Sand Salt Stone and Scenery

One more wonderful overnight bus journey sees us arrive at San Pedro de Atacama at 7.30 am. One of the benefits of arriving so early in the morning is that you awake to see the landscape emerge out of the dawn. I think that I had always thought of deserts of being big sandy things - but this one is more a massive expanse of shale that has been ground down by who knows what forces. This is the only benefit of arriving in a new town so early as it very cold and it seems as if any place for a cup of coffee is shut down until doomsday.

San Pedro isn’t that high up, only about 2500m, but it is between 2 main mountain ranges that rise to over 4000m. It almost never rains here, but it does manage to get some water from the snow melt and underground springs off the mountains. So, from time to time you come across some wonderful small oases or patches of very fertile valleys.



But most of the time it is very desolate.

The main town is a delightful grid of very traditional adobe houses. Some of them are whitewashed, whilst others are the colour of the natural clay that they use from the ground. The outside of the houses tend to be very stark on the outside - almost forbidding - but give on to wonderful courtyards. Once again there is no heating in any of the buildings other than fires that are lit at night.










During the day it is beautifully sunny and quite warm so long as you stay in direct sunlight. Indeed, you even have to be careful not to burn. Both Brett and I are managing to get back a bit of the tans that have become less and less obvious the further South and into the winter we go! But it is absolutely freezing at night and we are VERY grateful for the fact that our B&B has electric blankets on the beds.

We are only here for a couple of days so we press on and arrange to join a couple of tours into the desert and up into the mountains. I really want to go to see the geysers, but as this is a dawn outing Brett declines to accompany me (which is just as well as it turns out).

Our first trip takes us out for the day to visit the salt flats in the valley. In the way back whens, the tectonic plates shifted and pushed up the two mountain ranges with a valley in the middle. The sediment and water that settled in the valley soon evaporated in the unrelenting sunshine and left a salt flat 100km x 80km in the middle of the desert.

Salar de Atacama (Salt lake)

The only things that manage to survive on the flats are 3 species of flamingo (which makes it a flamingo nature reserve), a couple of rodents and a few micro-organisms that they all eat. It was fascinating to walk across the flat and to see the thick layer of salt that is there. There are a few mining companies that take borax, lithium and potassium out of the salt; but in the main it is left for the tourists to appreciate.






Away from the salt flats there is a bit more life to be seen and we pass llamas, vicunas, different birds and there are some Alpaca lurking but we didn’t see them.





We meander higher into the mountain until we reach a couple of lakes that are amongst the highest in Chile. The air is so clear and the colours and perspectives are so breathtaking that my camera doesn't even begin to do it justice.

It's not frozen yet - but it soon will be.



At this height the snow never completely melts. This snow is still left over from last year's snowfall as it hasn't snowed here yet this winter.

Not quite the top of the world - but it sure feels like it.

As we are now over 4500 metres from sea level we notice the lack of oxygen in the air and even a short walk takes an inordinate amount of energy. It is amazing that people live a this altitude - but they do.

Some even manage away from the villages.

Farming at 3000m+.

Room with a view?

In fairness, there aren’t many villages and the populations are quite small, but they are thriving communities in their way, although it is difficult to see how they make a living. There is some land that has been organized for agriculture, but the landscape doesn’t lend itself to mass production. The llamas and alpacas provide wool, milk and meat as well; so in the main life here harks back to earlier times.

The next day I leave Brett snoring gently at 3.50am while I lurk on the street waiting for a minibus to pick me up for a dawn trip to the geysers at Tatio; apparently, they blow best at dawn. Which is a pity because they are 98km away and this means a 2 hour trip in the bus starting at 4.00am. Although it is cold when I get up, this is nothing to how cold it gets as we once more climb over 4000m. The bus trip is a dark, shaky, noisy and uncomfortable experience that Brett would have found unbearable. The only reason that anyone does it is to be able to see the Geysers, and even so I get close to wondering if it is really worth it!

