San Pedro is an oasis village, just north of the Atacama desert. We enjoyed some beautiful desert scenery on our horse riding trek.

The sunset tour of the Valley of the Moon was also interesting. The valley was so named because the landscape resembled that of the moon. We stopped by at the Death Valley - when explorers first visited the place, they said it resembled Mars. The locals had never heard of Mars and thought the explorers said "mueres", meaning death... and the name stuck and has since been called Valle de Muerte, or Death Valley.

Our guide told us a beautiful story about the volcanoes:

All the mountains that we see around us are volcanoes - in Spanish, volcanoes are male (el volcan). There is one exception, Mount Kima in the distance - la montana, the Spanish word for mountain, is female.

Licancabur, the conic volcano, was jealous of his brother's love of Kima. In a rage of jealousy, he decapitated his brother, which is the adjacent volcano flattened at the top, without its conic cap. Their father (an active volcano, which erupts once a year spewing ashes and gases) was furious with the incident and banished Kima to faraway lands - hence the distance between Kima and the rest of the volcanoes. However, one summer solstice some years back, the sun threw the shadow of Kima on Licancabur's brother, and for a brief moment the 2 lovers were once again reunited.