Going on the advice of many travelers we headed to San Pedro de Atacama in the Atacama desert (the driest in the world) after Vina del Mar. It was a 24hr bus ride to Calama and then an hour bus ride to San Pedro. We arrivied in San Pedro (population 5000) around 11pm and started looking for a place to stay. There were two people behind us with packs like ours, so I asked them if they knew where they were staying, they said no and we decided to look together. Their names were Alex (a girl from France) and Serigo (a guy from Mexico), they are both studying in Santiago and traveling together on winter vacation. San Pedro was starting to shut down when we got there and everywhere we asked, no one had any empty rooms. It was frustrating and cold and a bit scary when someone told us this happens a lot and travelers have to sleep on the street for a night. Somehow we found a nice old man with a full hostel who called around to all the other hostels to see if any had an extra room. No one did. Alex, Serigo and I walked around the town until about 1am while Megan and Ricky stayed back with our packs in the reception area of the hostel of the nice man. We had no luck finding anything and by the time 2am rolled around the nice man wanted to go to bed and then did a very Latin American thing, he ¨found¨ us somewhere to stay. It was a storage room with lots of beds and blankets. It wasn´t the nicest place, but boy did that bed feel good after a day of sitting on a bus.
While falling asleep, I thought about Mary and Joseph and no room in the inn...
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