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For Raquel’s 40+ Birthday, we took a long weekend trip to the desert of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile for amazing stargazing, breathtaking views of the colors of the desert, salt lake floating, and some arts & crafts.

After a 1.5 hour drive from Calama, we arrived in the town of San Pedro de Atacama, which is an adobe colored, two-bit, touristy town of narrow roads lined with single story adobe structures.  Think Santa Fe, New Mexico in the 1800s!

Except there are volcanos in the outskirts of San Pedro, like this one, Volcan Licancabur:

Our first night, we were fortunate to be able to go on an amazing star gazing tour.  In fact, it was the last night they were running the tour for a while because the moon was getting to be too bright to see the stars.  Be sure to check out our Star Tour blog entry for some amazing pix of our 1st night:

Our second day, was our water tour.  We started with a trip to the Cejar Lagoon (salt flats) for floating in the cold, salty water:

Think Dead Sea, but with Volcanos, very cold water, and no Ahava mud products!

Afterwards, we went for a sunset tour of the Chaxa Lagoon.  Often there are flamingos, but we unfortunately didn’t see any.  But we did see an amazing array of colors from the white salt and crystal blue waters to the red glow of the sunset on the Licancabur volcano:

Our third day, we toured the Valle de La Luna (Valley of the Moon) and Valle de la Muerte (Death Valley), which was Raquel’s favorite tour and great photo opportunity.  The Valle de la Luna got its name from it’s similarity to the lunar landscape.  Our guide told us that many people still believe that Neil Armstrong landed here and not on the moon back in 1969.  According to our guide and wikipedia, NASA is using the terrain of Valle de La Luna to test some of its equipment for future Mars missions.

We started our tour of the Valle de La Luna with Asher’s favorite part:  The Caves, which were formed by wind and water erosion.

There were some amazing sand formations at the Valle de La Luna:

Next we were on to the Valle de la Muerte, which our guide said was originally called Valle de Martes but was misunderstood by the Belgian explorer Le Paige (whose name is all over San Pedro) to be Muerte instead of Martes.  Check out the amazing colors of the sunset over the Valle de La Muerte:

These are some of our favorite sunset photos over the Valle de La Luna and back towards the Volcan Licancabur:

Our fourth and last day, we woke up early to travel out to see the spectacular colors of the Valle Arcoiris (Rainbow). Check out the amazing array of colors caused by various salt concentrations and minerals found in the sand:

One of the things we try to do when we travel is make sure we try something local and new.  Asher loved trying Inca Kola, which he said tasted like extra sweet cream soda.

We also really enjoyed our hotel, Cabañas Ancar Atacama, where we stayed in a cute little cabaña.

The kids favorite part of the hotel was the freezing cold pool, which was too cold for Raquel, but extremely refreshing for the kids who were hot from our 1k walk from the town in the hot desert sun:

No trip to Atacama is complete without a trip to the markets:

Asher really loved his time in Atacama!  Here he is in the plaza:

O2 was our favorite breakfast spot.  We liked it so much, we went twice.  The kids loved the manjar pancakes, while Raquel loved the amazing veggie quiche.

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This is what the top of the walls looked like:

Here she goes again.  This is one of Raquel’s artistic shots that took way too long to capture, so half the group went on to the Plaza, on the other side of the church steeple that is in this photo.

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‘”Is Your Mama A Lama?,” I Asked My Friend Ben.

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Cactus Flower, the only thing growing here!
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Don’t get Ben started about the veracity of these carvings!
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