Atacama Desert & Lauca National Park

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After spending a few days relaxing in small villages within Chile's Elqui valley, we made our way up to San Pedro de Atacama. This small town in the middle of the Atacama desert is home to a huge tourist industry taking people into the surrounding area.

Hitting the ground running, we booked onto a cheap tour out into an area renowned for looking like the moon and called... Moon Valley. While the scenery was stunning the tour was rubbish, so we booked onto a walking expedition of the same area the next day, which allowed us to get into the landscape.

Having ticked the 'barren rock and sandy dessert' box, we got up early and headed off to a huge, salt lake that's home to thousands of flamingos. As the sun rose over the water we watched the pink flamingos walking through the salty brine, completely oblivious to the below freezing temperature that kept Tracy and I hopping about to stay warm.

Another early morning excursion took us out to Atacama's hot geysers. Braving the -15 C morning we walked amongst spurting jets of steam and bubbling pools of water. Our tour guide cooked us eggs and boiled water by using the heat from the thermal pools. Once we had finished our breakfast there was time for a swim in the hot water springs.

As a quick detour from Atacama to Lauca National Park, we stopped in at Chuquicamata copper mine, the biggest in Chile. This open pit mine is huge. The 400 ton trucks that transported the rock from the pit bottom looked like tiny dots as we grazed down from the visitors viewing platform at the top.

To finish our time in Chile we visited the Lauca National Park that starts at 3200 meters above sea level and has peaks reaching 6300 meters. Sleeping in the small town of Putre allowed us to acclimatise to the altitude, with the help of coca leaves.

The park was stunning. We drove along dirt tracks, around emerald coloured lakes full of birds and climbed to a height of 4800 meters. Near the Bolivian border we walked around a lake shore with snow peaked volcanos in the background. All around Lamas grazed. A very spectacular end to our visit to Chile.

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Comments

[David Roe]

Stop it
I am getting very very jealous about now..... :) Only joking, keep em coming mate