This past week, I, along with my friends Eric and Will, took a trip to the Atacama desert in the north of Chile (close to the borders with Argentina and Bolivia). As my title suggests, the Atacama is known for being the driest desert in the world (it usually rains for less than an hour each year).
We all know the idiom that claims "A picture speaks a thousand words", and in this situation, it could not be more true. I absolutely fell in love with the desert, but there is no way for me to describe what it was like, so I am just going to post photos and let them speak for themselves (although they cannot do justice to seeing it in real life).
Our first tour took us to the Laguna Cejar, which is a lagoon with such a high concentration of salt that you can float in it effortlessly.
The same tour also took us to the "Ojos del salar", so named because they were two pools side by side that seemed to be the "eyes" of the salt flat.
Our last stop on this tour was Laguna Tebinquinche, another lagoon in the salt flat. The colors of the landscape there were unbelievable, especially when we stayed there to watch the sunset (bottom photo).
Our second tour took us to the Flamingo reserve, where we could observe flamingos and other wildlife in the salt flat.
Our next destination was the altiplanic lagoon, located up in the surrounding Andes mountains. However, while we were driving up the mountains to the lagoon, it began to snow. At first, we were very excited that it was snowing, since precipitation is so rare in the Atacama. However, the bad news was that the snow limited the visibility on the road so much that after speaking with an ambulance driver going the other way, our tour guide decided we had to turn around and head back down without seeing the lagoon. My friends and I were feeling pretty bummed about missing out on the experience, when we passed another tour group heading up the mountain. The two tour guides stopped and talked, and our tour guide decided that we could indeed go up to the lagoon if we followed the other group. So we turned around again. When we arrived at the lagoon, it was still snowing and cloudy, so much that we could barely tell there was a lake in front of us.
However, all of a sudden, it stopped snowing, and the sun began to peak out through the clouds. In what was one of my favorite moments of the trip, an entire backdrop of mountains was revealed to us, and we could see the entire lake. I was completely in awe at the beauty.
The theme of the day was contrast, because the the next tour took us to "Valle de la luna"(Valley of the moon), which was the textbook definition of a desert, with huge sand dunes and rock formations.
Our final destination of the day was the "Valle de la muerte" (Valley of death, although it is only named that to attract tourists), where we watched the sunset over a huge canyon.
The next day, we woke up at 3:45 am so that we could be heading to our next destination by 4:30. We were headed to the Geisers del Tatio, which was an area filled with geysers at more than 14,000 feet. The reason we had to arrive so early was because if we went later in the day, the air temperature would warm up so much that the steam from the geysers would not be visible. Even though it was freezing cold and very early, getting to see the geyers and the sunrise were worth it.
We also had the opportunity to swim in a thermal pool. I had my doubts about going in, since the air was freezing, but I did it, and here is the photographic evidence!
The final big activity of our trip was a bike ride through the desert. We rented bikes in the town where we were staying, grabbed a map of possible trails, and headed out. This was my other favorite moment of the trip because it was just us, the bikes, and the desert. We passed a few other bikers going the other way, but we were almost entirely alone with nature, unlike on the tours where we were accompanied by 5-10 other tour groups each time.
I will close this very lengthy post by saying that I never could have imagined the beauty that I found out in the desert. This trip was a totally different kind of travel than I have ever done, and I realized that while cities and other human constructions are often astounding, there is nothing comparable to natural beauty.
