. HULAgans And Horses Ijust returned from a seve n - day trip to the Atac– ama Desert. Now you may be asking yourself, "What is there to do in the desert for a week?" First, our group flew into Caiama, Chile on the [May] 22nd and drove an hour and a half to a small tourist town called San Pedro de Atacama to stay at a hotel. San Pedro is built in mainly adobe style buildings and the streets are just made of dirt and dust. The town runs on a lower power level than the rest of Chile due to its lot:ation. [Because of thi s] , sometimes at night there are no street lights lit to see where you are walking and [there are] even occasional power outages. Since cars rarely pass through, all the tourists just walk in the narrow streets. The first day there we met our guide for the week named Patricio , but we called him by his nickname, " Pato," the Spanish word for duck. Pato was a 40 year- old guy who grew up in the Atacama Desert and was over-zealous about sharing all the "facts" he knew about the Atacama with us . The [third] day there, we were given the option of sandboarding or horseback riding. I chose to sandboard since I had n eve r done it before (another great first time experience in Chile) . I was pretty nervous, but it turned out to b e an awesome experi 40 student li fe ence! We (12 o f the 16 HULAgans and PalO) drove out of San Ped ro about 30 minutes to ge t to the sand dunes. We climbed up an enormous sand dune that was really steep on one side and shorter and shallower on the other. Most of the group including myself started off sandboat"d ing on the shorter side because we were scared of tumbling down the steep [slope]. The first couple of times down, I fell before I made it to the bottom. Falling didn't hurt as much as I thought it would sine, the sa nd has some give to it. After some tips fr om some of the guys and Pato, I managed to go d own the shorter side twice without falling. It was really fun watching everyone sa nd – board in our group , espeCially some of the guys who weren' t scared of painfully rolling down th e dun e after falling. My last time to go down before we left was a good solid wipeout: sand went everywhere as I bounced and tumbled arou nd and then came to a sto p. I loved sandboarding! The last day before we left was a free day so many of us chose to go horseback riding. Dr. [Tim] Baird and several other students had gone earlier in the week and liked their guide Bernardo so they reserved his horses again for our last free day. My horse's name was Almendra meaning almond in Spanish. We had two guides , Be rnat"do and David , and aQout 12 H UlAgans r iding as we ll as Dr. Baird. My horse started out in the b ack and we rode out of town into the wide-open desert, which at this point was really rocky but fIat. " Soon after we started, Dustin [Smith] decided he wanted to take off his sweatshirt because it was get– ting really hot. H e asked Kalin [Caruthers]' who was on her horse next to his" to take his backpack while he attempted to get his sweatshirt off. As he passed his backpack over, Kalin's hOl"Se was startled by [see ing the backpack] and started to go crazy. Before I ,"ealized what was happening from the back, Kalin's ho rse was turned around and frantically [moving] side to side and up and down. Kalin was trying to hop ofT the hOl"Se as best she could wh en the hOl"Se ended up throwing her off and amaZingly she stuck a IO-point landing on her feet ! Everyone was concerned and worried about Kalin, but thankfully she wasn't really htu"t. After telling Kalin to get back on her horse, Bel'– nardo informed the group in Spanish that the horse was startled by the backpack and that no one sho uld pass things back and forth or take things ofTwhile thei r horsewas moving. We were all relieved tha t Kalin didn't fall on the rocky ground ... I've got to say she looked like a real rodeo cowgirl on that crazy horse! Julia PeHy
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