The Atacama Desert
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009South America – what a continent! (Please excuse me while I gush like a child for a paragraph.) In many debates over the years with Wendy or other travellers, I have tended to choose Asia as my preferred continent for overland travel (especially if I get to include so-called ‘West Asia’- the Middle East – as part of Asia), given the extraordinary diversity of people, cultures and religions, unmatched by any other continent and, indeed, it would still be unmatched even if you could combine all the other continents together. But what South America lacks in diversity of peoples it more than makes up for in diversity of landscape. And it’s not just that it ticks all the landscape variety boxes – jungles, deserts, beaches, mountains etc – but it seems that everywhere you look on this continent there are natural phenomena that you just don’t see anywhere else: here, pink-purple-and-orange rock hills; there, geysers rising to the surface from rivers running underneath the world’s driest desert; over there, miles and miles of crystal salt flats; now look, dinosaur fossils, etc etc.
And so it has been for us over the past few days. Travelling over the Andes from the magical Quebrada de Humahuaca in Argentina on Thursday, we saw llamas, vicuñas and flamingos from the bus windows and drove past active volcanoes, through blinding white salt plains and alongside bright yellow mountains. We crossed the Chilean border in the afternoon and promptly arrived in hot, dusty and infrastructure-lacking San Pedro de Atacama, a small oasis town in the Atacama desert and an unusual introduction to the most politically stable and economically prosperous country in the Western Hemisphere south of the United States. I didn’t think much of San Pedro, which virtually only exists for tourists, and was a bit cynical at first of joining the hordes in taking minivan tours throughout the surrounding countryside, the type of travel that we normally eschew if possible. But I need not have worried at all – the desertscape was spectacular and the three tours we did (even the one that departed at 4am) were all very worthwhile.
Our first trip was the sunset tour to the Valle de la Luna, which I feared might be like sunrise at Poon Hill in Nepal or Mt. Bromo on Java – nice, but with too many other tourists around to really allow you to enjoy the nature. But fortunately it wasn’t like this at all; the view from the sunset lookout of jagged hills, deep grey sand, and little canyons was truly spectacular, and there weren’t nearly as many people as I thought there would be, and since those who were there were spread out along a ridge, I barely even noticed anyone else. Considering only the views, this was the highlight of the region.
The next morning, we rose at 3:45am for our trip to see a field of geysers two hours drive from San Pedro; the geysers are only active in the early morning when it is still cold. It was, as I hinted at above, pretty extraordinary to see these bubbling geysers and the mist that rose from them in this otherwise completely barren desert. The geysers reach about 85 degrees Celsius, and as such our guide boiled eggs in one of them and heated up chocolate milk to make hot chocolate while we walked around the place. One geyser in particular violently erupts every 10 minutes or so, then completely calms down and stops bubbling entirely – then repeats the process over and over again.
On our final afternoon in San Pedro, we went to the Salar de Atacama, the world’s third-largest salt flats and home to flamingos and other bird life. The salt flats were rockier than both the ones we passed on the bus a few days before and the more famous Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia, but it was still pretty extraordinary to see them stretch out before us at sunset to the foot of the nearby Andes, with a full moon rising behind the mountains. I was a bit disappointed that we weren’t allowed near the biggest concentration of flamingos, but I still managed to get a few good shots anyway.
After three days of happy touring in the northern desert, we hopped on a 24-hour bus and headed south to the centre of the country, where we’ll spend the next few days in the cities of Valparaíso and the capital Santiago.
Nick