San Pedro de Atacama, Chile - Polarsteps

After an interesting journey, we arrived 10 hours later than planned in San Pedro de Atacama. Something with Bandidos in Calama and sealed off cities.. 🥷🔥❌ but we made it! We found our lovely homestay here, with the fantastic Nico and doña Rosa who made us feel more than welcome💕. In the evening we chatted with a Czech couple, who offered us to rent and share a car instead of doing all (pricey) tours. That sounded like a great idea and so we joined the Czechs 🇨🇿 and a German🇩🇪 for the next two days. After enjoying some local carnavaleske parade through the city, we jumped into the car. On our way to the moon! Or at least to Valle de la Luna🌙. An impressive landscape welcomed us, something we totally missed because of the dark when we drived into the town the night before. We saw our first views of the existence of salt in this area and climbed to the top of a sand dune. After sunset we went deeper into the desert to look for a place with almost no light pollution. Jens lead us to the 'Magic Bus' where we made tons of pictures with the starry sky as background.🌌 Day 2: The alarm clock pulled us out of a coma-like state at 03:30🕝. Time to wake up, to see the Tatio geysers. The fumarolles (smoke and steam) are most impressive in the early morning, so most people visit these geysers around dawn. After a two hour drive in the pitch dark, we were overwhelmed by the amount of steaming geysers in the valley. More than 400 geysers are active here. The area smelled of sulphur (yay, rotten eggs) and had geysers of up to 6 meters high. It was a very impressive sight. On the way back from the geysers, we stopped at some lakes to spot some flamingo's 🦩and at an beautiful canyon, with cacti🌵 of more than 10 meters high. Oh, something that we should have mentioned: all of this takes place at at least 2500 metres above sea level😱. The geysers field even lies on a stunning height of 4300 meters (!!!!). The high altitude is hard on the human body, especially Liselot's. With a terrible headache she was floored for the rest of the day. 🤯 We couldn't be happier that we decided earlier on to stay another day in S.P. de Atacama. We took some well needed rest and arranged the tour for the upcoming days.... Exciting! 🥳

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Chile