Dream vacation in Chile and our local special...

Chile | Sep 8 - Sep 14, 2023

Great location, truly wonderful staff, and immaculate. It's a bit bare bones, but very comfortable and I would certainly recommend La Cochera to anyone visiting San Pedro.

The room was very large, consisting of a bedroom, walk-in closet, large sitting room, and bathroom. The bed was comfortable. The bathroom could have been a bit cleaner - the grout and bathroom fixtures looked a little worse for wear. The location was okay. We're walkers and it felt like a fairly long one to get to any of the neighborhoods/sites we wanted to see. We did end up taking cars several times which is unusual for us. Breakfast was good and the staff was friendly. I was allowed to check into my room a bit early, which was greatly appreciated as I was exhausted after a long day of travel. The overall vibe was a bit generic - it just didn't have a lot of personality or charm, but we were perfectly comfortable.

We had a wonderful guide who was extremely knowledgeable and gave us an insider's flavor for the city. We surely would not have gotten anywhere near the sense of the city that we got had we just walked about on our own.

This was a life changing experience. It is hard to describe how truly incredible the night sky is in Atacama. We were picked up promptly from our hotel. Initially there was some confusion because we were told that the tour would be in English, and when we were picked up the driver only spoke Spanish. However, when we arrived at the destination the actual guides spoke Spanish and English. There were about 20-25 people participating, and we were broken up into three groups - those of us taking the tour in English were one group and the other two groups were Spanish speaking. The groups took turns at the three stations. Our groups' first station was the snack station, where our guide told us about the indigenous peoples' relationship to the stars, and about various constellations. There was a fire. It was lovely. We then went to the photography station. They had a very high-tech camera set up so everyone was able to get a photograph that depicted how the sky looked - something regular cameras surely would not have been able to pick up. Finally, we went to the station that had a couple of high-powered telescopes. We looked at Saturn (you could see the rings using the telescope), and this was the most science-heavy part of the tour. We learned about why different stars are different colors, how they are formed and die, etc. Honestly the sky was so incredible on its own that I would have been happy sitting in a field just looking at it, but the tour added some much-appreciated context that made the experience even more special.