Gorillas in the dust - the Atacama desert

What a week!

If you have ever been in a desert before, you will know how fascinating they are: they are totally inhospitable places often without a shade in sight to protect yourself from the burning and constant sun during the day. They are also bitterly cold at night. At the same time though, if you pay attention, they can in places be full of life and they have the most beautiful sunsets and starry nights that you can probably find on our planet.


The Atacama desert is (in parts) the driest place on our planet. It covers a large part of northern Chile. To make this place more special, it is trapped in between the Pacific ocean, with its very cold Humboldt current  and the mountains of "La cordilera de los Andes". When I refer to mountains, this is probably the understatement of the century.... the Andes reach often over 6.000m and are actually still growing due to the tectonic forces happening below them.   The difference in temperature between the Humbold current and  the hot ground produces almost constant winds to flow inland from the sea  This is the reason why virtually no water ever reaches the ground, precipitation only occurs in the mountains surrounding the desert. For more "chileography" in spanish and some photos, click here or there is always wikipedia.

As all permaculturists can tell you, most diversity and action occurs at the "edges" which is precisely what happens here! Mountains meet snowy volcanoes and together they meet the desert and the salt lakes.

We stayed in a little Andean village called San Pedro de Atacama. The village was quite touristy in a pleasant sort of way (vegetarians are easily catered for, there are showers and hot water, a very decent bus stop which connects regularly to the main cities in the area, plenty of tour operators and places to buy traditional crafts). San Pedro is at 2500m altitude. From virtually every one of its little streets we could see snow capped volcanoes (some of them active with smoke coming from the top). In the vicinity of San Pedro there is plenty to do and see:

1. The Atacama salar: this is the 3rd largest salt plain in the world (after Uyuni in Bolivia which can also be visited - as long as you have yellow fever immunisation if you intend to come back to Chile! and another one in the USA). They regularly get migratory birds like flamingos. We spent a morning here in the "snowy" looking salt plain.
2. The laguna cejar: we cycled here. It is really a surreal place. Incredibly clean VERY salty water. You can see your toes and everything below you (and it is VERY deep!). It reflected the sky like a perfect mirror - until we jumped in! And then it was quite a surprise, the top layer was incredibly cold, but warm water was waiting about 1-1.5m deep. Before this we enjoyed a lovely meal (mangoes, avocados, bananas and some biscuits the food of the gorilla champions! ;o)) on beautiful structures made out of lovely salt crystals. 
3. El valle de la Luna : this valley takes its name as it could easily be a valley you find on the moon. Incredible dunes, beautiful hills and the ever present mountains in the distance... perfect spot to see the sunset (we also cycled here)
4. A starry night: what better place to see the stars than in a place where clouds don't really happen much?! We saw the milky way, the southern cross, ursa major (at a strange angle here in the southern hemisphere), Saturn (through a huge telescope - it looked like someone had painted it, honestly, its shape, moons and rings are truly perfect), the Hubble Telescope also made an appearance as well as some shooting stars. We also had a canadian astronomer to answer our questions and make us a tea afterwards!
5. The Geisers of el Tatio: An amazing trip that started at 4am (a bit early even for us). These geiser field is the one of the highest on the planet 4320m. You can actually feel a bit of altitude sickness (or maybe that is just the early morning! ;o)) They recommend to avoid heavy meals before going (especially meat and alcohol - We recommend avoiding those most of the time anyway so no problems there). The reason the trip starts so early is because seeing sunrise in a geiser field is quite surreal. Temperature outside was -12C (and it felt it too, I was glad we temporarily stole a blanket from the hotel to put over all our layers!). Around you, there is boiling water pooring out of the floor creating a lot of steam and bubbling fountains of boiling water, thermal pools and rivers flow through the "plain" which is actually a massive volcano crater that is still active though dormant for the time being. We saw the sun rise, which turned a very unbearable -12C into to quite a pleasant temperature within 30mins or so. 
6. Our guide then took us to a thermal river - for a quick warm up at 4000m! Along the way we saw vicuñas (wild alpacas), llamas, viscachas and a few andean geese.
7. Following this we visited a cactus forest. They were up to 10m high... and apparently they grow 2-4cm per year (I hope this doesn't challenge you as much as it did some of the american tourists traveling with us on this tour who could not work out how old the cactus were...). The "forest" sits next to a small river that has carved itself a pretty impressive canyon through the arid rocks.  

 In short, we had a pretty incredible time. This is what we came here for!

PS. WE HAVE A BANK ACCOUNT!!!!! ;o) (and we can send text messages to each other after 5h phone discussions with Entel)
PS2. Some lucky people will get postcards. If you are not one of them, is not because we have forgotten about you, there will be more postcards coming in the future!