Snow and mud. Desert chronicles. Day 2.

As the anxious person I am, I woke up too early (7:15) thinking I could have fallen asleep for my tour. Of course I hadn't, I had plenty of time. I picked up my breakfast to go at the hostel bar and went outside to wait for my van.

The Sun didn't hit the hostel's side of the street in the morning, so it was quite cold. Meanwhile,t took that time to answer text messages while I still had wifi, I saw how other vans came to pick up other people and I played with street dogs that were walking around. Until my turn came, and my tour mates for the day are a group of Brazilian people and a couple of Aussies.

I think this post has more pics than words, you'll understand why.

We drove for a while until we took a secondary road to the Rainbow Valley that still has some parts covered with ice and snow.

Our first stop was to see some llamas that were eating in a meadow and were really really cute. Our second stop was the valley. It shares the variety of colors with the Seven Colors Hill in Argentina although in a less spectacular way.

While I was walking around the valley I found a heart shaped stone, they have een chasing me for the last few months.

Aren't they the cutest?

This is Rainbow Valley. In my opinion, the road to get here was more spectacular.

Felipe, our guide, told us the difference between both sides of the place, the colores side is stone and the black one is sedimentary. Meanwhile, we had an awesome picnic.

I know you're not supposed to take rocks from places, but I just couldn't resist.

We left the Valley and went to see the petroglyphs and even though the explanations about the carvings, their possible age, the original people of Atacama and hallucinogens were more than interesting, this place still had some snow and my inner child came up so I ended up playing with the it filled with happiness.

Some of the petroglyphs. The first one isn't, but it reminded me of my dog, so it was important.

It was time to go back to San Pedro. I had nothing planned for the afternoon, so I went out for a walk, first to the surroundings of the town and then back to the cute mud streets. While I was walking I found this place that offered a night tour to the Moon Valley. I signed for it without even thinking about it but the joy lasted shortly. When I was about to go out for the tour they called me to say it was cancelled so I had to go anyway to get my money back.

While I was doing that errand, I started following some music I was hearing and got to the town square. There was this band and people dancing. I stayed for a while and didn't understand what was happening.

ON the road back to San Pedro. This is worth everything, right?

The band playing in the town square.

I went back to the hostel to eat some empanadas I bought on the street and sleep, tomorrow will be a big day.

*You can read the original version of this post in Spanish here.