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.\u00a0 For those of you who don\u00b4t know your deserts the Atacama it the driest desert in the World and some places have no recorded rainfall since records began.\u00a0 So, with this in mind we didn\u00b4t get petrol and drove out until the light came on!\u00a0 We did manage to get to a petrol station in time though so Mum needn\u00b4t have been quite so worried!<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Having crossed vast areas of arid desert we arrived in San Pedro de Atacama.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Unfortunately, being the only real habitable place, the town felt like it was geared solely to housing touristic explorers and little elese.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We drove round and round literally for hours with several unhelpful directions to campsites.\u00a0 The town itself is small with a maze of thin roads, many of which are one-way and a lot of which are pedestrianised.\u00a0 This made for frustrating driving in a big van.\u00a0 Added to this was the Chilean road sign speciality, i.e. none, or signs masked by various objects other like signs or trees.\u00a0 At one point we asked some Policemen for directions and ended up driving through the town with a Police escort.\u00a0 They pointed to a gate and Mum and I went to investigate.\u00a0 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\u00b4t have to make our excuses about not staying there.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u00b4t exist and was perhaps some delirious travel writer\u00b4s mirage.\u00a0 I tentatively looked through the book again and found a different map with the campsite marked.\u00a0 We headed out of town again and were relieved to find the place.\u00a0 We were greeted by the proprietor, a rather odd chap named Louis, and shown in.\u00a0 The place was lovely with shady acacia covered sites and a dramatic view out over the desert to the Andes.\u00a0 There was one other group at the camp who were a rather strange group of unsociable Germans traveling in a \u00b4Rotel\u00b4 – a kind of custom-made bus, hotel thing.\u00a0 Having set up the tent, we watched a beautiful sunset, ate and went to sleep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.\u00a0 For those of you who don\u00b4t know your deserts the Atacama it the driest desert in the World and some places have no recorded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}