Black & White Town - Doves

A fairly uneventful bus journey thankfully, apart from the expected lack of sleep. We´re starting to climb now. San Pedro is at 2400m, and you can feel yourself breathing a little harder after fairly mundane activities like tying shoelaces! It´s a pretty remote town in the heart of the northern Chilean desert and is completely dominated by tourism. There´s good hiking and biking options here, and it´s also the launchpad for 4WD excursions into the Bolivian desert and salt flats, which we´ll be doing in a couple of days.

But in the meantime it´s a nice chilled-out place to relax for a couple of days. We hired some bikes and went off to some nearby sand dunes to try our hands at sand boarding. It quickly became apparent that snowboarding techniques aren´t so great on sand - there´s too much friction. But after some experimentation I managed to get down the dune in one go, and it was actually really good fun, if a touch painful on landing. Also biked out to see some pre-Columbian ruins, that were little more than a few piles of mud. But then they were 2800 years old (allegedly).

The tour group are a good group all told. Still have some doubts about my roommate, a rock-bothering know-it-all geologist, who seems reticent to flush the toilet and has a penchant for getting up at 6.30am and rustling plastic bags for 20 minutes. Each to their own I guess.

written by

phileasdogg on February 9, 2009 from San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

from the travel blog: Planes, Trains & Taxiwallahs

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Quite a few of our group suffered from altitude sickness, with migraines and vomiting being the most common complaints

written by zmljwf on July 18, 2011

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