More Desert Adventures

Hello everyone, hope everyone in Canada is surviving the nasty winter. I on the other hand have been sweating it out in the 30 Celsius Atacama desert and now the coastal city of Valparaiso, but let me catch you up on my travels since Bolivia.

After returning to San Pedro I stayed for a few more days and took some day tours around the area. My first trip was to a salt lake with an extremely high salt content (about 30%). It is a very strange sensation to get into the water and have your feet immediately float up to the surface. You can float even with your hands and feet sticking completely out of the water. You can't even really swim because you can't keep your legs low enough to kick. After getting out of the water and drying in the hot sun you are literally caked in a thick layer of salt. It was an awesome experience. As part of the tour we also visited a couple of perfectly round freshwater lakes in the middle of the desert landscape. One of which I got to run and jump off the steep edge into. Finally we finished off by watching the sunset at a small salt flat.

The next tour I took went through some small desert towns where all the buildings are made of mud and sand bricks. We learned about llamas which are everywhere in these desert regions and saw quinoa growing in fields. We headed back up to the high altitude desert to see some more lakes and also some more salt lakes with flamingoes. I learned that flamingoes eat brine shrimp aka "sea monkies". It is a chemical in the shrimp that give them their pink coloration.

My final day in San Pedro was a busy one. We left San Pedro at 4am to drive out to a geyser field. We climbed up to 4600m where without the sun it was a very frosty -8 Celsius. It was well worth the cold because you enter this huge desert plain that is full of boiling water escaping through vents. Enormous steam clouds are everywhere and giant pots of boiling water. It was an unreal landscape. Our breakfast consisted of our guide boiling a bag of eggs in one of the thermal pools and cartons of chocolate milk to make hot chocolate. We stopped in another small town on the way back where I had a delicious llama kebab. It is pretty similar to beef and was deliciously seasoned and tender.

For sunset I visited the very famous "moon valley". The name is extremely fitting as the landscape is so bizzare. Giant sand dunes, strange rocky formations and salt everywhere. We walked through this neat little canyon that then turned into a salt cave. It wasn't very big, but there were cool formations in the salt walls. As the sun was going down we climbed up the biggest sand dune in the area to watch the sunset.

Finally even though I was completely exhausted I headed out at 10 pm for an astronomy tour that came highly recommended by everyone I talked to and was voted as a can't miss attraction by my friend Paraag. We drove out in the middle of the desert to the house of a French Astronomer. Strangely enough we were greeted in the dark by a flat Canadian accent. Turns out the astronomer who gives the English tour is from Hamilton. It was so nice to hear an accent from home, I have not run into very many North Americans thus far in my travels. Out of the 15 or so people on the English tour I was the only one who wasn't speaking English as a second language.

The tour was really interesting as our guide explained the night sky to us with the aid of a giant green laser pointer that he could use to point to stars and constellations. Being in the southern hemisphere the night sky is a bit of a mystery to me so it was great to have things like the Southern Cross that you don't see at home pointed out. We also saw the constellation that the Subaru logo is based on. I had no idea. He gave us a history of how people used the stars and how human knowledge of the sky evolved. So much more interesting to learn about history while standing under the stars than in a classroom. We then got to make use of the 10 telescopes that they have to view a variety of objects including Jupiter and some colored stars known as the "jewel box". It was well worth staying up late to have the night sky explained like that.

The next day it was finally time to say goodbye to the desert and hop on a 24 hour bus ride back south to Valparaiso, a city on the coast about 1.5 hours west of Santiago. The ride was long, but I managed to sleep in 2 hour chunks through most of the night. The guy sitting beside me was a snorer, but fortunately only for small bouts. The buses in Chile are actually really nice and the roads were relatively smooth.

Photos will soon be uploaded at the usual location and I will also be uploading another post very soon about my experiences in Valparaiso.

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