Thanks to everyone who suggested a trip to the Atacama when I'm in Chile next March. Is it easy to go there and make arrangements on the fly or should I book a tour ahead of time? I'm relatively independent, but slightly lazy and my Spanish is a little primitive. If you went there on a tour, did you like the tour company you used?
Thanks
Acprincess
Atacama tour
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You need to book your flight to Calama as soon as possible in order to get a good price. You also need to book lodging if you want a choice. The tours can be chosen once you are there. Cosmo Andino and Cactus are good. All medium priced lodging can arrange the tours and the high end hotels do their own tours.
Thanks for the info - you just saved me some money.
I just came back from Chile. I had pre-booked my tour is due to limited time, but it's easy to book excursions once you were there. There are many competing companies and prices looked pretty good. My excursions were with Turistour. I do NOT recommend Turistour. They were subcontracted to buy our travel agent chile travel tours, we did not choose them ourselves. They were consistently extremely late picking us up from the hotel, wasting much of our vacation time. Only one of their guides was friendly and helpful and spoke great English (Derek) the other three guides we had were mediocre, even to the point of rudeness. And three out of four meals they failed to provide vegetarian as we had requested in advance.