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From Bike Bums to Hike Bums

By Chris Thompson - 2009-09-20

San Pedro de Atacama is a sleepy village, nearly lost to time, at the edge of Chile. You can practically see both Bolivia and Argentina from town. The twisting dirt streets wind between rows of adobe huts that seem to have sprung out of the desert.

We knew that we had to explore the town and the desert wonders around it. However, being cyclists, and therefore averse to extra riding, we decided to take a bus to San Pedro. We spent the night before we left cobling makeshift backpacking gear from our cycling bags. The next day, tromping through Calama to the bus station, we looked like a gang of primitive barbarian backpackers.

We arrived in San Pedro after dark, witnessing one of the most amazing, purple, orange, and red sunsets I have ever seen. We walked around town, treating ourselves to a nice meal in a little resteraunt, then we headed out to the desert to find a place to camp. Beneath a blanket of shimmering stars, we spent the night hunting for constellations, Centarus Scorpio, Sagitarius, Lupus, and the Southern Cross. The sky was incredible.

San Pedro is strange, partly because it is so popular with international tourists. After two months of being the only gringos around, we were now swimming in them! We roamed around town for an afternoon, and decided to escape into the desert. Being on foot, we couldn’t get very far away, so we found a tour that would take us sand boarding across some gnarly dunes, and then drop us off in the middle of nowhere.

Sandboarding was a blast, flying down the silicate slopes, and occasionaly crashing and exploding into a sandy burst. Even more thrilling than that was being dropped off in the desert on the far side of the Salt Range, or "Cordillera de Sal". We sat on a cliff edge above the desert that night and watched the sun descend, another perfect sunset out in the desert. In the morning, after another color show, we began to climb down the cliff. We spent the day passing through crackling salt palaces, navigating narrow gorges lined with razor sharp salt blades, and crawling through dark tunnels.

Hours into the hike, we found ourselves deep in a cave. The ceiling was dropping towards the floor. A wide crack, two feet high, stretched into the inky blackness in front of us. We turned around, hoping that there was a better way out of this salt maze. Returning to the cathedral-like part of the cave, we looked up to the opening in the cave near the top of the dome. One hundred feet above us, glorious yellow sunlight streamed into our prison. After a bit of exploring, we discovered that what appeared to be an impassible wall above us had a series of small hand holds carved into its side. A short climb later, we founds ourselves emerging into the hot sun. We followed the final canyon out into the flats east of San Pedro, and began the long walk towards San Pedro, the bus station, and the open road.