THE ATACAMA DESERT

Published in

The Land of Fire & Ice

7 min readMar 12, 2018

My only reference point to what a desert would be like was Disney’s Aladdin and a documentary I once saw about the Gobi Desert in China. Both featured rolling golden sand dunes as far as the eye could see. So I wasn’t sure what to expect before I went to the Atacama Desert— famously the driest desert in the world. Only the North and South Poles are drier, and some areas haven’t seen rain for 400 years.

When I landed in the airport, I experienced culture shock all over again. There wasn’t any sand anywhere — more gravel-looking rocks. It was grey and big and unchanging during the hour drive to San Pedro, the primary town and tourism hub for the desert. A flash of green in the distance signalled that we had made it.

San Pedro is a strange little town. It has narrow bumpy roads bursting with tourists in cars, bikes and on foot. It was hard to navigate, the people barely moving out of the way and cars stopping or parking anywhere. All the buildings are mud huts but are also almost all exclusively hostels or restaurants. Shop fronts have wooden signs, which felt like an attempt at authenticity but fell short when they had a Coca-Cola or a MoviStar logo (a telecommunications company) carved into them. We eventually found our accommodation which was a dusty small mud hut with a thatched roof, one in a yard of other holiday makers — with screaming children. Things weren’t looking good.

We slept in the following day and had breakfast at a French-inspired cafe bakery. It was delicious - fig and blue cheese loaf with avocado and an espresso. Not your standard desert fare. We then hit the road for our ‘three birds one stone’ tour of the region — two lakes and a salt plain.

Moments after we hit the highway we had to pull over to photograph the view. A large snow capped volcano loomed over the town with dense white clouds floating above. The ground was covered in greenery — a nice refuge from the grey and orange of San Pedro. It was barely a few more minutes before we had to pull over again. The landscape had transformed again and now had smooth mud like waves and small ponds. I ventured into the landscape to snap a photo of three donkeys that were lined up but James warned me that there are 180,000 explosive devices installed along Chile’s borders by Pinochet, some of which are yet to be excavated. Admittedly James was being overly paranoid, but I decided I wasn’t willing to loose a leg for the picture and turned back to the car.

It wasn’t easy to breathe at Laguna Miscanti. There was a young boy receiving oxygen as we drove into the national reserve. It’s technically part of the Altiplano (literally “high plain”) and is over 4000 metres high. Families of guanaco (llama-like animals) frolic besides a lake underneath more snow capped volcanos. The ground was covered with a yellow shrub creating a beautiful palette of blue, yellow and green. We were warned halfway to the second lake in the region that our little Golf was unlikely to survive the pot-holed road, so we decided to check out the salt flats instead.

There’s a common term used in the region called the “Bolivian winter”. As Chile is in the southern hemisphere — it’s currently in summer. But the neighbouring northern hemisphere Bolivia was experiencing winter that can cause strange weather events. We were treated to a spectacular storm on the drive home with large forks of lightning and whirlwinds large enough to look like tornados. Very Mad Max Fury road. For the driest place on earth there was a lot of rain. We were even treated to a rainbow!

We stopped at the Salar (“salt lake”) de Atacama to see our very first flamingos. I was surprised when the flamingos were white with only flashes of pink under their wings which I learnt was from malnutrition.

Despite enjoying our trip from comfort of our hire car we were exhausted. The dryness really got to us. No matter how much we drunk we still were always thirsty. We also got badly sun burnt — the cool breeze and thin air of the highlands hid the sun’s intensity. We were looking forward to cooling off in the salt lake which was safe for swimming. But unfortunately we were turned away at the gat; it was closed due to the storms. On the drive back to San Pedro we noticed a few people had pulled over besides to two sink holes on the side of the road that were filled with water. We weren’t initially sure if they were safe to swim in but we thought we may as well give it a shot. The best way to enter was launching yourself off the ridge.

We squeezed in a final stop to Valle de la Muerte (“valley of death”). I finally got to experience the sand dune desert which I had imagined. The valley has a huge sand dune sitting amongst jagged rock formations. We’d landed in Mars. The storm raged on behind the dunes in a dark grey and the warm setting sun made the rocks glow orange.

The following day we thought we’d squeeze a quick visit in to Valle de la Lune (“valley of the Moon”) before breakfast. Big mistake. The area was huge and full of caves, impossibly smooth sand dunes, epic rock foundations and salt that looked like snow in places and glittered like shattered glass in others. The one benefit of arriving early was being alone. I’ve never experienced the type of silence before. So quiet we could hear the salt cracking in the cliffs as they warmed with the rising sun.