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San Pedro de Atacama is the driest desert in the world. It was also our first experience of being at high altitude - not so bad, a little breathless, but the main difference was the weather. It could be 30 deg C in the day, though cooler in the shade, but freezing at night, yet we still camped.........impressed? (no, of course not, that's just plain stupidity). Of course no South American campsite would be complete without its share of canine friends. The comments book of a few months ago talked of the dogs being a little too boisterous (the girls all being on heat........) which I think explained all the cute puppies now running about the place!
There's lots of beautiful landscape to see around San Pedro though most of it is only accessible through tours, so tours it was. Our first took us to the Salt Mountain Range and the Death Valley. A couple of stories as to the origin of the name of the latter: the first, a mispronunciation by a Portugese monk; the second, because so many animals used to die here crossing the desert, it being so dry and the third, because all the people with
leprosy were once abandoned here. Who knows which is true, but there certainly were no animal or human remains that I could see (not like that scary elephant graveyard in the Lion King.....). We then got to have a go at sandboarding down a giant sand dune, just without the board (i.e. running!!) A bit scary when stood at the top looking down, but there's so much resistance from the sand that you can't really go that fast. Great fun!! I think half the dune ended up in my shoes by the end though.
The second tour took us to the salt flats, the third largest in the world after Uyuni, Bolivia and Salt Lake City, US. I had expected them to be flat and white, in the manner of salt, but they were rather nobbly, and brown due to the presence of other minerals, mainly lithium; 60% of the world's lithium supply, for batteries and the like, comes from here. A few flamingoes were paddling in the tiny lagoons within the salt flats, munching away on tiny shrimps all day long. We visited a couple of lagoons high up in the desert (Lagunas Miscanti and Miniques); the colours
were fantastic - the deep blue of the lake, the red colour of the desert, a perfect clear blue sky, with the Andes in the distance. Stunning. Final stop was a real life oasis in the desert (such things do exist in real life!) complete with stream, grassy banks and an abundance of fruit trees.
Our final tour involved a delightful 4am start (imagine how grumpy I was?!) to go and see the Geysers, at an altitude of 4000m, which at that time of the morning meant it was -15 deg C. Soooooo cold, even with all my clothes on. The geysers were all steam geysers, (with a couple of pools of boiling bubbling water - water boils at 80 deg C at this altitude) which in themselves are not as striking to see as water geysers but the sheer number of them was quite impressive. At breakfast I sampled my first coca tea and it actually tasted quite nice. Can't see them serving it in Starbucks any time soon though. As a reward for braving such sub-zero temperatures, we stopped at some nearby hot springs (more like a hot river really). Bit of a moral dilemma here, since
getting into them required prior removal of most of my clothes, while there were still sub-zero temperatures to contend with. Definitely worth it, a blissful 40 deg C, though a severe case getting-out-of-a-hot-bath-too-quickly syndrome afterwards (sure the altitude didn't help - lucky I'd had my coca tea!). Final stop was a cactus forest, beautifully located in a valley with a river running through it. Of course I couldn't resist the urge to touch a spike - they're a bit like a load of cocktail sticks, just missing the cheese and pineapple (imagine that as a party piece!).
It was a full day bus journey from San Pedro to Salta in Argentina - luckily they supplied a nutritious lunch (cheese and ham sandwich) and dinner (toasted cheese and ham sandwich). It was a beautiful drive up into the Andes and descending the other side above the cloud line, sitting waiting to see what it would be like to drive into a cloud. Unsurprisingly, it was just like fog, and no cloud people. Bye bye Chile.
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