Back in Chile we flew to the north to a little desert town called San Pedro de Atacama which we fell in love with! Not an industrial building in sight, they are all low rise, shack type buildings made from stone. It reminds me of the movie Jewel of the Nile! We stayed in a lovely little hostel called Cabur which is just out of the centre and has a very chilled out atmosphere.
We took a bus trip to Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley) which was just spectacular. The whole valley resembled the surface of the moon due to its structure and salt formations, all of which are natural. The colours were a wide variety of sandy browns which contrasted beautifully against the early evening blue sky. We visited a few other valleys, all made up of desert rock. We stopped at the 3 Maries which are around 3 million years old and are the result of erosion. We walked up a sand dune where we watched the sun setting over Moon Valley. The rocks changed from bright red to a dusky pink colour as the sun disappeared behind the desert.
The following day we surfaced at 3am to see the sun rise over the Taito Geysers. I ahve never seen anything like this before - a large flat plane filled with geysers of all sizes bursting with steam. They geysers are formed when a frozen underground river maked contact with hot rocks. They can reach a temperature of 85 degrees celcuis and 10 metres in height. At times we were just surrounded by steam. As the sun rose the whole area was suddenly illuminated and took on a whole new look.
We spent another day travelling around the San Pedro de Atacama area by mini bus. Our guide spoke not a word of English but we had been chatting to 2 Canadians who were fluent in Spanish and became our translators for the day!
First stop was Atacama salt lake which looked nothing like a lake, it was a flat plane filled with white rocky boulders which are formed by underground evaporation. In the areas of water were dozens of flamingoes, the background contained various volcanoes including one active one - all these factors made a beautiful picture, especially when the flamingoes took off in their groups - big pink birds soaring through the sky!! From here we travelled up through the mountains and volcanoes visiting 2 deep blue mountain lakes with Llamas grazing down at the waters edge. It was atLake Miscanti Tracey slipped in a hole and twisted her ankle, it swole up like a balloon! Luckily there wasn´t much walking involved that day, and it is usually me trying to get out of the exercise! :)
The altitude was 4,200 metres, making it quite difficult to breath at times especially when there was walking involved.
We visited 2 small traditional Chilean villages which had quaint little churches. Wealso saw the Chilean Inca Trail and crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. A great day with stunning scenery. Later that night the sky was pitch black and littered with millions of dazzling stars. This was when I received my first astronomy lesson and was shown Orion and his belt, Taurus, Pegasus and various star clusters, along with a few shooting stars... magical!
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