San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

after another 24-hour bus ride, we foud ourselves in the driest place on earth: san pedro de atacama, in the north of chile. there are places in san pedro where no rainfall has been recorded -- ever. the town itself is tiny, and exists primarily as a tourist base camp. if you walk the four or five blocks of the main drag, you'll find fifteen or twenty tourist agencies all offering excursions to some of the many spectacular sights of the regions. you'll also find a few restaurants and grocery stores, and very quickly you'll find that everything costs at least 20 percent more in san pedro than elsewhere in chile.

while at san pedro we visited the valle de la luna and the valle del muerte. the former is so named because the white salt crust of the valley gives it a lunar appearance, and the latter is so misnamed because its arid red stones lend it a martian appearance, and a dutchman with a bad accent said valle de martes (valley of mars) but was interpreted as saying valley of death. both offered quite stunning sights, and the sunset at the valle de la luna was quite spectacular, culminating in a brilliant, perfectly white horizon beneath a dark sky.

the following day we woke at 3:30 in the morning to catch sunrise at the largest geothermal field in south america. here we danced about in the negative eight degree celsius weather and huddled together in the toxic sulfuric emissions of the geysers for warmth. after a frigid breakfast and the coming of dawn, we hurried over to a nearby hotspring. the morning ended with a long drive through the desert, with stops at a few lagoons and a tiny native village, where we sampled delicious llama meat.

we spent our final night in chile at a star-gazing tour hosted by a crazy frenchman. the high altitude and clear skies of san pedro make it ideal for star-gazing, and in fact it is home to one of four internationally organized astronomical research centers. unfortunately, we were unable to book the english version of the tour, but from what we gathered from the french version, france is the center of the world and the greeks were consuming psychotropic substances when they gave many of the constellations their names. after the french spiel, we were given free access to a collection of high-powered telescopes, from which we glimpsed a close-up view of the moon's surface and a astonishingly clear look at what we took to be saturn.