Star power of the Atacama desert

In the driest desert in the world sits the dusty town of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile: population 2000, 103 tour agencies (1 for every 20 locals!). We came here from Argentina by bus, but since 70km of the road was at 5000m (16,000ft) it should probably count as a flight. San Pedro looks like Tatooine if you replaced the exotic aliens with exotic backpackers and slapped signs offering tours everywhere:

OK, to be fair I'm an unreliable narrator; that's the meteorite museum. Everything here is dusty brown, the streets and unpaved, and volcanoes are always peeking over things in the background. This is more representative of the less touristy streets:

San Pedro is an adventure playground, and deservedly a major stop on the backpacker circuit because there is so much to do: desert tours, sand boarding, geysers, biking, salt pools, salt flats, stargazing, and more. We loved it so much we stayed 5 nights!

Haha no, I'm misleading you again, we got sick on the second day here and stayed until we felt up to tackling higher altitudes in Bolivia. Chile has some tough love for us, every time we come here we immediately get stomach problems.

Before we got benched though, we did have two formidably memorable excursions:

STARS

The Atacama desert is so dry, parts of it have never received rain in recorded history. The dry air, clear skies (5 cloudy nights per year!) and high elevation are perfect conditions for astronomy, and many of the world's most important observatories are in northern Chile (in the distance were able to see lights at the assembly area for the immense ALMA array of radio telescopes).

We went on a tour led by a Canadian astronomer away from the light pollution of San Pedro, and it was like a whole new world opened up above our heads. 4000 individual stars visible to the naked eye. The bright gauzy bands of the milky way, the fuzzy splotches of the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, the constellations of the zodiac. Our camera gear wasn't up to the task, but here's someone else's photo from the same site:

We also got to use 20-60cm telescopes to take a closer look at Jupiter (and four moons), Saturn (with rings and four moons), the Sombrero Galaxy, Eta Carinae, the Tarantula nebula, the Jewel Box cluster, and more. I am still humbled.

SALT

We also took a desert excursion to see lakes(!). The rain this area does get does crazy things, creating salt lakes and sinkholes. At Laguna Cejar we got to swim in supersaline water, 35% salt. It's so salty that you easily float (like more famously on the Dead Sea, sorry the good pictures are on the nice camera). We kept trying to stay under though: barely in line with the laws of science, the warm supersaline water was topped with a thin layer of cold, less-salty water.

We also saw stromatolites, the oldest form of life on earth: bacteria living in rock-like colonies.

So much around San Pedro we didn't get to, but that's OK because tomorrow we leave for Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the largest salt flats in the world. If San Pedro is a 10 out of 10 for desert, Salar de Uyuni is supposed to be a 12. No internet access, so you'll hear from us again in a few days from Uyuni or Potosí.

-Peter