A desert night and a killer headache
Our first evening in a desert, in fact this is one of the if not the driest desert on earth, the Atacama desert in northern Chile. The impressively inclined, windy route through the mountains between Argentina and Chile was a sight not to be missed...but what did we do??? Slept for the first 4 hours of this great journey to the Atacama desert....duhhhh... See last night was our last evening in Argentina so naturally we had to celebrate! We had some help from Vicky, Lorraine and Justin ( 3 British friends) who began dancing salsa and would not stop until way too late!!! Yesterday in the day we all took a white water rafting trip in one of the coldest and the longest river in all of Argentina. To say the least yesterday was an exhausting day with the full day rafting trip and then the all night drinking celebration so by 7:00 AM earlier today when we had to be on the bus for the 12 hour bus journey from Argentina to Chile we were simply dead!
After a few hours, I managed to wake up and check out the views and was in shock with the amazing salt flats that dotted part of this desert "Mars-like" mountain region. Apparently this does not compare to the Bolivian salt flats which go on for hundreds of miles, but we'll get to that later next week.
Besides being at almost 4000 meters during some of the bus ride and really gasping for air, the hangover that set in was the worst. You see hangover headaches at this altitude and with bumpy, winding cliff side roads on top of that, are the mother of all headaches and I hope never to encounter again. My head still hurts, but we'll see if getting a good night sleep in a bed now will help out.
We are not doing the full 4-day desert excursion until Sunday or Monday so I'll let you know what the real desert is like then. For now we are in San Pedro de Atacama, an adobe styled town that is at the very outskirts of the desert. We are staying with Alvaro ( a friend we met earlier on this trip back in Brazil) and he's got a great adobe and rock built home with a modern wood thatched roof, it's a very chilled out place! Good thing, cause we can clealry save on hotels since Chile is the most expensive of places in all of South America.
Check out San Pedro de Atacama on Google.com and see if you can get pics of this place. Not sure if I get the right cell service to upload pics from my blackberry, afterall we are in a desert.
Later.
Sent by Jeffrey via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
After a few hours, I managed to wake up and check out the views and was in shock with the amazing salt flats that dotted part of this desert "Mars-like" mountain region. Apparently this does not compare to the Bolivian salt flats which go on for hundreds of miles, but we'll get to that later next week.
Besides being at almost 4000 meters during some of the bus ride and really gasping for air, the hangover that set in was the worst. You see hangover headaches at this altitude and with bumpy, winding cliff side roads on top of that, are the mother of all headaches and I hope never to encounter again. My head still hurts, but we'll see if getting a good night sleep in a bed now will help out.
We are not doing the full 4-day desert excursion until Sunday or Monday so I'll let you know what the real desert is like then. For now we are in San Pedro de Atacama, an adobe styled town that is at the very outskirts of the desert. We are staying with Alvaro ( a friend we met earlier on this trip back in Brazil) and he's got a great adobe and rock built home with a modern wood thatched roof, it's a very chilled out place! Good thing, cause we can clealry save on hotels since Chile is the most expensive of places in all of South America.
Check out San Pedro de Atacama on Google.com and see if you can get pics of this place. Not sure if I get the right cell service to upload pics from my blackberry, afterall we are in a desert.
Later.
Sent by Jeffrey via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
posted by 2400hours at
10:00 PM
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