Travel Update 7: The Atacama Desert

Our 23-hour night bus arrived in Calama, Chile, about 11 in the morning. Kris and I were surprised to feel relatively alert at the end of the trip; we’d packed a good amount of food on the bus with us, and had both been able to sleep well. Despite the length of the bus ride, or maybe because of it, this ended up being the best night bus of our whole trip!. Our goal was to get to San Pedro de Atacama, though, not Calama, and we were only here to find the next bus in the chain. No tickets were available online, but we were trusting that we had seen enough South American bus transport by this point to understand and figure out whatever system would get us there. We picked up our bags, stepped out into the street, and followed an instinct to turn left and just walk until we found a bus company. As it happened, the nearest bus station was immediately next door, with four companies advertising different routes, and yes there was a bus leaving for San Pedro de Atacama in fifteen minutes. The one after that? Another six hours. Thank the stars for lucky timing, we thought, and were soon bouncing along down the road, joking — as we smelled the brakes heating up down a long, straight, steep hill — that one thing you absolutely didn’t want to do when designing a bus like this was over-design the brakes (indeed, you would know your design was perfect if they were just on the edge of catching fire every time you drove the bus route! Anything more would be extra mass you’re lugging around for no good reason).

But we made it, catching some views of the edge of the Atacama Desert as we rolled into San Pedro. I’d heard about the Atacama Desert and the Uyuni Salt Flats when I was travelling Peru in 2013, but hadn’t been able to travel there and explore with my timeline to return to Canada and start my first season of ski patrol. It captured my imagination because it’s the driest non-polar desert in the world (the only place on earth that receives less precipitation per year is Antartica) and is geologically active, with volcanoes and geysers dotting the landscape. It receives just five millimetres of rain per year, spans roughly 105,000 square kilometres, and is used by NASA as a testing ground for Mars rovers because of its similarity to the red planet. Because there is very little human habitation, very little moisture in the atmosphere, and it sits at roughly 2,400 metres above sea level, San Pedro de Atacama is reportedly a prime area for stargazing, so Kris and I were looking forward to getting out in the dark of night and taking some photos.

Tourism in San Pedro has boomed over the past thirty years, as the area has entered the consciousness of travellers, and the town is doing well because of it. There’s one walking street through the middle of town lined with shops, over half of them tour agencies connecting travellers to tour operators. It’s not easy to get around the area without a car or motor transport of some sort — we met people travelling by motorcycle or on road trips from other parts of South America, and one very determined twenty year-old exploring the area on a rented bicycle — so we opted for day tours to go see some places that called our names and then a multi-day 4x4 tour through the Bolivian portion of the desert and the Uyuni salt flats.

Our first tour was deliberately easy, since we were coming from sea level to high elevation and wanted to acclimatize gradually. We picked at trip to some nearby hot springs called Termas de Puritama, a short bus trip north east of town. The hot springs are nine well-developed pools with sandy floors and rocky banks, and a boardwalk connecting all of them from top to bottom. Some of them are filled by waterfalls from the pool above, and it felt great to lean back and be pummelled by the water for a few minutes at a time. The pools are ringed by tall grasses with fluffy tops, like ornamental grasses you might see in Vancouver, and the bottom of the canyon leading away from the hot springs is filled with miles and miles of the same grass. Despite the area being a desert, there are surprising oases of water and life dotted all around, most fed by springs or streams.

That night we joined a stargazing trip that took us a little ways away from the lights of the town and into the darkness of the desert. The trip started with a smorgasbord of finger food, beverages, a fire, and time to chat with the other travellers. This is where we met the guy exploring on a rented bike, who was drinking heavily and trying to find a late night after-hours party that he’d heard of somewhere. (Ah, to be young and dumb and broke again...) Once the fire burned down and the sun was fully set below the horizon, we moved into a small circular walled enclosure with three big telescopes, and our guides talked to us for a little bit about stars and galaxies, nebulas and black holes. Any time someone asked a question they struggled to answer, my engineering physics degree kicked in and I filled in with information about dark matter, gravitational lensing, stellar nurseries, and the various ends that stars can find after their main hydrogen-fusing stage.

Our timing was unfortunate, though, because the moon was just a day or two off of full and there was an uncommon amount of humidity in the air, so only the brightest stars were actually visible. With the telescopes, we had a good view of Jupiter and its moons, a close-up of the moon’s surface, and a view of the Pleiades, but the sky was dark to the naked eye — few stars, and no view of the Milky Way. We decided we would have to plan a trip to Jasper around the new moon at some point and get some proper stargazing in if we wanted a sky full of stars.

Damn you, sky egg!

The next day we visited a salt lake named Laguna Cejar, where we could float in water as salty and dense as the Dead Sea. At the hot springs, Kris had been ribbing me about on whether I knew how to float properly (fun Graham fact: I’m only about one percent less dense than fresh water when I have my lungs completely filled; when they’re empty, I sink!), but here there was so much salt in the water that floating was no problem. Actually getting into the lagoon was a strange feeling, because it was so much more dense than any water I’d swam in before, and there was this strange sensation of “pushing” into the water to get in. We got a fairly short time in the water, just half an hour, because the sun was scorching and because they wanted to move tour groups through the lagoon efficiently. We stopped at a few other sights in the flat area around the lagoon — a pair of nearly circular freshwater “eye” lakes that were connected to each other underground, and a salt pan where the water was continually dissolving and precipitating gypsum and other salts in a kind of “living rock” that changed and reformed continuously over years. Starting the tour, we noted how much more visible the nearby volcanoes were than the day before, but by late in the afternoon they were partially obscured by a haze of dust and humidity.

