David and Edel

Sand dune in Valle de la Luna.

I think I managed to sleep for 10 of the 11 hours of the bus to San Pedro de Atacama – probably a new record. Atacama is maybe the #1 tourist destination in Chile – the area has similar desert landscapes to east of Copiapo, but with a hundred times more visitors (we hardly saw a soul when we were out in the Nevado de Tres Cruces with Ovideo). San Pedro itself is quite a cute town – it has no reason for being other than tourism, but all buildings are low and blend in quite well with the desert. The driest desert on earth actually – some parts haven’t seen a single drop in the 400 years that we have bothered to keep a record. We took a rest day first (a bit more sleep couldn’t hurt) then got a tour to Valle de la Luna and Valle de la Muerte for the next evening – both very lunar or martian looking landscapes and completely dead. We did some barefoot sand-dune running, a walk through a salt-canyon and then sat down to watch the desert turn red at sundown with views towards the Licancabur volcano.

Tatio geysers.

The next night we went on a tour to a private space observatory run by an eccentric Frenchman – the skies here are some of the clearest on the planet and there are big international observatories competing with each other all along northern Chile, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) recently outdone by the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL) which on top of being bigger also has a more clever acronym! The Frenchman had a collection of different-sized telescopes where we got to look at Jupiter, distant galaxies (one 8 million light years away!), nebulas and other tiny shining dots that become incredibly impressive once you know what you’re looking at. The tour was quite informative, with a cool green laser-pen to point out various constellations, and a funny commentary focusing mostly on how to use astronomy to pick up girls!

Flamingo flying over Laguna Chaxa.

Next day we went to see another collection of salt flats and high-altitude lakes. Salar de Atacama is the worlds 3rd biggest salt lake, but it isn’t as dazzlingly white as the bigger Salar de Uyuni across the border in Bolivia – we saw lots and lots of flamingos though. The high-altitude lakes were Miscanti and Miñiques – strangely cobalt-blue in a landscape of soft reddish pastel-coloured hills. On the way back to San Pedro we stopped at another unexpected dash of colour – a lush green oasis, figs and flowering trees and a small stream of fresh water in the middle of the desert. In the Toconao village next to the oasis a small parade happened to be going on at the same time we were there – brass-band and bored looking school-kids in costumes…and someone at the very end in a thick fur-costume who must have been sweating litres in the desert heat.

One of the Tatio geysers.

Very early start the next day – pickup at 4am to take us to the Tatio geysers. It was very cold to wait around in the desert night for the bus, which then took 2-3 hours to climb up the thermal area at 4300 meters altitude where it was even colder. Until the sun finally rose some half-hour later it was actually very tempting to dip the hands into the 80 degree water the geysers spit out… The geysers actually keep going the whole day, but all the tour operators time it to be here at sunrise since when the air is cool the hot steam from the thermal features is the most spectacular. And spectacular it was – particularly with the early morning sun catching rainbows in some of the bigger geysers. Each geyser runs on a separate schedule – some going 10min then sleeping 40min, some going an hour then sleeping one – the highest was sending water and spray some 30 meters up in the air. Tatio is more active than other thermal areas we’ve been to in other countries, and you can walk around freely with no fences which is nice (this will probably change once one or two more tourists has to take that one extra step too far to get the perfect photo though…fortunately Edel was there to keep an eye on me 😀 ).

Vizcacha in the Atacama desert.

On the way back we visited another hotspring with a bit more comfortable temperature to soak in. I would probably have killed for a dip back when we were waiting around in the cold before sunrise, but now the desert heat had already set in and you would start to get dizzy after a couple minutes. Spotted lots of Vizcacha nearby – it’s a cute fluffy animal that looks like a rabbit-squirrel. One final stop on the way back in another oasis, this one full of giant cactus hundreds of years old along a ravine with a river and several waterfalls running through it. With the air many degrees cooler than in the desert outside, and with a bit of humidity and some oxygen from the plants it was as refreshing as, well, an oasis!

Vicuña in the Atacama desert.

Next we hopped on another monster-bus, 17 hours south, to La Serena – for the next post.

In the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino.

