Atacama desert is considered to be the driest place on planet Earth. It is a very cool and arid region of over 1000 km in length. The reason for its dryness is because it lies in a basin that from every side is limited by a mountain range and all the rainclouds usually do not make it over the mountains even if Atacama is so close to the ocean. What's more, in Atacama's region once there used to be a giant lake with saltwater but when the high Andes grew higher due to earth movements it basically dried off leaving a pefectly flat surface covered with a layer of salt - a salar. A similar situation happened in the most famous salar in South America - Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. This is not even a bit of a proper scientific explaination, but I get the general idea.
Everyone was asking me before our departure - what were we going to do on a desert for a week? They said it was just sand and rocks. Well, it was so much more and now I will try to prove it!
Like I wrote in the post about San Pedro we participated in organised tours in order to move around the area. This was a convinient solution, we did not have to care about our safety, english speaking guides and meals were included.
Our first tour was to Tatio Geysers. All the tours depart at an ungodly hour just to reach the Geysers early enough to see the sunrise. At dawn their geothermal activity is supposed to be the highest, and of course the colours of the sunrise make it a phenomenal spectacle of vapour and colours. It's like landing on a different planet. It was awfully freezing before the sun came up, the guide told us the feelable temperature was around -18 degrees Celcius. The spot was located at the altitude of 4,300 meters over the sea level. San Pedro is at 2,000 so we had to elevate on the double of that. To be fair, this is a very big difference. We were advised not to run, to generally move slowly and to listen to our bodies to prevent altitude sickness (but some people still felt unwell).
This was like a scene from a dream.
All the meals at the tours were served on portable tables with adorable local tablecloths on open air. Local bread, jams, nutella, hot tea and coffee. This part was very enjoyable!
We also made a stop at some hot springs nearby, but I didn’t jump in. The area around was beautiful, though.
Animals! I hoped to see some local fauna, and I did. There are so many! The animal that we saw most often was a Vicuna, a close relative to llamas and guanacos. They appeared out of nowhere, and didn't seem so frightened of people very much. Sometimes it can be hard telling guanacos and vicunas apart, only by the colour of the heads (guanacos have dark heads).
We had a stop at a small village Machuca. It was basically three streets with a church up the hill. Quite charming but obviously set on tourism. We had some gilled meat of a lama there, out of mere curiosity I did try it and it was actually pretty great.
Valle de Luna is the most known area of Atacama. Its raw formations of rock and sand were created by wind and water, and they come in all shapes, sizes and colours (but brick red mostly). It resembles the surface of the moon.
I felt that the security of this particular part was the most strict. It was not possible to even move a bit into the road to take a better shot because someone would tell me off for trespassing. I wish I had an opportunity to wander around on my own there, for a longer period of time. The trails inside the stone gorges or on the peaks looked really appealing.
Some formations included The Amphitheatre - a rock with pointy edges shaped in a semicircle. On the opposite side of the road a gigantic sand dune stretched between two rocky hills. Nobody had access on the ridge of the dune in order not to destroy the fragile structure of the dune.
Some formations included The Amphitheatre - a rock with pointy edges shaped in a semicircle. On the opposite side of the road a gigantic sand dune stretched between two rocky hills. Nobody had access on the ridge of the dune in order not to destroy the fragile structure of the dune.
After visiting Bolivia we spent another few days in San Pedro and attended two more tours.
Laguna Cejar was a half-day trip to a very nice lagoon. It was actually a complex of a few smaller water basins that served different purposes. The one we saw first was a flamingo nesting ground, but at that time there were no flamingos in sight. Paths where people were allowed to walk were indicated by rows of rocks, that looked pretty cool.
The second one was more attractive to us, because it was suitable to go for a swim in its extremely salty water. The lagoon was shallow in general with a deeper part in the centre that had a mesmerising dark blue colour. The water was so salty it was very easy to lie on your back and float. Chilenos did their job great building a washroom facility by the entrance to the lagoon.
The last tour we took was to Las Piedras Rojas, meaning literally "red rocks". It lasted for a whole day and we stopped on a few more lagoons and viewpoints. The landscape was more of a high-mountain-like, as we drove cross Andes nearly to the border with Argentina. We passed two lagoons with dashing bright colours before we finally reached the rocks themselves.
The red rocks were interesting because of their structure, they formed cuboids with hexagonal or septagonal bases, perfectly geometrical. The rocks were very light, as if they were hollow inside. We were allowed to climb the formation for a better view.
On our way back we stopped at Laguna Chaxa, a habitat of a flock of flamingos. We saw bigger flocks in Bolivia, but on Chaxa there was a whole educational centre about flamingos, describing every species and life cycle of flamingos.
On the absolutely last day we had my friends and I decided to go cycling through Vale de la Muerte. Death Valley. Yeah. It was a very ambitious idea and I decided to go back shortly after arriving to the valley itself, since driving a bike in the scorching sun in 30 degrees, through sandy roads and on the altitude of 2,000 meters over sea level seemed to be beyond me.
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