Visit of the Valle de la Muerte

It’s our last day in San Pedro de Atacama. We decide to go and visit the Valle de la Muerte, because it’s en route to Calama. If the visit takes a little too long, we could drive directly from there.

I am pleasantly surprised by this valley – it’s not as famous as the valle de la luna and is much smaller but offer a completely different atmosphere. It starts with the drive into the valley itself. You are at the bottom of a canyon with tall red spikes and cliffs around you – it zigzags through the cordilla del sal. 

Then the valley opens to a wide basin full of sand and massive dunes. Finally, it narrow downs again into a bottleneck shouldered by two impressive flat plateaux.
The contrast between white sand and red rocks is stunning. 

We park at the bottom of the sand dune and climb along a ridge up to the Miradors which offer a spectacular view of the canyons we had crossed. The tourist’s name for the landscape is Mars’s valley. It’s an accurate nickname. Then we walk to the opposite plateau which shoulders the largest sand dunes. 

We are the first one in the valley and the dune is pristine, some footsteps are barely visible and give us some direction to safely reach the tallest dune ridge.

It’s amazing and incredibly beautiful to be the first to walk along the ridge of this massive dune with an otherworldly red landscape surrounding you. It was a little difficult and intimidating to walk the dune down, but so worth it.

In the end, it took us about 2 hours to visit and walk all the sights in the valle de la Muerte and we were finished by 10h30 am. Perfect, since we were covered in sand ( plus 1kg in each shoe … ) we went back to the hotel for a shower and change our clothes. We also prepared our laundry to drop it off on the way to Calama.

The drive to Calama was uneventful. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the Avis downtown office it was closed. It’s inside a hotel, so we asked the concierge there. He said we need to call to get someone. We did call and call to no avail. We had to drive the car back to the airport. It was really inconvenient, a bus ride from Calama to San Pedro is maximum CLP 5,000 but from the airport it’s CLP 15,000 per person! 

We were pretty pissed off by the time we arrived at the airport. We gave the car back and booked a transvip van to San pedro which departed an hour later.  Everything went smooth from there.

Back in town, we picked up our laundry, stopped by this really quiet and nice café on the main street for a snack, and changed our last Chilean pesos into Bolivianos. We spend the rest of the evening resting & cooking a meal with our leftovers.

Tomorrow’s pick up is at 6am !