Visiting the Driest Place on Earth
Let’s go on a quick rollercoaster really fast: I left for Atacama last Friday, and the Saturday before, my wallet was stolen from my backpack while in Valpo. So I had six days to recover my, well, everything.
Call card companies and have them shut off my cards.
Ask if they’ll also express ship new ones to my house.
Have my mom take them to FedEx and express ship them across the world to ME ($83 later…..).
Hear they’ve arrived in town the day before you’re supposed to leave, but won’t be delivered until tomorrow.
Show up to the sorting facility that is only open for 30 minutes per day and beg them to give you your package.
Receive my cards and go about life as if nothing ever happened. (Only without a student metro card at a fourth of the price of a normal fare and no IDs other than my passport, which you’re not supposed to carry with you.)
The Atacama Desert
Our home base on this trip was the remote and tiny desert city of San Pedro de Atacama. We landed in Calama airport, a tiny building with only three gates and hosts only two airlines. There was not much of anything around the airport. Out the windows, there was only open desert. Along the hour and fifteen minute drive to San Pedro de Atacama, we did pass the city of Calama, which came and went in a matter of three minutes. The rest of the drive, again, was open desert.
We were dropped at our hostel, which was a party hostel on the outskirts of San Pedro, about 25 minutes by foot. San Pedro is known for having one of the clearest and unpolluted night skies around, so the large open field without the light pollution of the city was the best thing about this hostel. We ended up relocating to a different hostel in the center of town for the last two nights, mostly due to the strong odors of sulfur and feces in my bedroom. (”Just leave the window open! It’s just like that because you closed the window!” “But you guys blare music outside until 3am and the desert gets into the 40s at night!”) The second hostel was excellent, hardly more expensive, and close to everything! Which isn’t difficult, as the city is only a few blocks wide and there’s really only one main road that you can walk end-to-end in ten minutes or less and a town square.
Our biggest activities included a bus tour to Atacama’s salt flat and flamingo reserve, as well as lagoons up in the mountains, another 5am bus tour up to Geisers del Tatio, and a bike ride through Valle de la Luna. The geisers were at the highest altitude that we reached on the trip and it was THE COLDEST. The windows on the bus iced over, I hadn’t exactly packed for winter, etc. This location included a field full of geysers varying in size, and even a hot spring. I remained out of the hot spring (except for up to my knees) because I didn’t have the heart to undress in such cold weather. I was also concerned with the salt content in the water, as my skin was going absolutely ballistic since arriving in the driest place on earth. My skin had recently been flaring up due to my beloved eczema, but nothing could have prepared me for how fast everything would go downhill. I was in the desert for about 4.5 days. Within two, I had several cracks on my hands, a red rash all over my neck, chest, shoulders, arms, and face (”Hey man, you got some sun yesterday!”), my eyelids crusting over in my sleep, and I was forced to carry lotion with me everywhere I went to avoid being able to feel my skin stretch over my face every time I moved it and my having my lips crack. (Let’s just say I was actually eager to get home, where my skin didn’t even have a trace of these things within two days.)
Before arriving in Chile, I had no idea what Atacama was. I had no interest in going. When we stumbled across Sky Airline (who went on strike a month ago and canceled my trip to Patagonia, if anyone remembers THAT…) and I found roundtrip airfare for $60, however, I decided to give it a try. Of the things I read, I found the most interesting to be that it was 1) the driest place on Earth and 2) it has a landscape so similar to Mars that NASA and other space study organizations use the desert to test Mars rovers. For my first three days, I was wondering WHERE MARS WAS, until I landed in Valle de la Luna. We conquered this beast via bike. Just imagine riding uphill through sand. The end. This expanse of land was all different tones of orange and tan, void of plant life, full of dunes, and, well, just like you’d picture (or have seen pictures of) Mars. It was absolutely incredible.
All in all, the desert was very diverse. It had a lot more color and shrubbery than I’d have assumed the driest place on earth would have. It was terrible for my skin, horribly cold during nighttime hours, and breathtaking no matter which direction you chose to go.
