Full disclosure: we're back home now, but I figured that I'd update the blog about our last week in Chile anyhow.

Sunday - At Tierra Atacama, excursions are a big part of the experience. Each day you can choose from 2 half-day excursions or one full-day excursion. Today we did two.

In the morning we took a short van ride to Valle de la Luna, a protected area with some amazing geology. Together with our guide Leo and fellow adventurer Richard, we overlooked the "Death Valley", an amazing area of dunes and ridges. Apparently it really was meant to be called "Mars Valley" but the spanish word for Mars (Marte) and Death (Muerte) were mixed up by some european cartographer at some point. Mars valley is a better name. Pictures are worth 1000 words here. After this vista, we took a walk through a salt canyon, which is a small canyon and cave system where the walls are completely comprised of salt, worn glass-smooth in many places.

At 4 that afternoon we started our 2nd excursion, a long drive south to the salt flats, where there are a bunch of flamingos. Along the way we stopped at a small town called Toconao. There was an old church with a roof made of cactus wood. Turns out cacti have wood inside of them! Buildings in this part of the world are all either adobe bricks or cut stone. We fed some llamas some dried seed pods, which they didn't like and they spit on us. Ella found an adorable puppy as well.

The salt flats were fairly unimpressive. They looked kind of like the salt flats in death valley, except there were flamingos.

Monday - We chose to book only a morning excursion today so that we could spend the afternoon relaxing at the hotel's indoor pool. The morning excursion was pretty great though - we took a short hike (again with our guide Leo from the previous morning) called the "Cornices Hike". The hike took us up above the rim of Death[Mars] Valley, and then over to a big sand dune. This dune had a very steep angle and about 250ft of vertical drop, and was absolutely perfect for glissading down. In fact, this is an area that people practice Sand-Boarding on. We just went in our socks (the sand was too hot for bare feet!), and it was an absolute blast. One of the highlights of the trip for sure. Ryan and Ella absolutely loved it, and tried to climb back up for more.

Tuesday - Today we did two excursions: In the morning I did a hike up the Puritama creek up to some hot springs. Stacy and the kids took a van ride and met me there. The hike was really nice, about 5km along a beautiful gorge, with some interesting old dwellings and corrals made of stone. The hot springs were great - not all that hot (maybe 90-95) but that's ok because it was pretty hot out anyways. Lots of fun waterfalls and pools to explore.

In the afternoon Ryan and I took a bike ride (Stacy and Ella vanned) to the Cejar Lagoon. This is a lagoon in which the water is so salty that in greatly increases the density of the water, and makes you much more buoyant. The bike ride was pretty uneventful but Ryan loved it - I don't know whether it was just because he was in need of some exercise or if he had fun chatting it up about Harry Potter with our guide, Francesca.  The salt lagoons were really awesome, floating in them was a blast. You just lean back and feel totally supported by the water, it's really fun. The downside is that the salt is a major skin irritant - especially for our poor skin which was so dry and chafed from the dry air and bike ride. Ryan was hurting pretty bad from it.

That night we met up at dinner with a Canadian family that was staying at the same resort. We had a great time chatting it up with them - it was a nice change of pace to have some new conversations. We stayed up way too late though, because the next day...

Wednesday- We had to get up at 4:30AM to start the long drive to the Tatio Geysers. This is a volcanic area high up in the mountains (above 14,000ft) east of San Pedro. The car ride made all of us but Stacy a bit queasy, and the altitude sealed the deal. All 3 of us puked up at the top, which made the trip somewhat miserable. We did get to see some interesting volcanic activity (similar to Lassen Natl. Park), and these neat animals called a Viscacha, which looks like a hare but is more closely related to the Chinchilla, and hops like a kangaroo. Pretty neat animals.

On the way back we saw some llamas, which I learned on this trip were domesticated from the Guanaco.

We spent the rest of the afternoon at the pool, which seems to be the best part of any vacation for the kids...hmm....

Thursday - Time to go home! Oh wait, but first lets go horseback riding. Stacy and the kids took a short horseback riding trip while I stayed back and packed up the room (horses and I don't get along). Right as we're leaving to catch the shuttle to the Calama airport however, Stacy gets an email telling us our flight is canceled. Oh, great, what a nice way to start our journey. I have to hand it to Tierra Atacama's staff however, they stayed on the phone with LAN airlines figuring out how to get us on another flight that would make our connection in Santiago. The staff at this hotel was stellar. We ended up getting to Santiago about 3.5 hours later than we thought we would, but luckily we still had enough time to transfer to the international terminal and catch our American Airlines flight to Miami. The rest of the journey was uneventful, and we arrived back in Folsom mid-day on Friday.