During our stay in Valparaiso, the owner of our B&B suggested we make a visit to San Pedro de Atacama on our way to Peru.  It's located in the Chilean Desert where all of the buildings are built out of adobe bricks and straw.

We didn't have any other plans until we made it to Peru, so we decided to break up our trip and make a little pit stop.  Three buses later, we arrived in San Pedro from Valparaiso after 31 hours (24 of which was on a bus).


San Pedro de Atacama has become a popular tourism spot because of it's variety of activities.   You can take day trips to visit The Valley of the Moon (looks like the moons surface),  Death Valley, geysers, salt lagoons, stargazing tours at night, sand boarding and plan trips over to Bolivia.


Since this was only a pitstop and we had already purchased our onward bus tickets, we were only able to do one of the excursions.  We had really been looking forward to visiting their long series of geysers, but the a few weeks prior they had received so much snow in the mountains that the passes weren't currently passable.  Bummer.  We then settled on a morning trip to visit the salt lagoons and see the flamingos stop through, but they were all booked.  We then settled on visiting the salt lagoons during the afternoon tour (which didn't include any flamingos) and hoped for no problems since our bus left 45 minutes after our scheduled return.

We visited the Lagoon Cejar which is a large sink hole in the Salar de Atacama and has a 40% concentration of salt, allowing you to float like you would in the dead sea. This area is the world's second largest concentration of salt; 60 miles long by 50 miles wide.






Yes there were people swimming but the water was VERY cold.  With the air temperature at 60 F, it wasn't warm enough for me to want to be in some ice cold water.