Finally in Chile we were all starving having not eaten since our yoghurt and coco-pop like cereal concoction for breaky. First up however was finding a place to stay. Having not booked somewhere we followed the Aussie girls to their hostel. Unbeknown to us it was the beginning of a Chilean public holiday and San Pedro was super busy. At the girls hostel there was only one spare bed. Not sure whether we would be able to find anywhere else in town and not wanting to mission it around town trying to find somewhere the lovely owner of the hostel gave us the bed. It was probably the tiniest single I have ever seen in an even smaller room. The lady must have taken pity on us though as instead of charging us the more expensive price for having a private single we only had to pay the price of a dorm bed and only for one of us. A good thing for our wallets because things are definitely a lot more expensive once we crossed that border and especially in a tourist town during peak holiday time.
San Pedro is a cute dusty town and looks like it is the set of a western movie except with heaps of bikes rather than horses. It also had the best ice creams. We missed the peanut butter chocolate one which sold out quick but the banana split ice cream with huge swirls of caramel was delicious!
We were hoping that being in the desert and all the ride would be pretty flat but there were a few slight inclines making us breath a bit harder, taking in all the extra oxygen available at the lower altitude. Luna valley is only 16km from San Pedro but having done little exercise in a while we all worked up a bit of a sweat especially pushing the bikes up the massive hill from the second checkpoint in the park to the giant sand dunes.
Luna valley is named as such due to the lunar like landscape. Remnants of volcanic pillars with craters, canyons and caverns as well as giant sandunes, once inside the valley you can definitely get the eerie feeling of being out of this world. It would have been cool if there was zero gravity so we could have leapt up the cliffs but was still fun exploring the rock and salt outcrops in the valley shaped and eroded away by wind and water.
The caverna was probably the most exciting and slightly scary part of the day. The lady at the entrance to the cave said it took twenty minutes to walk and the map showed a loop but neither mentioned needing a torch as you would actually be crawling underground. The first red arrow seemed like a good sign and we followed all the other footprints in the sand through the tight cracks between large walls of strange rock types. This led us to a hole in the side of a wall big enough to climb through. With no red arrows showing the way we risked it and ducked inside hoping for the best. Pitch black and the only light we had was from one phone and the flash from the cameras. About 5 minutes in and the cave narrowed and we began to doubt ourselves. Flashbacks of the movies the descent (really creeping caving movie) and 127 hours popped through my mind. Out of all the dangerous things that we did in Bolivia here I was going to be attacked by alien creatures in a valley named after the moon or worse get stuck and have to cut my arm or leg off with the butter knife I had for our sandwiches. I didn't quite have to resort to this as light at the end of the tunnel beckoned us and a red arrow at the end of the cave greeted us. It would have been nice having a red arrow at the beginning of the cave so we knew when entering we were going the right way. I think this was the last time I would be going underground for a wee while.
My words really don't do the valley justice and you might have noticed the lack of photos in this blog. I know I had the camera with me on our short ride leaving San Pedro to Calama as I was taking photos with it but I either left it on the bus when we hopped off in Calama or I left it at the station when we went to get a feed. Not the best way to start a long overnight bus ride. I had only just bought the camera for Jake before we came on this trip and having already lost my phone on the trip it looks like I have picked back up my bad habit of forgetting stuff.
On the positive side I already know the new camera we want. One of the British girls we hung out with on our pampas tour in Rurrenebaque had an easy to use camera which took amazing quality photos. Will try to find one like hers in Chile but until then the phone is our main device for capturing images of the rest of our trip. Unfortunately I hadn't copied the photos from San Pedro over to our hard drive yet but I was glad that we had shared photos with the Aussies of our Salt flat tour already so I had saved them to the laptop. Until we get a good camera again these posts may not be so vivid and you will just have to put up with my dull story telling. Google the places for photos.