Did you know...

...San Pedro de Attacama has the driest desert in the world?

The next day Brooke, Tony and I hired bicycles and rode out to the Valle de Luna (Moon Valley). We reached the valley by sunset, after Tony and I got ourselves incredibly lost for an hour and forty minutes crawling through underground tunnels and caves (that is a completely separate story. I thought we might bump into Osama Bin Laden in our underground adventures, but nay, no such rendez vous took place…maybe our aussie accents scared him off. It’s remarkable how much the San Pedro caves resemble Taliban territory though, rather than a bunch of tourist caves. The ‘path’ was either a tunnel, that you had to crawl through on your belly with a headlight, or a line of dusty footprints that wound over jagged terrain. It felt as though we were entering Tom Robbin’s clockworks. Real explorers!). We watched a concoction of peaches and sugar boil up in the sky. Later, as the sun sunk lower, the ambrosial dessert of heaven magically transformed into an egg-white and apricot purée. We were the last to leave and we rode back to San Pedro in the dark.

As we rode back, I thought again about my fear of falling. I had stepped and leapt over numerous crevices in the caves. But sometimes I was so paralyzed with fear that I simply couldn’t do it, despite my brain ordering my legs to move. I’m not sure if I’ve already said this, but I’ve concluded that when you are so afraid of falling, ultimately you probably will, because the fear seeps down into your legs and either turns them into jelly, or into two stiff poles. And legs like that won’t carry you where you want to go or even hold you upright.

Back in San Pedro, we got tipsy on pisco sours and filled our bellies with hot food. I don’t remember a time when I had been as tired as I was that night. The minute my head hit the pillow, I was (Itay, Omri and Amir, please excuse my terrible Hebrew spelling) mahook. Gone.