Fancy a Board of Sand?

My salt flat tour took me right to the border of Chile and many tours allow you to San Pedro, Chile rather then back to Uyuni, Bolivia. I had wanted to see this town so it worked out perfectly to just ‘pop into Chile for a few days’. On my bus to San Pedro I ran into two girls that I met in Chile, Lucy and Laura, and we all decided to room together. San Pedro de Atacama is a cute town of cobble stone streets, little restaurants, and sandboarding. Sandboarding is similar to snowboarding and was something that I had wanted to try for sometime. San Pedro is one of the best places for it. So we rented a bike and a board and headed for Valle de la Muerte (Death Valley). Everyone sandboards down, literally, a huge mountain of sand that is exhausting to climb up, but lots of fun to board down. I was a little hesitant at first, after the whole dislocating my shoulder snowboarding thing a few years ago, but after my first fall I realized that sand was much more forgiving then snow. I had a few mini rolls down the sand mountain and was finding sand for a couple days after (especially the ears), but it was great fun overall. After boarding we grabbed some beers and headed to a beautiful spot to watch the sunset overlooking the Valley de San Pedro.

Because San Pedro is in the middle of a vast desert it has amazing views of the stars. There is a wonderful observatory that conducts tours of the stars at night. The tour started at 10pm and took us out into the middle of the desert where the observatory was located. Our guide was a hilarious French guy making all kind of jokes like how to pick up a girl by talking to her about stars. With his powerful laser pointer he walked us through the galaxy, provided us with history and pointed out various stars explaining how many light years away they were, etc. Stars and the universe are quite amazing. The observatory had about 8 high powered telescopes that were focused on certain stars, star clusters, the southern cross, a star that is red in color, and different consolations. One of the telescopes was focused at Saturn and it was remarkable how clear it looked with its rings.