San Pedro de Atacama – Day 3 (Post #112)
Michele here….writing about our last day in San Pedro de Atacama. We got up this day (April 25th) at 3:15am in order to take a 2-hour bus ride to El Tatio Geothermal Field, which sits at an elevation of 14, 256 feet. When we signed up for this tour yesterday it took us a while to understand that the guy at the agency was telling us to avoid eating red meat and drinking alcohol because the elevation was so high. As I have mentioned before there is almost no English spoken in Chile and this concept (about avoiding alcohol and red meat due to the high altitude) was difficult to grasp in Spanish.
We arrived at the geiser field just as the sky was getting light. I definitely underestimated how cold it was going to be at this place and my hands were numb and I was freezing until the sun came up. Despite how cold we were, we both thought the geiser field was awesome. We walked around taking pictures for about 45 minutes before being served breakfast. The breakfast included, among other things, of hard boiled eggs that were boiled for about 20 minutes in one of the 600 geisers in the field. Here are a couple of pre-dawn pictures. The first is of the geiser field and the second is of us in front of a geiser spewing out boiling hot water:
El Tatio Geothermal Field:
A very cold Mike and Michele in front of one of the geisers:
After we left the geiser field we traveled to Machua Village. This village has only a few homes (10 to 12) and one church. At one point all the inhabitants left the village but in an effort to get some of the residents to move back, the tours now stop at the village and tourists can buy empanadas and tea from the handful of people that live there. Here is a picture of the village church:
On the way back to San Pedro de Atacama, we made several stops to take photos of wildlife that most of us rarely, if ever, have seen. Here is a picture of a family of llamas that were hanging out by the side of the road. Aren´t they cute?
We got back about noon and paid our hostel half the price of the room in order to stay in it until 8:00pm when we would leave to take the overnight bus from San Pedro to Iquique, Chile.
As Mike has written in the next blog, the overnight bus sucked. It was 6000 degrees on the bus and none of the windows could be opened. We thought we might die a slow death on that bus but as you can see, we lived to tell about it.
Tags: Category #27: Chile
Michele Harmon
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