Zelma’s Trip

Having eaten breakfast we said out Goodbyes to Juan Lopez and Basile Fawlty and headed to San Pedro de Atacama, a well visited base from which to explore the Atacama desert.  For those of you who don´t know your deserts the Atacama it the driest desert in the World and some places have no recorded rainfall since records began.  So, with this in mind we didn´t get petrol and drove out until the light came on!  We did manage to get to a petrol station in time though so Mum needn´t have been quite so worried!

Having crossed vast areas of arid desert we arrived in San Pedro de Atacama.  It is clear why San Pedro is one of the most visited places in the North of Chile as it is the only real place to stay in the desert.  Tourists use the town as a base to explore the desert, ride bikes and horses, sand board and visit the surrounding mountains, hot springs and salt flats.  Unfortunately, being the only real habitable place, the town felt like it was geared solely to housing touristic explorers and little elese.  The town itself is low rise, consisting of mud covered walls and buildings which in one way are quaint but in another feel like the only reason for a lack of further develpoment is to keep the “authentic” Chilean look so that tourists can say they stayed in a quaint, historical town.  In all fairness I guess San Pedro had some kind of charm but our impression of this was marred by our inability to find anywhere to stay.  We drove round and round literally for hours with several unhelpful directions to campsites.  The town itself is small with a maze of thin roads, many of which are one-way and a lot of which are pedestrianised.  This made for frustrating driving in a big van.  Added to this was the Chilean road sign speciality, i.e. none, or signs masked by various objects other like signs or trees.  At one point we asked some Policemen for directions and ended up driving through the town with a Police escort.  They pointed to a gate and Mum and I went to investigate.  Eventually two local workers, who stank of alcohol, greeted us and we were rather relieved when they explained it was a campsite for workers so we didn´t have to make our excuses about not staying there.  By this point we were all frustrated, tired and hot and we stopped in a parking area where Mum went and bought some supplies in case we ended up spending the night in the desert.  When we had first arrived we had tried to find an out of town oasis which apparently had camping but, after looking for so long, decided it didn´t exist and was perhaps some delirious travel writer´s mirage.  I tentatively looked through the book again and found a different map with the campsite marked.  We headed out of town again and were relieved to find the place.  We were greeted by the proprietor, a rather odd chap named Louis, and shown in.  The place was lovely with shady acacia covered sites and a dramatic view out over the desert to the Andes.  There was one other group at the camp who were a rather strange group of unsociable Germans traveling in a ´Rotel´ – a kind of custom-made bus, hotel thing.  Having set up the tent, we watched a beautiful sunset, ate and went to sleep.