San Pedro de Atacama is a very small village. It is the most well-known oasis of the Atacama desert, in part because of its central location, and in part because it is actually the largest of the oases. Due to its popularity and thriving tourist industry, San Pedro is the starting point for most visits to the valles, salares, and geysers of the Atacama. Filled with reasonably-priced hostels aimed at backpackers and student travellers, San Pedro was also the ideal starting point for our trip.
Despite its size, San Pedro has a lot to offer to travelers. In addition to the hostels and the location, it is rife with shops and services of all kinds. Restaurants, pottery stores, shops selling jewelry or woven goods, stalls selling homemade bags and tea and masks and plates... As well as various bike-rental shops and internet cafes that could transfer digital photos onto a CD (thereby allowing the tourists to take even more photos the next day).
We spent our first evening in San Pedro wandering around the streets, poking into the handcraft shops that looked interesting. We booked a two-day tour package offered by our hotel, in order to visit the salar, valles, lagunas, and geysers in our short stay, and then continued our wanderings. For such a tiny city (there couldn't possibly be more than 3 square city blocks in the entire town), we got turned around and lost quite often. More than anything, for me the difficulty was being away from water. If there's an ocean or a river, I can navigate a city based off of that. Since we'd spent the past six months living in Valparaíso, where we could clearly orient ourselves based off of the ocean on one side and the cerros on the other, being transplanted to a flat, arid, desert city full of similar-looking buildings made of adobe and thatched roofs... well, it was disorienting, to say the least.
In our explorations, we came across a pottery shop in an open yard. An old man was there at the time, working at the pottery wheel on a new project, and talking to a visitor. After the visitor left, he started to talk to us as well. As it turns out, he had made most of the art on display, and his work was also currently on exhibition at the San Pedro Museum. We talked about how we were studying in Valparaiso, but from the states, and he said that he had traveled to the states. Apparently, he had spent a signifigant amount of time in Berkeley, and taught a pottery workshop there for a bit.
We thanked him for his time and for talking to us, and he suggested that we go to the museum, not only to see his work but also because it was supposed to have incredible exhibits about the history of the region. The museum was already closed by this time, but we promised that we would go there before we left.
Our next two days were mainly filled by visits to the salar, lagunas, valles, oases, and geysers of the desert (see previous entry)
After our two days of sight-seeing around the desert, we went to the San Pedro Museum, which was highly recommended by both our books as well as by the potter we'd met earlier. The main exhibits pertained to the history of the Atacama region and to the indiginous people who had lived there. There was also an art gallery in which we found work by the potter, as well as a variety of beautiful paintings.
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