The day started with a 5am wake up call! The weather was unbearable... A morning of -20*C was beyond what we imagined it was going to be!!!
We started the day by having some awful breakfast! The cereal was left uncovered overnight and they gave us each one pancake (and they screamed at you if you took two) and the woman refused to give us some forks to eat with! I think it was because last night we all got mad at the cook because she was asked several times if the soup was vegetarian and she said yes and we found pieces of chicken and bones in the soup!
At 5:45 we were already sitting in the 4x4 and waiting to start the day!! Even though the car had a heater it was almost impossible to warm up!
Our first stop was at the "rock tree" where there were many natural rock formations with different shapes.
Our next stop was at Laguna Colorada where we saw flamingos and llamas walking on top of the frozen lagoon!
We kept moving along until we reached the highest point of our whole entire trip... 5,100m!!! (And my widest... With 7 layers!!!)
Then we stopped at some fabulous but stinky geysers!!! The gases from the nearby mountains travel underground and come out at the bottom through the geysers! It was really cool to witness it!
Later on we reached our lunch spot which was next to a wonderful lagoon and the hot spring!
Many of us decided to skip the hot spring and instead went on a stroll on top of the frozen lagoon! We could even see the water bubbling under the ice! The view from there was simply amazing... Too beautiful for words!
After eating some lunch we needed the respective potty break but we didn't have 3 bolivianos to pay for it so we decided to find a good pee stop somewhere around our lunch spot. The girls and I walked behind the house and out of a hole in the back the owner came out and very angrily said to not pee around there! Haha (she knew our intentions) so we spread around and some people hiked up and peed behind a huge rock up in the mountain. The rest we decided to wait since our drivers said they would stop on our way to the next site!
Our dirty truck:
To our surprise the land was completely flat and we had no opportunity to pee for more than an hour until we reached the green lagoon!
The green color of the lagoon was fantastic! I've never seen anything like that:
After a quick view we were on our way to the border of Bolivia and Chile where we encountered a very angry border officer!
After passing the Bolivian border we took the slowest bus ride to customs in Chile where we encountered good looking Chileans (yeay!) that were beyond nice!!!
We finally arrived in San Pedro de Atacama... A place full of dogs and hippies!
San Pedro is an old city with dirt streets and full of shops all around in houses made out of adobe. Based on its location San Pedro is the IT spot for looking at stars so at night we went for some star gazing.
The view was beyond incredible, the Milky Way was right above us and we could see constellations, stars, planets, nebulas etc. The observatory had massive telescopes and we were able to see specific stars and my favorite... Saturn!
Some pictures from Neil's camera:
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