San Pedro Attacama

From Santiago we arrived in San Pedro which is in Chile and close to the Bolivian border. So far our travels in Chili and Argentina have been pretty European so it was a nice change to reach San Pedro. San Pedro is a small Chilean town in th middle of the desert, the town actually looks like a set from a spaghetti western film. Its streets are full of travellers though as this usually the gateway from people entering, leaving Bolivia via the Salt Flats.

On our first day we had a look around and a man with a flyer stopped and talked to Michael is very fast spanish. Michael then explained he was English, to which this guys reply was "Oh, you have a very Chilean face!" which it probably the catch phrase for the whole trip. Considering Michael has a complection to match the aryan race this comment was hilariouse!

We booked a sandboarding trip that afternoon, the trip also included seeing the sun set in Death Valley. The sandboarding tutor told us that the name had orginated when the first person to see this place, I think he was German,  and thought he was on mars. The Spanish word for Mars is marte, which in time changed to the Spanish word for death, muerte, which was very similar. As he pulled up to the sandunes he was like, welcome my office, lucky devil!

So never did sanboarding before but it was so good!!! Its like skiing and surfing on powder so our tutor said and you dont need any experience. Ofcouse everytime you went down, you had to carry your snowboard back up, which was bloody hard work I tell you. Me and Michael had about 10 goes each, it was brill!!! After that we went to this canyon to watch the sun set, it was a stunning sight, kinda what I expect the grand canyon to look like. We did some funny jumping photos here, which everyone else copied, trend setters or what! haha.

The next day we met two German girls who we decided to so the Salt Flats tour with. We managed to bargain the tour price down so it was smiles all around. Except for later that day Michael mistaken the girls for some completely different people which was hilarious, but nearly got us to a bad start as they were a bit insulted by that. Luckily it was completely forgotten by the next day and we met our other two people for the tour (you need six people). One guys from Holland and the other from Australia who happened to be half Filipino too, from Cebu which is near where my mums from, small world. So yeah we were lucky as everyone was sound and we had a really good time. More about the tour in our next blog.