We planned on a couple nights in San Pedro de Atacama (aka Atacama). This is a small town on the Chilean side of the Andes.
But when the bus entered town I thought we'd made a mistake in our choice of Atacama. This isn't a town, I thought, it's some other town's dump. At the bus station we disembarked, looked around, and found nothing marked, no street signs, no addresses, just a maze of dusty streets populated by other bus riders wandering zombie-like, looking for directions. I considered, briefly, returning to the bus, to take it to the next stop, Calama.
Complicating this was that one of us was suffering from the altitude. This started around the time we stopped for customs, at the 4,300 m altitude Chili-Argentina border. The photo above shows the border. The Andes here are nothing like mountains you see in California or the Alps; they are more high desert than mountain. But they are high enough to feel it.
But we kept walking around Atacama, determined to find ourselves. Finally, desperate, I pulled out my phone and called Canada, not for an RCMP airlift home but to add a roaming data plan so I could pull a map to find our hotel. And then it all came together: I found us on the map, we found the center of town (it was just around the corner), and then suddenly the town was OK, in fact better than OK.
Soon we were on the main square, the streets had names, cute restaurants were on offer, excursion companies, bike rentals, hidden markets, and lots of people young and not so young speaking different languages and dressed in outdoorsy attire having a good time. And my opinion of Atacama changed. This is a cool place.