However, arriving at Tatio just as dawn breaks is amazing. Located in the crater of an inactive volcano, there are little jets of steam that get bigger as the sun rises, and you can hear the geysers begin to bubble louder and louder until they start to steam and run over the ground - melting the ice that has frozen overnight. The limescale that has accumulated over so many years as the geysers erupt makes little mini volcanoes everywhere and the limescale patterns in the rising sun are quite beautiful. The guide tells us that they are just about to turn this area into a thermo-power station. I suspect that the gain of power will more than compensate for the loss of this tourist attraction because at the moment locals are very dependent on a very limited and inconsistent supply of electricity. Having something more reliable and local should help their future development no end. (They might even have enough energy to put some heating in their homes at last!)

Just beginning to steam before the dawn.


Soon they are in full blow.


Once the sun is fully up they settle down again.


Beautiful limescale patterns.

Anyone for a nice volcanic mud pack?

Once the sun comes up it is just about warm enough to strip down to swimming costumes and jump into the thermal pool that is fed by the same source as the geysers. It is a very strange sensation swimming about in a pool as little jets of boiling hot water bubble up from the bottom. If you aren’t careful and your feet happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time then it can be quite uncomfortable; although not as dicey as having to get out of the water to get dressed as the temperature only just begins to hit 0 degrees.

At around 9am we head back down the mountain. This time it is daylight so now I can at least see how bad the road is that we are driving down. I use the word ‘road’ very loosely as it is really only a dirt mountain track! Our driver is very good at pointing out various bits of wildlife so I can see some more llamas, birds and the funniest little rabbits that you can imagine - because they eat the cacti that are the only things that grow at this height they are GREEN. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.

Notice the green hue?

Wild llamas.

Ice-walking birds.

One more village at 4000m+ is very traditional. With the houses all made from local stones and straw roofs. I suspect that they are not equipped with many of today's mod cons.





4000m+
Tourists come through this pueblo every day so I wonder if this helps them to be viable? There doesn't seem to be much else keeping to keep them going.

Even at this height the church takes pride of place.

The bus that made it up the hill one last time.

Gathering water from the mountain stream.

We get back to the town at midday and Brett is just about awake enough to enjoy my tale of the morning and to appreciate the fact that he didn’t come along for the ride.

The afternoon sees us join another trip that takes us into the Valley of Death and Moon Valley! I never really did understand why the first bit was called the valley of Death because it was really just a very, very desolate valley that was a bit of a cheat really as it had been man-made by some bloke who needed a road into his mining works. It was amazing to be able to see the layers underneath the rocks that are all around - and there were a couple of great dunes in the middle of it. I am sure that it wouldn’t be the cleverest thing to get stuck there in the middle of a summer day - but Death Valley felt like an overstatement.













Moon Valley is so called as the landscape is supposed to be as desolate as it is on the moon. I haven’t been to the moon (maybe for our next trip) but it could be pretty close to it. There is a lot of quartz here and, if you stand quietly enough as the sun goes down and the temperature changes, you can hear it crack.

I have never been to the such a place before - it is truly breathtaking most of the time.

Despite this we feel that it is time to move on from Chile and decide to make a break for the border tomorrow. We take the shorter bus ride to the closest town, Calama, in the hope of being able to take a day bus to the border. Unfortunately, there aren’t any buses leaving until the evening and so we have an 8 hour wait in one of the sorriest looking towns you have ever seen. It is predominantly a mining town, so there is some money here, but it is very shabby and could almost be Bedminster; only in the desert and 4 times as big which prompts Brett to rename it Calamity. We do manage to find the local shopping mall and thank our stars for globalisation as we sink into some very comfy cinema seats to while away a couple of hours watching Gran Torino (which, by the way, I found very depressing even if Clint did have a great time making it).

We have to take the bus to Arica which is 16km south of the Peruvian border. From there we are squeezed into a collective taxi with 2 other people and driven to Tacna which is 20km the other side of the border. Although it feels a bit strange traveling this way, in fact it works really well because the driver knows exactly what everyone has to do at the border and he patiently takes us all through so that we are soon whizzing our way through our first bit of Peru.