Finally back in South America again. We had kept a fairly high phase travelling and crossing borders for a while, buzzing in and out between Hong Kong, China and Macau, then Japan, Australia, Vanuatu and New Zealand in a short space of time…getting a bit tired of taking flights and filling in customs forms. Now it’s time to slow down – no fixed dates on the itinerary for nearly six months until the end of March. The long sliver of land that makes up Chile will be our home for the next two months. We’re starting in the middle, somewhat awkwardly, as the country is as long as from Norway to Niger, but will make one return journey from Santiago to the deserts of the north first, waiting for spring to arrive before making our way through the forests and fjords of the south towards Tierra del Fuego and eventually crossing in to Argentina.

Abandoned car in the desert.

We landed in Santiago with the worst jetlag of our life after the 11 hour flight… I never used to get jetlag at all but travelling east is always worse as you loose hours. Also I think it might have something to do with the entertainment kits on the airplanes being too good now with a hundred movies to pick from so you don’t sleep.. We arrived in the morning, slept the whole day, most of the night, then until 5pm the next day again. During the 4 days we stayed in Santiago we managed to at least visit one museum though, a very nice one with pre-Columbian art. It had many artefacts from places we visited on the last trip like Chavin and Tiwanacu – including some of the few gold pieces that escaped the conquistadores. It’s great fun to be back in South America after so long in Asia, for example the different attitude towards public affection….we saw a spectacular makeout session in a cafe in Santiago during one of our first days, and even more funny they were actually part of the staff!

Laguna Verde at 4500m altitude.

From Santiago we got a 12 hour day-bus north, and just after dark we arrived in Copiapo which is the loudest place on earth (Chile had just won some sort of important football-thing..). Copiapo lies just at the southern edge of the big deserts – the Atacama stretch on for the next thousand kilometers north – and through the hostel we found a driver who could take us up towards the salt-flats and the altiplano the next day. Ovideo picked us up at 8am, and being a very competent desert driver he had already whisked us up to another four kilometers in altitude by an hour before noon. Between gasping for air we looked out at guanacos and vicuñas and reddish hills and mountains stained in a rainbow of colours from different minerals…browns, reds, green for copper, yellow, orange, and grey on the high Ojos de Salado volcano. On the lower hills before entering Parque Nacional Nevado de Tres Cruces we passed some abandoned settlements and several copper mines (Chile is the worlds biggest exporter). We stopped for lunch by a mirror-blank Laguna Santa Rosa, full of flamingoes, at one end of the much bigger Salar de Maricunga salt flat. Climbing on towards the Argentinian border later we reached an even more stunning lake – Laguna Verde at 4500 meters – with a radiant bright green-blue hue it’s the most spectacularly coloured high-altitude lake we’ve seen anywhere. It’s a real other-worldly place, the air thin and biting cold, the lake surrounded by bright white salt-crusts with an equally bright-white mummified cow completing the eerie scene.

Naturally mummified cow by Laguna Verde.

Cactus in the mist.

We decided to go on another trip with Ovideo the next day – to explore a national park on the coast instead. But first he took us to try out his new truck in the big sand dunes north of Copiapo. He knew all the tricks – emptying out most of the air from the tires first for better grip – then when we left the road again refilling them from a spare tire on the back he’d pumped to double pressure beforehand. Great fun going up and down the huge dunes, like an improvised roller coaster without a track! There was a bit of fog hanging over the desert landscape in the morning as well, so we could see even less where we were going. When we were done laughing we set off along the coast, towards the Parque Nacional Pan de Azucar. Ovideo stopped in a small fishing village on the way to buy himself a couple of the Conger Eels that you see on every menu in Chile – delivering us another round of laughter watching a big group of pelicans fight for the pieces as the fisherman skinned the fish. The man saved the best leftover cuts for his cat though.

Desert fox in the Pan de Azucar national park.

Into the park next – a strange landscape of yellow hills and cactus which seemed out of place covered in fog and being right on the coast. From a second viewpoint we were looking down from sea-cliffs 700 meters high but couldn’t even see the ocean below, with wave after wave of thick cloud sweeping in over the cliff to cover us in a fine mist. Cactus and fog makes a surreal combination. We stayed for a while, fighting the temptation to share our sandwiches with a cute desert fox, and watching the tall cactus around us appear and disappear into the fog.

Flowering desert.

On the way back to Copiapo we stopped in a place where the coastal desert had come alive with a thousand flowers in different colours. Desierto florido is a special phenomenon here, happening every 4-8 years, where the whole desert wakes up for a brief moment in spring – I’m not sure if this is a good year or not, but this particular spot at least was very nice.

From Copiapo we headed on deeper into the desert to San Pedro de Atacama, for the next post.

In the Caleta Pan de Azucar fishing village.