San Pedro de Atacama february 22 + 27 2011

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San Pedro de Atacama

San Pedro is touristic, but in a nice way. Little shops, pubs and restaurants make you feel like in a Western. It took about 14 hours to come here by bus (Andesmar again, they leave daily!) from Salta in Argentina. San Pedro is an oasis in the middle of the Atacama desert.

When we make a trip to the Valle de la Luna and the Valle de la Muerte we see how arid this desert is. With an average precipitation of 1 mm a year it is the driest desert in the world. At some spots it has not rained since 440 years. The Spaniards began with the registration. Accordingly there is hardly any life. Still we see some plants like the Rico rico. It has a specific smell. According to our guide locals make tea of it (with water from the oasis?) to cure stomach problems. Other plants we see are the Copa copa and the Pingo pingo. Apparently there is some water here. At other spots there is not life at all.

Valle de la Luna or Moonvalley rather could be called Marsvalley. TV series like Space Odyssey were recorded here, because of its Mars like appearance. We walk across a completely dry gorge and indeed we get the feeling to be on another planet. In 2003 NASA did experiments in the Atacama desert to test if the Viking 1 and 2 would be able to find life on Mars. They did not detect any life in the Atacama desert. When we look around in the gorge we only see sandstone mixed with clay and salt. In between we see the lustre of mica layers. I remember how the masonry stove of my parents had mica windows, to peep in the heater. Mica can withstand high temperatures better than other materials. It is a silicate. Erosion formed the gorge: in the past there must have been plenty of water. In the Valle de la Muerte the sandstone is capped with layers of vulcanic ash in different colours. For some reason there is always a strong wind here. We hardly can stand on our feet.

The question is of course why is the Atacama desert so dry? First of all the Atacama is a valley in between the Cordillera de los Andes and the Chilean Coast Range, which runs parallel to the Andes. Clouds from the Pacific Ocean hardly can pass the last one. Winds from the Atlantic side are blocked by the Andes, so that the rain falls in the Amazon area and not in the Atacama region. The second reason is the cold Humboldt stream. It causes an inversionlayer of cold air near the sea surface and warmer layers higher up. It means that the higher layers can contain more water than usual (like we saw at the coast of West Africa near Namibia).

From San Pedro we will make a tour to Bolivia for four days.

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Comments

[anonymous]

Beautiful!

[Vera]

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!