After I left Arica, I took a night bus to Calama. It's the larger city where you transfer buses and take a quick one over the San Pedro de Atacama. This is the small town that provides access to the Atacama Desert. The Atacama Desert is 49,000 sq mi of salt flats, lakes, sand and lava. Its just to the west of the Andes and still has a couple active volcanos. The average rainfall in this area is about a half an inch per year aka not very much at all, making it the driest non-polar desert in the world. And one of the oldest!
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One of our first stops was the Valle de la Luna. It had a ton of really crazy rock formations covered in salt. And the whole area looked like it could be from another planet.
Confession: I did taste it. It is truly salt all over. |
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| Las Tres Marias on the right. Do you see the dinosaur shape? Apparently a French tourist knocked over the leftmost of the Marias. |
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| More cool rocks. |
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| Sunset over the valley. Do you see all that salt?!!?! |
I think the town is as big as it is mostly to support the tourists coming to see the desert, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. I planned on staying three days and actually stayed for a week. Someone at my hostel even made me a crochet hat. And I made dog friends. They even walked me home. Of course.
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| The little white one was afraid of all the things. |
Many of the sights around San Pedro are only accessible (in a reasonably cheap/easy way) by joining tours. So I spent a couple of days playing tourist and getting shuffled on and off busses. Except these tours were pretty awesome. I ended up taking several of the tours with the same few people and making a couple awesome new friends. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. One of the things I was most excited to see were the flamingos! For some reason (I think because they're super colorful) I thought flamingos were warm weather birds. False! They're all over Chile. And the Chilean's thought it was entertaining how excited I was to see them.
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| Mountain + reflection + flamingo. Aw yessss. |
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| Flamingos flying!!! |
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| More flamingos. |
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| More high altitude lakes. Apparently the whole area is so salty/mineral-y because any moisture in the area will roll off the mountains and down into the ground, leaving the minerals closer to the surface. |
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| Floating in salt water! Truly one of the coolest experiences ever. You really didn't need to know how to swim to get in. |
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| Salty edges of the pool |
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| Not ice, SALT! |
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| We got up at sunrise to see some geysers!! |
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| Geysers at sunrise |
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| This reminded me of one I got to see erupt in Yellowstone. |
I did find out on one of the tours about several of the medicinal plants the indigenous people used. Apparently they specifically named herbs redundantly. Rica rica is great for stomach aches and is a great spice for cooking meat. Pingo pingo is taken to clean the blood (still not sure what that means), and the guide thought it was hilarious to share that its also a natural Viagra. I'm pretty sure rica rica is in the same family of plants as sage. I found out about an ice cream shop that made rica rica ice cream (and other super unique flavors). So of course I ate there four times. For science. I tried some fruit/ginger flavors, coca leaf, and a weird really sweet bean. Nom nom. I also tried llama meat. For science. Its quite tasty. Like lamb, not chicken.
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| =D |
The last thing that I did in the Atacama Desert was walk up the Laskar Volcano. It's definitely one of the more expensive things I've done and I flip flopped back and forth all week about if I wanted to spend the money. But hey. Why not? So I was up at 4am to drive a couple of hours into the desert to walk up the side of an active volcano. Yesssss. Also, the top of the volcano was 5,600m. Thats taller than Gokyo Ri in Nepal. And I was going that high after sleeping at around 2000m. Lets just say it was slow going. And lots of chocolate was eaten. Chocolate is my new solution to everything (ok so its not new, just reconfirmed).
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| See those white things in the water? A flock of flamingos. |
