Well as you can tell by the title I am still in Chile. So I guess when I said I would only have one blog post in Chile I was lying. Mother nature decided it would be better for us to stay in San Pedro instead of going to Salta, Argentina according to our original schedule.
So we were supposed to leave on Sunday morning at 9 30, but due to the weather in the mountains the bus left in a convoy at six o'clock in the morning and we were not informed of this change in plans, so we of course missed the bus.
Now it wasn't only us in this predicament, one of the guys that we met on the salt flats tour whose also travelling through bamba was stuck in San Pedro with us. So we decided to make the best of it and we booked an astronomy tour for Monday night and booked a ticket to catch the next bus to Salta on Tuesday. This little hiccup had no real effect on our itinerary so no big deal.
Well....that didn't work our either. Our Monday night astronomy tour was cancelled due to clouds, becuase we wouldn't be able to see anything anyways. And Tuesday morning rolls around and we found out those same clouds thats caused our tour to be cancelled also made it snow in the mountains. This snow made it so the road was blocked and the border to be closed. So once again, no bus to Salta and we are still in San Pedro.
So with this new information and this making a bit of a dent in our itinerary we started to look at other options. Flights and other busses and what not. But in the end we decided to wait for the next bus to Salta, which is Thursday.
So once again we booked the astronomy tour and decided to wait it out until Thursday.
Our original plan had us in San Pedro for three days. If we are able to get the bus to Salta on Thursday we will have been here a whole week. Now San Pedro is a small town and there is not much to do here so there has been quite a bit of just hanging out, visiting, soaking up the sun and reading. Which I'm not complaining about, it helping me get over my cold. Alyssa and I however have pulled out one of my mom's moves and decided to go shopping to pass some time. Haha I have spent a bit if money and bought lots of souviners. My backpack is so full and I still have one country left! But I will make it work.
On Tuesday night we did an astronomy tour which was amazing. It started with a brief history about astronomy and some interesting facts. 40% of the astronomical information in the world is gathered in Chile. Not far from San Pedro, about a half hour away, they are currently building a huge telescope field consisting of radio telescopes and an optic telescope that will have a reflector that is 25m in diameter! These are some of the cool things we learned from the tour.
We also got to look through a telescope and see stars, a nebulous, cumuls, both old and new ones, and we also got to see Saturn. It was so cool to get to see these things! We also got to find and look at constellations. We started with the Southern Cross, which is like their equivelant to our Northern Star. We used the Southern Cross as the starting point for every other constellation we found. We found a half horse, half man constellation as well as a scorpion. We also got some snacks and we tried to take some pictures. It was such a great tour and I'm really glad we did it. It was really interesting and so neat to see everything through a telescope that good.
I started to write this yesterday so that's why the start says in still in Chile, but as I type I am on a bus to Salta (finally!). We just departed so hopefully everything goes well on the trip that we have been so patiently waiting for haha.
Some thing I've noticed about being in South America is there lack of a concept for time. Evrything is late and people say ten minutes and half an hour later still nothing. I gotta say though that South America time is way worse then Sidloski time haha, but since I'm used to Sidloski time its helped me cope with the way worse South America time that seems to get on people nerves pretty easily.
Chile has been fun. Even though our stay was extented, twice, and we had to jump through some hoops and stand in line early in the morning for over two hours to get on this bus, I still enjoyed San Pedro and getting to experiance it.
Chile has been quite an adventure, and now I'm looking forward to Argentina!