3 countries in one week: Chile, Argentina, Brazil

It was 3 days since we crossed from Bolivia to Chile and now we were headed towards Salta, Argentina. We took a bus with our friends Dani and Kinga from San Pedro de Atacama to Salta. It was Friday and we had to leave earlier because on these days the border is full. It took more than 2 hours to go through customs and do the paperwork.The road was very windy but the views were spectacular.

Two stops before Salta we said goodbye to our friends.  After 10 hours on the road, we got to Salta and we realized that it was a long weekend and most hotels were already full. It was 8pm at night and we were walking with our backpacks without much success. We finally found a place, Posada las Farolas, that was a little over our budget but very comfortable and with charming owners. The next day we moved to Tierra Oculta where we met a group of students from Misiones who were there for a conference to tell to university prospective students about their experience. These guys organized a BBQ at night and they were partying until 5 am. However when we woke up they were already awake. We then discovered that they had some problems with the security guard and the police.

The city was very nice. We hadn't been in one since La Paz! We found a good restaurant where we tried the "empanadas de carne". We saw a very good flan that we wanted to have for desert but we weren't able to have it because they closed the kitchen without telling us anything!

From Salta we flew to the Argenitian side of Iguazu Falls. The falls can be visited from the Argentinian and the Brazilian sides. In the former you can get closer to them and in the latter you can see a better panoramic view, according to what they told us since we didn't have time to see them from the Brazilian side.

Since we had so many problems in Salta, we decided to book a hostel in hostelworld.com. We booked the Azaleas place, located between the falls and the town. However, when we got there, it was closed. We waited for 2 hours because we already paid a 10% of our stay, but we finally left. We asked in different hostels but most of them, as we expected, were full. We finally ended up finding a room in Peter Pan hostel, that was actually better than the one we booked online.

We were surprised that none of the showers have curtains and when you get a shower the entire bathroom gets wet.

The next day we took a bus to the falls. There we followed several of the established itineraries. First we took the Lower loop and we crossed by boat to the San Martin island, where hiked to a view point where you could see the falls from really close. We got really wet!

On our way to San Martin island

Views from the island

 On our way we were able to see different animals: Coatis, caymans, and weird birds.

Coati

 

Then we walked the Upper trail overlooking the falls from the top, and finally we took a train to the Devil's throat which is stunning. To get there we had to walk over footbridges placed on top of the falls.

Views from the Upper trail

Devil's Throat

 

The nextday we took a public bus to cross to the Brazilian side. It was the third border we crossed in less than a week. We realized that it is very easy to cross and there is little control. In Foç we stayed at Bambu hostel for just one night as the next day we had a flight to Manaus at 6 am.

Laura cooking in the hostel Bambu

Our NEXT STOP will be a 4 day tour through the Amazon.

San Pedro de Atacama: the Moon´s valley and watching the stars with a French astronomer

San Pedro de Atacama is a town, in the north of Chile, in the middle of the Atacama desert, one of the most arid deserts in the world. 

Nice sunset at Moon´s Valley

The town is in the valley and the streets have lots of sand from the desert. It is very hot and dry. The houses are made of adobe and the street lamps and signs remind us to a Farwest village.

San Pedro de Atacama´s church

In San Pedro we stayed at Eden Atacameño hostel, the same hostel Dani and Kinga were staying. One of the things that surprised us the most were the rooms and food prices. Everything was very expensive! Maybe because it is a turistic place or maybe we felt that way because we came from Bolivia, where everything is very cheap.

The first day in San Pedro we took an evening tour to Laguna Cejar, which is a lagoon with a very high percentage of salt in water. It has 30% of salt and it is very easy to float in the water similar to the Dead Sea. Victor was very happy that he was able to float because he usually can't!

After swimming in the lagoon, our guide sprayed us with water because if you leave the salt on your skin, the  skin feels like cardboard. Afterwards we drove to two small lagoons with fresh water where we could remove the salt we had. They call them "Ojos del Salar".

Finally we went to watch the sunset in a big lagoon where we had snacks and Pisco sour!

Pisco sour!

Andes changing color at sunset

That night, after dinner, we went to an astronomy tour. We visited the observation center (http://www.spaceobs.com/) that was built by three astronomers. We learned that San Pedro de Atacama is one of the best places to observe the space because of its altitude, dry environment, good climate conditions and far from the light from big cities. In fact, currently there is a huge telescope being built there: the ALMA project (http://www.eso.org).

The tour was very interesting! We first had an explanation of the things you can see with the naked eye. It was a bit complicated because we are used to the northern hemisphere and many of the things we take for granted in the north are just different in the south. One of the reference points in the north is the polar star, whereas in the south is the Southern Cross. We then moved to the telescopes area where we were able to see many things: the moon, nebulars, dual stars, clusters of stars (subaru), jupiter and galaxies. A cool feature was the telescope that was focused on the moon had a joystick that let you move and zoom so that you could see the details of the moon's surface. We finished the tour with a talk given by a French astronomer, under a small hut and with hot chocolate! He talked about asteroids, which was his specialty. 

