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San Pedro de atacama is an oasis in the middle of the crazy landscape that is the Atacama desert. We didnt know what to expect as we werent planning on visiting the region at all until a friendly traveller suggested we skipped Salta and headed to Peru via the top of Chile instead. It is the highest and driest desert in the world.
The town itself is firmly on the tourist trail but manages to be completely charming at the same time. Mostly adobe buildings with courtyards line the dusty cobbled streets around a central plaza with an adobe chapel. We booked into a friendly hostel and booked onto a tour of one of the main sights for the following day, and prepared ourselves for a 4 am start with a meal by one of the many courtyard fires that all the bars and restaraunts have. The temperature at night in the desert can dip to -10-15 degrees, and as we discovered at 3.30am that is bloody cold to be considering leaving a warm bed for.
Our tour started with a stop at the geysers that occur at 4500 m above sea level in the desert due to the volcanic
Incas
View from Pukara de Quitor activity below. The puffing fumaroles produce torrents of steam and boiling water and we were free to wander around them, after the guide warned us that 3 tourists have fallen in and died through the fragile earth that surrounds the boiling water. We kept a respectful distance and then legged it back to the van as we were freezing. On board were an American and Canadian couple and poor Cindy the American half was gasping in the high altitude so our guide admistered her some oxygen and we all had some ham and cheese rolls.
Then it was onward to the "hot" springs and we all stripped off at several degrees below freezing and jumped in. They werent that hot. and quite slimy. It wasnt the spa experience i had been dreaming of, and everyone got to see your bum after when you got changed by the pool. It had good comedy value though.
We then went on a walk to see a cactus forest and down to the centre of the oasis to follow a waterfall down past the rocks to a clearing below..lovely.
Our second day in the desert took us on a long walk to some inca
ruins outside of town - Pukara de Quitor, a site of a bloody battle between the Spaniards, Atacamenos and Incas which ended in 300 important incas losing their heads at the hands of the conquering Spanish. We wandered amongst the ruins for an hour then headed back to town to start the highlight of our stay, a stargazing lesson deep in the desert where no artificial light pollutes the night sky.
The evening was led by Alain, a French astronomer who together with his Chilean wife has an observatory in the desert. We listened to an explanation of the night sky and then were free to observe through the 8 powerful telescopes set up for us..Saturn looked like a sticker on the end of the lens! You could see the rings around the planet, incredible. We saw many distant galaxies, including the milky way and coloured stars called the jewel box. Alain treated us to a crash course in how to seduce your other half with the night sky, and how to recognise constellations,and then we had a question and answer session. In the past year he has been studying the existence of exo planets that we know to exist
around other stars (suns). All the evidence points towards our solar system, and therefore us, being unique thus far...
The Atacama desert will enter the world stage of astronomy with the creation of the Alma project, a collabaration between the Chileans, South Asia, USA and Europeans. This will study the remnants of the big bang and help us to work out how the universe exists around us..Very exciting...The sky is incredible in the desert and Alain pointed out that those of us who live in cities are very disadvantaged as we never connect with the universe that surrounds us..explains why we in London do indeed believe we are the centre of the universe!
We finished our desert adventure by setting off on a cycle day through the valley of the moon...its stunning. and hot. The landscapes are mental, it looks like something out of Star Wars, with massive canyons, craters and then salt flats all in the middle of nowhere. We lasted 4 hours..
Saying a sad goodbye to the night sky we boarded a bus bound for Peru...the next adventure.
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