourist supposedly, hence the rocks prohibiting you to go nearer nowadays). The guide told us that they looked like a pregnant woman, a woman preying to the sky and a woman knealing. She then said you had to use your imagination to see it, seems Chilean`s have pretty weird imaginations.

The last stop on the tour was to see the valley from a view point by sunset, which brought out the amazing colours in the rocks.

With night time approching we cooked up some amazing pasta in the limited tiny kitchen only for our friend Sarah to stroll in who we had met on the Navimag boat. So what did we do......played some drinking games of course with her and others in our hostel and planned to go on a bike ride the following day with her.

The next morning she turned up with a really sound German guy named Sergio from her hostel (as she had to move hostels the next day) and we went off on a bike ride with a French guy (ironically named Francois) from our hostel. Some Inca ruins were on the cards which were about 5k away from our hostel down more dirt roads. Pretty cool view when we got there.

With 5 bikes and only 2 locks we locked up 2 bikes together and the other 3 together only for us to have no idea where the key was for the lock securing 3 bikes! Ironically just as I closed the lock I said ´lets hope we  haev the key for this´. The 5 of us searched for a good 15 minutes and couldnt find it so we decided we were never given a key so we best get it sorted early and sent back Sarah and Sergio to go and argue with the tour bike lady that she hadnt gave us a key. Me, Jen and Francois couldnt work out what was going on as Sarah swore she had a key for the lock, so I decided to go and have one last look....and of course I found it sitting randomly on a step where no-one had looked. Running back to tel Jen and Francois I would go after them and then back to the bike (which in itself was an effort at altitude) I raced off on my now free bike to try and catch them up. Going as quick as I could, I couldn`t catch them, probably hindered by the fact I flew off my bike when trying to bezz it super fast in the sand, and finally caught up with them at the tour office, just as the woman was starting to have a go at them.

Following a leisurely bike ride back as I was absolutely breathing out my arse at altitude, we set off up the inca ruins, with me struggling to catch my breath depicted in this photo below.

After the ruins you could also walk up a long uphill path to a viewpoint, coming across this weird unexplained circular thingy so we obviously got in the middle of it for a photo.

Back down from the viewpoint and we only had an hour left to get the bikes back, we set off on one more short bike ride to see a gate thingy that Sergio knew about. With Jen saying she wasn`t going to do death road in La Paz the whole journey I had to point out that she successfully rode down this path on the way which is about 10 times thinner than death road, ignoring the fact that if you fell off here you would have about 3 feet to roll compared to thousands of feet on death road!

And to the gate we arrived, which had a weird head carving on the left. There was some significance here as when the Inca`s invaded they beheaded the locals who resisted and put them on poles giving the valley the name "valley of the heads".

Cultural activities done, we settled back into drinking games at the hostel with our good friend Ron costing 2 quid. Sarah came along with her friend from ther UK who flew out to meet her that very day and with her first day in Chile, Sarah brought her along just for drinking games (I like her style). Following drinking games the night before with Ron, we discovered that it was 2 quid a bottle for a reason and tasted like pee, leading Jen to be sober for the night....didn`t stop me from reaquainting myself with Ron though.

The next day we just chilled in San Pedro until it was time to get the bus to our last stop in Chile.....