San Pedro Photos

Massey Sandboarding Video

Buck Sandboarding Video


Crossing into a new country at a small town can be a bit risky because you don't have any of the local currency of that country and the small town may not have any working ATMs. It happened to me once in Laos and it happened again here, no working ATMs. I always keep several hundred dollars in U.S. bills in reserve, so we were never in danger of running out of money, but I wanted to save the dollars because we were about to cross into Bolivia at another small town, with, according to reports, only a single unreliable ATM and I needed to make sure we'd be able to pay for our Bolivian visas at the border, $135 each. It looked like I might have to break into my super emergency reserve stash that I keep in a hidden pocket that I told myself I'd never use unless I was mugged an lost everything else. In the meantime, I scraped together some coins I had leftover from the last time I was in Chile and exchanged my remaining few Argentine pesos for Chilean ones and that was enough to pay for our hostel for one night and buy pasta to cook for dinner. We were in luck the next morning. The ATM was fixed!

The Atacama desert is the driest place on earth. There are some areas where measurable rainfall has never been recorded. We rented bikes and rode around the area, but the dry, hot air and altitude burned our lungs every time we had to climb a hill. There are some surreal landscapes around that practically look like Mars.

On our last day, we rented snowboards, strapped them to our backs using deflated bicycle tire inner-tubes, and rode to some nearby dunes to try sandboarding. It was basically like snowboarding in extremely thick powder. We had to lean way back on the board and it was very difficult to turn. It didn't help that I'm a skier, not a boarder, and I've only been on a snowboard one other time. It got tiring without a ski lift to carry us back up the hill, but it was a beautiful spot to enjoy the afternoon.