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Rock, salt and ..... more rock
Entry 57 of 59 | show all | print this entry |
21 hours. Thats how long we spent on a bus from Santiago to San Pedro De Atacama. Lord!! But it wasn't all that bad, especially since we got a first class fully reclining seat for the journey. They even give you meals and show movies and Buffy and bewitched repeats. I now know the spansh for vampire, witch and a whole loads of other useless ones as well. It was great!! Better than a plane, and much cheaper too.
San Pedro De Atacama is a little village quite literally in the middle of nowhere. Its in the Atacama desert, the driest place on the planet. There's a place about 20 miles from the village where no rainfall has ever been recorded. EVER!! The streets are paved with, er...dirt. Thats right, no tarmac. But its a happening place, the action centre of Chile. Its right in the middle of all of these natural wonders. We stayed in a nice little place, made like those traditional houses you often see on the telly, white washed and a little bit wonky looking, but nice nonetheless.
We got up at the ungodly hour of 4am the first morning to go see the El Tatio Geysers, the highest geyser field in th world at about 4500 metres way up in the Andes, about 7km from the Bolivian border. It took about 2.5 hours to get there, travelling in the dark along a fairly treacherous looking roads. We got there just before dawn broke, which is when they begin to erupt, but, as our guide informed us "it's not cold enough for them to explode really high". Not cold enough!?!? It was feckin freezing!! He was right though, some of them erupted about 20 feet high, but if its cold enough the place is meant to look like the earth is going to open up beneath you with geysers spewing hot water aout all over the shop.
Later that same day we headed out to the Salar De Atacama, the largest salt flat in Chile and the third biggest in the world. Its basically the harshest, most inhospitable looking landscape you ever saw. Lets just say you wouldn't want to get lost in the middle of it. The salt is twenty metres thick and forms basically from water flowing from the andes that evapourates before it can go anywhere and deposits the slat it contains on the flat(you learn something new every day). Amazingly there are some animals that can survive here, most notably the flamigoes who look very impressive in pink against the white salt plains. They live in the small pools that dot the flat. We watched the sunset over the flats, which was amazing, easily as good as Ayers rock.
After a hearty meal in one of the tonnes of restaurants in the town and coming out smelling like a pyromaniac (they all have huge bonfires in the middle of the room - it gets very cold at night so the smoke gets all over you)it was time for bed. Another long journey ahead the next day.
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