The next day we visited the Moon Valley in the Atacama desert. The landscape is unique, with lots of sand and spectacular dunes made by the wind. We also visited the famous stone formations of the "Coliseo" and "las tres Marias", which are three stones with different shapes.

dunes

the Coilseum

one of the three Marias (the dinosaur)

We also did a short exploration of the salt formations. We walked inside very narrow galeries of salt made by the erosion of a water stream.

We finished our visit to the Atacama desert waching the sunset with a panoramic view of the valley. The color of the stone formations with the sunset light was amazing and I don't know if it remembers the moon surface or not, but for us it remembered our visit to Utah and Arizona last Thanksgiving.

Next Stop: crossing the border to Argentina and Brazil! Salta and Iguazu Falls.

Salar de Uyuni: 4WD trip over 12000 squared kilometers of salt

From La Paz, we took a night bus to Uyuni. The best buses to go there are from todoturismo because they have heating system that is very needed for the cold nights in Uyuni. The previous day, we spent the entire evening looking for their office but couldn't find it, until a worker from the station called his supervisor to ask about it. Even policemen didn't know it was across the street from the station! The trip was 10h long and the worst part were the last 180km through a dirt road. The bus was shaking like a blender!

Most tourist hire the tour when they get to Uyuni and start it a few hours later. However, we wanted to rest a bit from the bus ride and also research thoroughly the different agencies as we read pretty bad things such as car accidents and drunk drivers! We researched so much that we even knew where the drivers were washing the jeeps after the tour!

As we wanted to do the Salar tour crossing to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, we decided to hire Estrella del Sur, which has agencies in both countries. We read good reviews from this agency and also it was the only one that gave us a written contract. Moreover we discovered that one of the drivers leaving the following day, Figo, was driving a Lexus, which is a sign that he is a good driver as these cars are mostly used in private tours. We lobbied to go with him.

The following day we started the tour at 10am. We met Figo and our jeep-mates: two Chilean guys, Martin and Felipe, and a couple who live in Belgium, Dani from Marbella and his girlfriend Kinga from Germany. They were traveling backpacking for 9 months around Asia and Latinamerica.

The first day we visited a train cementery and the Salar itself. We drove through a flat and white huge salt surface of 12,000 square km! You can't see the other side of the shore. It is like a white dry sea. It is difficult to drive there because it is hard to get oriented as you only see the horizon line and nothing else.

We stopped to take some funny pictures. Being all white it is easy to play with the perspective and make people look tiny in the pictures while others look huge.

 

After that we went to visit the Incahuasi island. It's an island in the middle of the Salar full of cactus. We had lunch there and then we hiked to the top of the island. We saw huge cactus. One of them was 9m high and we found one that was already dead and it was 12m! Since they grow 1cm per year, it means that they were 900 and 1200 years old respectively.

After lunch we continued driving through the Salar and just before sunset we got off the jeep to walk on the Salar to enjoy the sunset. Beautiful!

That night we slept in a basic hostel made of salt. While we were waiting for the dinner we played cards. After a while, the daughter of the hostel owner, Guadalupe, joined us. She wasn't shy at all! she was used to tourists and she was very impatient. She didn't like to loose.

The second day we visited a volcano view point and lots of lagoons full of flamingoes. The lagoons had some weird white material on the surface and Figo explained us that it was "borax".

After having lunch at one of the lagoons, we continued our tour to see "el árbol de piedra". It is a stone formation with a tree shape, made by the erosion of the wind on the stone.

Around 4pm we arrived to "Laguna Colorada". It was the perfect time to see the red and orange color of the water. It is a special lagoon that in a specific point in time during the day it changes the color of the water from transparent to red. That happens because in some specific conditions of wind and sunlight, the movement of the water moves the red algae of the lagoon and the water changes the color.

That night we stayed in a pretty basic hostel near the red lagoon. It was a very cold night (-15ºC) luckily we had our sleeping bags and we slept 6 people in the same room.

The third and last day of the tour we woke up very early, at 4.30am to see the sunrise at the geysers. It was very nice to see the steam but it was hard to walk close to the geysers because it was veeery cold during the sunrise.

After that we went to the hot springs. One of the Chilean guys got inside the water. We were tempted to jump in the hot water but it was so cold that we couldn't imagine how to get out of the water after the swim.

We had breakfast in the trunk of the jeep. Figo prepared us a nice breakfast with pancakes and hot tea. Delicious!

After feeling a little bit warmer with the tea, we continued the route until the Salvador Dali desert. It is an area with rocks on top of sand dunes that remind to Dali paintings. While we were driving through the desert we saw some snow formations on top of the sand. It is very interesting to see snow in the desert.

Finally we arrived to the last stop, the Green Lagoon. It was  too early to see the green color of the water and there wasn't enough wind. But the mirror effect on the lake was pretty cool.

At the green lagoon we said goodbye to our Chilean friends and the rest of us went to Hito Cajones, the border between Bolivia and Chile. We took a minibus and we said goodbye to our guide Figo. It was nice to change the bumpy desert for asfalt road.

Next Stop: San Pedro de Atacama.