MONDAY 31st July
San Pedro de Atacama.
After the best nights sleep either of us have had for weeks we strolled into breakfast around 9am and then the group met at ten.
The plan was to walk nearly 3km to an archaeological ruin.
We weren't interested but I had already worked out that there was a geocache nearby so we went on the group walk. Our guide got lost momentarily bringing us along a gravel river bank to get us back on track. As we approached the ruin I checked my map to realise that we'd missed our turn off. The others all paid to enter the site and we walked back 400m and turned off up another road. A short climb later and we were on top of a hill with a neat view over San Pedro de Atacama, geocache in hand.
Lindsey cleaning out the geojunk from the geocache.
San Pedro de Atacama in the middle distance with the Andes on the horizon.
Rather dry around here!
Behind us across the valley we could see the rest of our group climbing a ridge to another view point on a higher hill.
We continued making a circular walk back to San Pedro to head for one more cache. We passed an artisan market and found some gifts for the five girls in our lives. On to the cache and a nice shaded seat. Initially we couldn't find it. We checked some spoiler photos and Lindsey scratched about a bit more and when she did I glimpsed something out of context and hey presto there was the cache, well buried.
It turned out that this was a cache that was placed back in March and then supposedly went missing as there was only one signature in the log. Another cache had replaced this one which had been found by many but now that one seemed to have disappeared. We found two trackables which we rescued. The owner of one emailed me to thank me for finding it. He thought that it had long gone.
Cache reburied and we went back to the hotel for a light lunch supplemented with a couple of beers that I'd had stashed away in my luggage for quite a while.
We had an Internet and snoozing time in the sun for the rest of the afternoon.
Off to dinner at 7:30 after a briefing about tomorrow. Just four of us without our guide. We found a set menu for 10,000 pesos (20 kiwi). Soup followed by a spaghetti dish with calamari filled with seasoned lamb mince. An unusual combination but it did work. To end our meal we were given a chocolate brownie each.
Our guide told us that we won't get into Salta until between 8 and 10 pm tomorrow so we decided to go to the money exchange tonight to get some Argentinian pesos. More maths to get my head around. About 12 of their pesos to our dollar instead of 500 pesos in Chile.
Back to the ranch to hit the sack just after ten.
Alarm set for 6:50.
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