29 September 2013
We have a long peaceful sleep and we are ready to start our trip to the Atacama Desert. We meet up with Rex at breakfast; he arrived at the hotel late last night. It is really nice to see him. Rex headed up our photography trip to Patagonia in April 2012. This photography trip to the Atacama Desert and Easter Island is a new trip for Rex. Howard and I are the only participants and we will be his Guinea pigs while he decides the details of this trip for the future.
The flight to Calama is only a couple of hours. We are met at the airport by our guide for the next week, Cris. We drive about 1.5 hours to the village of San Pedro de Atacama and to our lovely hotel, Hotel Altiplanico. The buildings are made from adobe and hay with roofs made of straw. Our place has a private patio with an outdoor shower! Fortunately there is also an indoor shower–it’s way too cold in the early morning to shower outside.
The altitude here at “base camp” is 7,500 feet so the concern is altitude sickness. We have camped at 8,000 with no ill effects but we are still being careful. We are to drink plenty of water, limit alcohol (bummer) and spend a day or two around the village before we head to higher grounds.
The guys need to jump into their photography work. So for sunset photos Cris takes us a short distance to Coyote Lookout Point. The wind was incredible! It apparently is a popular sunset photo location because several other parties, including a small bus, pulled up to join us. But the sunset was beautiful and worth the extreme weather..
Rex, Howard and I ate at the hotel. I thought it was a bit on expensive side. The wine prices reminded me of our trip in 2012 when we discovered that the local Chilean and Argentine wines cost more in their homeland than they do in California! Howard and I had our obligatory Pisco Sours but they were not as good as in Santiago. We also had the 3 course menu: corn chowder, cheese ravioli, and quinoa cake. Rex is recovering from a stomach virus so he wisely ate white rice and chicken breast.
We hit the sack at about 9 and slept very well.