SAN PEDRO de ATACAMA...

..was so great it deserved all caps.

Thanksgiving came and went. Living in Santiago, if I wasn't an American, I would have no idea that the past Thursday had any significance up north. Nevertheless, a few friends and I celebrated in a mix of American and Chilean spirit with fresh salmon from the Mercado Central, mashed potatoes with a land mine of garlic, salad with homemade dressing and Chile's famously delicious Camernere red wine. It was satisfying and more than filling, just like a traditional Thanksgiving feast.

Five hours later, the four of us taxied it to the airport for the Norte grande of Chile, onward to San Pedro, famous for being the driest place in the world. Some places have never recorded rainfall, the parts that do receive rain are sprinkled with H2O two to three days a year each summer. A million years ago, however, a large river carved caves and rock formations that question the human mind of what is normal. The Valley of the Moon, el Valle del Luna, is the perfect example. While walking through the high arching red rock craters, one, inevidently, feels on another world. Hence the name. Today, however, some rivers still exist. Including el rio de San Pedro where my friends and I biked to. After an hour and a half of biking in the dry, red wasteland, the trickling river seemed an imaginary oasis. Upon example of the French couple that led us in the direction of it, we rubbed our arms and legs with the mud to cool off. Before leaving, we spread out our food for a delicious picnic lunch. In the extreme heat of the afternoon, we biked back to town and onward to the Valley of the Moon, where we suffered the harsh wind of the dessert in the absence of anything--vegetation, buildings, elevation of any kind. Seven miles later and an hour before sunset, we arrived, exhausted. Large, loaded tour buses blew past us, as we walked the remaining half mile to the large valley. The pact we made, if we were going to spend the money to travel to San Pedro, was that we would not do a tour, despite the belief of many that to enjoy San Pedro, you must do a tour. The tourist town of San Pedro is lined with tour companies offering everything from sandboarding, geyser tours, horsetrekking to flamengo spotting. We prevailed by biking, walking and arranging transport via a resident at our campsite, although admittedly we smelled and looked quite disgusting after the four days of no showering and weathering the elements of dust, mud, sweat and salt without air-conditioning of any kind. As a result, this led to a special kind of satisfaction, especially while those in the tour buses looked down upon us as we biked by the moonlight from the sunset in the valley.

To round out our San Pedro weekend, we also floated in salt lagoons. A curiosity indeed. The crystal blue lagoons contain enough salt that the water makes one impossibly buoyant. Even bobbing like a pencil is difficult. If you don't resist it, the salt mixture forces your feet up to the surface within seconds. By arriving to the lagoons apart from a tour, we will allowed to stay after sunset and watch wild flamengos fly overhead in the sky and watch one of the most beautiful sunsets over the towering volcanoes. It was beautiful and frugal.