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.