Valle de la Luna and Elqui Valley

“Moon Valley” was the most hyped tour in all of San Pedro de Atacama, and it was only a few km outside of town, so we weren’t necessarily all that excited to see it… We were blown away!

It had one of the more massive sand dunes we’ve ever seen. The “small” rock formation on the right side of the picture above is called the Amphitheater, and I’ll have a picture later, much closer.

You really can’t appreciate the immensity of this dune unless you have people in it for scale…

(enlarge the sand to see the neat ripples)

…or see it from different angles.

The surrounding terrain was definitely other-worldly -

The white areas are salt that leached out of the surrounding soil/rocks.

That path above is where we could see the dune the best, as well as the jagged landscape.

Ok, the promised Amphitheater (I couldn’t get anything near it to show scale, but just know it’s huge, like football field huge):

My favorite shot of the sand dune:

We took a “sleeper” bus from San Pedro de Atacama to La Serena, a seaside town near the Elqui Valley on the central coast of Chile (the ride was 16 hours), and on our arrival, we were reacquainted with humidity.

Elqui Valley is known for its dark skies for astronomy, and growing grapes for pisco - a national liquor that’s distilled into something like brandy.

They make pisco sours with it, and argue with Peruvians on who invented it first.

That evening we took a tour to an observatory, 30 minutes ride back into the hills, to get away from light.

This was the 13 inch telescope that the two astronomers used to show us awesome sights in the sky like nebulae, collapsing stars, and the dimming star Betelgeuse, that has astronomers the world over, all aflutter.

I really wanted to get pictures through the telescope, but couldn’t. We just oohed and ahhed, and I took some long exposures with my camera. This was the best, showing the voids in the Milky Way -