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Published: March 31st 2009
We left the low and wet for the high and dry. From Bahia Inglesa, we traveled to the dusty town of San Pedro de Atacama, which sits in a bowl of a valley up against the Andes and the Bolivian border. We stayed there for several nights before heading across the border to Bolivia via a three day 4WD tour over the salt flats and high, really high, deserts of the altiplano.
In San Pedro, we stayed at a crumby hostel, but one that let us cook dinners with our new friends Robin from Canada and Jun from England. For dinner each night, we had to choose between pasta or rice, with slight variations offered to us by the
mercaditos in this small town. San Pedro is the only town we found in Chile where the water isn't potable because there are too many minerals. Water is scarce in the desert, and at this hostel, we could only get running water for about 10 hours of the day.
We managed to find a nice canyon to mountain bike through and took in some pre-Incan ruins that dot the landscape- San Pedro was a stopping point on the massive Inca
Valle de la Luna
With alpenglow on the AndesTrail. We also did a little canyoneering and sightseeing in the Valley de la Luna, a beautiful reserve with sand dunes and crazy red rock formations not unlike Utah. All of this was our last hurrah in Chile; the real adventuring was just around the corner.
We crossed the Bolivian border above 4000 meters to the uplifted valley of the
puna or altiplano, a high desert that extends from Lake Titicaca to the Argentine border. The desert is home to glassy lakes with different minerals that create a rainbow of colors- Laguna Colorado, Laguna Verde...and the area is home to the reclusive camelids, shy flamencos, and other animals that would prefer not to be bothered, thank you very much.
Along the way our Toyota Land Cruiser didn't so much as hit a dirt road for the better part of three days. In fact, a large part of the journey was shifting among tracks in the sand, hoping to avoid a popped tire - or worse. At a few points, our fearless (and speechless) guide Emilio asked us to exit and walk for our safety as he barreled through some very rough areas.
We stopped at a hot
Crossing the rio
too deep for bikin spring and at geysers and bubbling mudpots amidst the vast desert sand. Volcanoes, both
apagados and still smoking, dotted our landscape. It was truly a beautiful journey, well worth the bumpy ride. At night, we first stayed in a small outpost at 4300 meters and then at a tiny rural village surrounded by quinoa fields.
The highlight was the final day where we journeyed to the vast Salar De Uyuni, a relic of a former sea that has vanished for lack of water to feed it (one day we might visit the Salar de Salt Lake). Just after 4 am, we stumbled, exhausted, back to our trusty Land Cruiser so that we could catch the sunrise on the largest salt flat in the world. The Salar stretches some 12,000 km2 and felt like an ocean that we could drive on. The ground is an endless crystalline salt formation anywhere from 6 inches to 9 meters thick. It was on the short list for the seven natural wonders of the world, but mostly it became a backdrop for funny pictures. Amazing how the awe-inspiring becomes acclimatized to our minds once we're there.
Our tour took us to a small
mining town where they dig the salt up with shovels while the government (and potentially foreign companies) seek ways to remove the potentially billions of dollars worth of lithium that lies beneath. We ended our tour in the train cemetery of Uyuni, which is the crossroads of the once-majestic 4 lines of rail that radiate from this dusty town.
In Uyuni, we paid our hefty US reciprocity tax, retrieved our passports, and now we are enjoying the Spanish colonial town of Sucre on our tour through the heart of indigenous South America.
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Alrif
non-member comment
desert is good
Wow - they have nice slots too! I thought the chinchilla was made up. Can they travel?