Advertisement
Published: February 13th 2009
Edit Blog Post
First Excursion; El Tatio geysers
We got up at 3:30am to be on time for our 4:00am excursion.. Tough morning... or I should rather say tough night! (When we were going to the Gerseys, I thought about how crazy we are to get up at 3:30am and go in the middle of the desert at a temperature of about -10 degrees). We tried to sleep on the bus on our way to the Geyser del Tatio but the roads in the middle of the desert are really bumby so didn't manage to sleep much. (I had no idea what a Geyser was before coming to Chile so here's the wikipedia definition: "A geyser is a hot spring characterized by intermittent discharge of water ejected turbulently and accompanied by a vapour phase (steam)". In brief, it's steam and water coming out of the ground. The best time to see them is at sunrise when each geyser is surmounted by a column of steam that condenses in the bitterly cold morning air. It was freezing as it was about -10 degrees outside and we obviously didn't bring our winter coat to South America. We then headed to a thermal swimming pool on the
southern side of the field. Water is hot in some parts of the part and gets colder in other parts so we had to move into the crowd to find a warm spot. The sun had just risen so it was still chilly outside. When I got in the water my hands started to be really painful from unfreezing in the hot water. There are no changing rooms so you have to try to hide under your towel in front of about 80 people to change into warm clothes.
Our last destination was the colonial village of Caspana, which is located in the middle of the desert at more than 3000 meters high.
Second Excursion: Valle de la luna
We could hardly stand up after getting up at 4:00 and spending 14 hours on the bus the day before. We managed to find the strength to have a coffee and take the bus to go to our second destination. We were told the valle de la luna (moon valley) was the must destionation of San Pedro of Atacama... and we now totally agree with them. The valley is named under its resemblance with the surface of the moon. The
excursion started in the middle of the afternoon at the "mirador", a lookout point which gives a spectacular panoramic view of the valley. Then we walked down in the Valle de la Muerte (Death Valley!!). It really looks like a death valley, as it is a sort of deep canyon surrounded by stange +eroded shapes. (I think the pictures will give you a better idea of the shape than my tentative description of the valley). We walked through what looked like a little alley between two huge sand canyon walls. I started joking with Elena by saying I would like to slide down the sort steep sand wall. A few minutes later, the guide asked us to go down and meet him there. I looked at Elena a few seconds and wandered if he was being serious. We realized he was and we started to go down the hill (a little bit scared.. as it was really steep). It turned out it was really easy to walk down on sand and it's not comparable with walking (or sliding) on snow. It was AWESOME!!!!! We runned down the hill, tried to slide down (it wasn't really successfulll... the only thing I
managed to do is put a lot of sand into my pants). At the end we had to take the sand off our shoes and I think we could have done a sandcastle only with the sand that was in our shoes.
We then walked into some sort of salt rock formations, visited a cave and saw some quartz (? hmmm not to sure if it was quartz or another precious metal).
Our excursion ended with watching the sunset on top of a mountain that looks down the dune.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.043s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.022s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb