We forfeited the final night in our hostel and jumped on our first truly epic night bus journey. Our destination, San Pedro de Atacama.
San Pedro lies on the periphery of the great Atacama desert, the driest desert of earth. Within no time at all it has been elevated to Chile's #1 tourist destination (eclipsing even Torres del Paine national park, far to the south in Patagonia).
This may seem at odds with many of its attributes; high altitude, outrageous dry heat and terrible access to name a few. The thing is someone, somewhere, has/is totally dialled into typical backpacker tourism and marketing.
San Pedro is a gateway to the Bolivian saltflats in one direction and a convenient(ish) stopover en route to Santiago in another. Its cemented itself on this grand backpacker thoroughfare by exploiting every possible asset available to it. To top this off it has then modelled and marketed itself specifically for the gap year masses.
It's a chilled, laid back bohemian oasis in the desert, while also hub of intrepid adventure and extreme activities.
Equally, its a horrific tourism construct, built on greed and profit. So false you'd expect the trees and indigenous flamingos to be made from plastic and fibre glass.
The worst thing is, it works. They've totally nailed it. They know the gap year masses and know them well.
Many of the most popular backpacker hostels in the world are basically all the same. There is an irony that you travel the world to experience new lands, people and culture, but you end up spending a hell of a lot of time playing fussball/darts/jenga while drinking Heineken with your identikit buddies in your purpose designed identikit hostels.
This is San Pedro de Atacama - you wouldn't have been surprised if the whole town was a single well planned endeavour, each and every local an employee; their bonuses linked to rinsing each and every backpacker dry and forcing an early, bankrupt flight home from Santiago.
So, nothing for it I suppose; "when in Rome" - sell me your tours!
We'd booked 4 nights in our hostel so were in no rush to go crazy. We settled, for now, with booking a trip that would take us right up along the valley, taking in various lagoons and lakes, before heading into the salty, but not-so-flat, centre to see some flamingos. It was one of the most popular trips, highly recommended and regarded.
In fact, It was a 10 hour minibus ride with average views and a couple of passable meals thrown in. I was thankful it hadn't lasted the scheduled 12 hours. We didn't rush into anymore trips after that. In fact we didn't do much else at all for a few days.
Salt 'not so flats'
Flamingos; check.
...and in flight too; cool.
Bird-nerd studying small wading birds. Check.
Avoiding, reportedly poor, star gazing tours, we took a couple of late night strolls out of town to see the stars by naked eye - this didn't pan out too well either, the light pollution from town is pretty bad (no doubt part of the reason the tours don't rate too well).
The only remaining attraction we were really interested in was the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the moon). There was a 4pm procession of minibuses which would take you out to the viewpoints along the route. This sounded less than appealing so we decided to make our way by bike.
To avoid the heat, and the minibuses, we picked up our rental bikes (surprising good make and condition) at 8:30am, grabbed a LOT of water and some empanadas (in Chile these are essentially enormous pasties) and we were set to go.
It was about a 15min ride to the valley proper, and we saw not another soul aside from staff at the park entrance. From there on in, the place is pretty awesome.
The whole landscape really is quite unearthly, it's name apt indeed. Aside from a neat little cave walk/clamber near the start, the valley is heavily salted, white, and like nothing I'd ever seen before. There are lookouts which we visited for better views along the way, but before long you reach the end, eat an empanada, and then ride back to town again.
Cavern clamber (shadow of Golum?!)
Offroading like a pro(?)
It was great, we finally felt that San Pedro de Atacama had shown some real worth. It seems a shame to me, therefore, that those herded through via minivan would most likely have a quite different opinion. The theory is that the 4pm brigade get to witness sunset in the valley, but at the cost of everyone being there at the same time?! Who makes these assumptions? Supplying what you "think" tourists want almost inevitably leads to the genuine being replaced with the false. Again, this is San Pedro de Atacama in a nutshell.
Maybe I missed the whole point of it all. Maybe (very likely) I hate the commercialisation of tourism, certainly to this extent at least.
I've, for some time now, inwardly questioned the impact and results of uncontrolled tourism once it has emerged in area or town - I'm not sure I like this "controlled" variety either.
[ Read more on San Pedro de Atacama's diminishing night sky here - http://features.weather.com/stargaze/ ]
