We started the day with a fifteen minute walk into Atacama for breakfast at a very charming restaurant. The sky was a cloudless deep blue and it was warm and, of course, dry. It's the driest place on earth.
Casa Don Esteban, our hotel, claims to offer breakfast but instant coffee, stale cereal with no milk, and a cracker isn't breakfast. The rooms look much better in photos than in person. A poor choice of a hotel but after paying US$ 85 per night for the luxurious Patio Alto in Tilcara and US$ 65 for the comfortable Carpe Diem in Salta, we thought US$ 100 per night would get a good room in Atacama. But no. If I could jump into a tardis and do it again I'd pay the US$ 300 that is the going price for a nice room in Atacama.
The hotel's positives are its bubbly proprietor, though she speaks no English, its peaceful location away from town, and its customers; the hotel targets astronomers so it is empty and quiet all night (they are out stargazing) and they sleep all day.
I guess Atacama is a different market than Salta and Tilcara plus Chile's economy is more stable so maybe that is why hotels cost much more here. Atacama's international draw allows hotels to charge more; one can easily pay 1,000 a night. Just listening to the languages spoken and noting the expensive cameras I know we're not in Argentina anymore.
After breakfast we hired a mountain bike to ride 10 km to a nearby lookout and it turns out to be spectacular ride through a red-rock canyon then up a hill that overlooks green valleys with volcanoes and snow-capped Andean mountains in the distance. Beautiful. The only challenge is that I feel the altitude—2,500 m—so the uphill sections have me panting. Along the way we stop to talk to a German biker who recommends another trail, an all-day ride to a lunar landscape, but tomorrow we've a plane to catch to Santiago.
We get back to town and stop for ice cream. Thinking about having a pisco sour a little later.
My opinion of Atacama is now a complete reversal of my initial impression and if I could I'd stay longer though at another hotel. I especially like how they've taken the indigenous adobe architecture and had fun with it. As they say in Argentina, Ciao.
