The Atacama Desert is awesome! We stayed in San Pedro de Atacama for 5 days/4 nights, and we packed the days full of tours around the desert. We recommend NOT booking tours online before arriving in San Pedro. You’ll pay a premium for no reason, as the main street in town (Caracoles) has tons of tour offices that you can wander into and they’ll book you on exactly what you want, with no worries about timing. In fact, we visited a tour office at about 4pm the day we arrived and were scheduled for our first tour at 7:30pm that night. It’s cheaper than booking online, and even less if you can pay in cash for the tours. We didn’t have enough to pay in cash, but we still saved about $200 compared to prices we saw online. You will need cash to pay for entrance fees to various national parks and hot springs as they don’t accept credit cards, so keep that in mind.
We booked 5 separate excursions through Atacama Connection, and for 2 people we paid $340,000 pesos (about US$370) for our tours with a credit card (he initially quoted us $420,000 but negotiated down, which felt like a standard part of the process), and $92,000 pesos (about US$100) in cash for entrance fees to 3 parks and 1 hot springs area. It was relatively expensive, but we considered this a “vacation” compared to normal life in the rest of Chile. And after going on the tours, I think they were worth the cost (under $250/person). The tours we selected were stargazing, Piedras Rojas and the Altiplanicas Lagoon, the Rainbow Valley, the Valley of the Moon, and hot springs.
We booked a private room with its own bathroom in a hostel about a 10-minute walk from Caracoles. The hostel had a free breakfast between 7:30-10:00 am, and they offered snack packs to anyone who wasn’t going to be around for the breakfast window. Most days our tours started before breakfast, and there was always a bag waiting for us in the kitchen with juice boxes, sandwiches, yogurt shooters, and stale chocolate wafers. It was a really nice touch.
When we weren’t on tours, I loved walking down Caracoles and the surrounding streets and squares. The area has a beautiful, rustic, desert aesthetic and everyone felt chilled out. We ate out for dinner most nights and I did some light shopping in the cute boutiques and souvenir stores. Overall, it was my favorite part of Chile and I’m so glad we decided to visit.
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