When we got back to town we grabbed a bite to eat and a big drink of water, then walked over to another attraction that turned out to be exactly as nerdy-exciting as the name implied: the Meteorite Museum. It was housed in a pair of white, tarp-covered geodesic domes, and admission came with a pair of headphones and an audio guide to the meteorites on exhibit. The exhibits described the various kinds of meteorites, and how they evolve and change in space over time. Or how they don’t: one type of meteorite, called chondrites, formed in the earliest days of the solar system. Each chondritic meteorite spent four and a half billion years drifting through space before landing on earth, and are the oldest pieces of solid matter that we can identify and touch. Even the oldest parts of Earth’s crust have subducted under each other, melted into the mantle, and been reborn as new rock over the eons. Elements have stratified and sunk in the liquid heat of the Earth’s core so that heavier elements like iron and lead are more concentrated at the centre, and lighter elements like water or silicon make up more of the surface. Chondritic meteorites, on the other hand, represent a slice of the original atomic composition of the cosmic dust cloud that coalesced to form the solar system. There were even a few meteorites mounted so they could be touched, with parts of them cut and polished so that the insides were visible.

Me nerding out about touching the oldest piece of rock I’ll ever see 🤓😆

Side note: who else finds a strange joy about going over and touching things just because they’re there? Kris and I are constantly doing that, then shouting the famous line from Finding Nemo... “I touched the butt!” It’s taken us on some fun mini-adventures.

Our third day was probably our biggest and most dramatic. We were up before dawn to visit a geyser field called the Geysers del Tatio. This was in a higher elevation part of the desert, near 3,900 metres elevation, so we had saved it for later when we were more acclimatized. The tour aimed to get there before dawn, because it was explained that that was when the geysers were “most active.” We didn’t understand until we got there — how could water heated up miles under the earth and forced to erupt on the surface be more active based on the time of day? But once we saw the clouds of steam billowing across the bottom of the small valley, we understood: the steam would be invisible water vapour later in the day, when the air was hotter and drier. We wandered around happily, often the last of our small group, taking in the erupting water, bubbling mud pits, and piles and layers of accumulated gypsum. There were geysers that would burble and fountain for a time, then die out and drain back into the earth, and others that guides used to use to boil eggs for their client groups.

We had breakfast just after sunrise, then made the drive slowly back to San Pedro de Atacama, stopping at little wetlands and oases to view flamingos, guanacos, and even a fox trying to see if it could get lucky enough to sneak up on a flamingo. Once we were back in town, we rested for the heat of the day and then rented bikes to go visit the Garganta del Diablo, or Devil’s Throat. This is a barren patch of land covered in steep red dirt hills, canyons winding between them carved by scarce rain and dry wind. One of the canyons has a smooth, flat bottom, and a bike trail leads from the road to a lookout with a view east to the  volcanoes and mountains that mark the border between Chile and Bolivia. The walls of the canyon are delicate dirt, shot through with plates and lines of hard, white minerals, and in some sections we were passing under overhangs or looking up at flat cliffs. While we were on the road to the trailhead, we could see the humidity from the past couple days building into towering clouds somewhere south and west of us, towards town. By the time we had biked to the lookout and hiked up the hill to see the volcanoes, we could see thunderheads passing to the south, moving from west to east and lighting up the mountains with rain and lightning, and after only a few minutes at the lookout it seemed like the storm had rolled around north of us as well. The trailing western edge was moving slowly closer to us, as the clouds piled up agains the mountains and began to lift and create lightning. I set up my camera for interval shooting, taking a few minutes to get as many shots as I could while Kris moved nervously to lower ground and I joked to her over the rising wind about why women have a higher life expectancy than men. We didn’t push our luck too far, though, and after capturing a couple good lightning strikes, we turned around and scrambled down to our bikes. The ride back to the road was calm, because we were in a more arid zone and shielded from the wind, and when we popped out on the road we saw a clear sunset on one side of us and a bruised, angry sky on the other.

We paused on the edge of town while we had a view of the storm, and stood staring at the lightning for a few minutes. A bolt of forked lightning would strike the ground every twenty seconds or so, often more frequently, and the thunder rolled over us in a continuous distant roar. Even the locals were stopping to stare and watch this epic thunderstorm crash over the desert. As the sun set, we found a place to sit and watch the lightning flashes as they grew less frequent but brighter, illuminating the landscape in the gathering darkness. We were glad, in the moment, that we hadn’t made any other plans for the day; it was truly a treat to be able to follow and witness such an awe-inspiring weather event, without thinking we had to be anywhere else or get somewhere other than exactly where we were.

The next day, we were up early and packed for our trip through the Bolivian part of the desert, looking forward to a few more days of otherworldly geography and the famous salt flats. More on that in the next update!