San Pedro de Atacama – Day 3 (Post #112)
Thursday, May 4th, 2006Michele here….writing about our last day in San Pedro de Atacama. We got up this day (April 25th) at 3:15am in order to take a 2-hour bus ride to El Tatio Geothermal Field, which sits at an elevation of 14, 256 feet. When we signed up for this tour yesterday it took us a while to understand that the guy at the agency was telling us to avoid eating red meat and drinking alcohol because the elevation was so high. As I have mentioned before there is almost no English spoken in Chile and this concept (about avoiding alcohol and red meat due to the high altitude) was difficult to grasp in Spanish.
We arrived at the geiser field just as the sky was getting light. I definitely underestimated how cold it was going to be at this place and my hands were numb and I was freezing until the sun came up. Despite how cold we were, we both thought the geiser field was awesome. We walked around taking pictures for about 45 minutes before being served breakfast. The breakfast included, among other things, of hard boiled eggs that were boiled for about 20 minutes in one of the 600 geisers in the field. Here are a couple of pre-dawn pictures. The first is of the geiser field and the second is of us in front of a geiser spewing out boiling hot water:
Michele Harmon