San Pedro de Atacama is a lively little town with plenty of nice bars and restaurants. Our best night, however, led us far away from it all. Far from the nightlife but close to the stars.
Northern Chile is renowned for its exceptionally clear skies perfect for stargazing. The air is very dry and there is no light pollution whatsoever outside of San Pedro, so the nightly spectacle one can admire here is impossible to see in any city, or anywhere in Europe, for that matter. In fact, the largest telescope on Earth (Project ALMA) is currently being built some 50 km west of San Pedro de Atacama. So we decided to take advantage of these natural conditions and set up a star gazing escapade. During the planning phase our group suddenly grew from original two members to six – new friends we met in our hostel decided to join us.
A couple of kilometers from San Pedro there are P-Columbian ruins on a large hill. And a little above the ruins there is a great viewpoint. We decided that this would be the perfect place to watch the sunset and observe the stars. Although there are guards and opening hours for the entry to the ruins and the viewpoint, we were told in our hostel that we should just talk to the guards and there would be no problem staying up at the viewpoint after closing hours.
We dressed very very VERY warmly (see Marc`s post on the weather in San Pedro), we took a big thermos with hot water, and pocket lamps.
Unfortunately the guards at the entrance were not quite as sympathetic to our plan as we had anticipated. They were not willing to accommodate us in any way. And it was too late to look for another spot for our stargazing. I am a law-abiding citizen so if I were alone with Marc I would probably have convinced him to postpone the outing. But our friends were determined to proceed as originally planned and they easily convinced me.
We climbed to the top of the hill, set up our mini-camp and waited for the night, hoping that the guards wouldn’t chase us up the hill. Finally the night came and it was as magnificent as we had imagined. The sky was absolutely beautiful, the Milky Way was clearly visible, and we could see millions and millions of stars if we only raised our heads.
Although we had no professional astronomer with us, we could still find lots of constellations and some planets thanks to SkyMap on my tablet (thank you, Google!!). We even tried our luck with basic astrophotography. See the results for yourselves.
After a few hours of this stellar experience, we decided that it was time go back home. The trek in the night back downhill was not half as hard as we had thought. The biggest challenge was to keep the lights and noise to a minimum, in order not to alert the guards of our presence. On our way back downhill, we thought about the worst thing that could happen to us for breaking the rules. The majority of the group thought a cordon of carabinieros waiting for us at the gate would be the worst outcome. I, on the other hand, thought the worst possibility would be if the guards at closing time had unleashed bloodthirsty dogs to search the terrain for stubborn tourists :)
Fortunately, none of these scenarios came true. After the descent we arrived at the locked gate. Trying to use the least light possible, we all climbed one by one over the fence and quickly disappeared from the crime scene.
Once we could all breathe freely, we unanimously decided that all the effort was totally worth it. Personally, I consider this night as one of the best adventures I’ve experienced during our trip. It was a perfect mixture of adventure, science and good company :)
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