we have made it to the atacama desert! san pedro de atacama - a town in the middle of the destert surronded by sand and grass. we went sandboarding on the dunes and it was absolutely fantastic, so so much fun riding down the dunes with sand getting everywhere, and i mean it - EVERYWHERE. it was slightly spoiled at the end by the fact that i "rode" into a girl and my board bruised her heel. ufff. one need to be careful! after that we went to valle de la luna and it was also absoluetly marvellous,full of halucynogenic, colour-changing rock formations. impossible to imagine what kind of artistic and engineering skills it required from the Creator. the next day we got up mad early (3.30am) to go to el tatio geysers at 4300 meteres above the sea level. we expected the altitude sikness but nothing was wrong at all. whoooho!!! our driver was late, grumpy and was speeding through the rocks as if he was on a motorway almost touching the rock formations at the turns. the most predictebale thing happened - we got a flat tyre in the middle of the rocky road and had to wait for another bus to come along with help. when we finally got to the geysers, they were pretty amazing, with boiling water being spat out from underground. one of the geysers bubbles for 4 minutes and then goes to sleep for 11 minutes with a perfect regurality. apparently it takes 11 minutes for the water to heat underground and come back up. note bene the water boils in less than 100 degress coz the air is thiner up here. wow! i wish i had been more studious at school to know more abaout all that. but hey, atleast there is a second chance for all of us who dont remmeber stuff from school - you can always go travelling and learn it first hand :)
we also went to the hot springs, but the water was not as hot as in pucon in chile- or maybe we are just getting spoilt.
on the way back the driver took us to "the indegenious village" which seems to exist only for tourists" sake - not too indegenious at all! a few houses, and dozens of gringos around. seems that the only activity of the village was selling empanadas for the tourists and charging for the toilets. suprisingly they had solar batteries at most of the houses.
the next day we joined a tour (handy and cheep enough) and we stared our bolivian adventure :)
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