My Trip to the Desert

The other weekend I traveled to the Northern tip of Chile to San Pedro, home of the driest desert in the world. I traveled with two other volunteers, Amy and Katie, two French girls, Julie and Lucy, and a German girl, Anna. We were quite the diverse group. To save money we rented a car, which was the best decision we made! Naturally, the car was a stick shift so of course none of us Americans could drive it ha. The car we rented was a four-door truck. There were 6 of us, so to say the least, it was a tight squeeze in the back of the truck…but it was worth it for sure!

The things I saw that long weekend were incredible. None of the pictures I took captured the true beauty that I was surrounded by. But nonetheless, I still took a million pictures to try and capture some of God’s best work.

The town San Pedro itself is pretty small. Every store in the town was an adventure/tour company, a restaurant, or a convenient store. To say the least, the small town was flooded with backpackers and foreigners. The town had a nice little market place, where I bought some mittens, and there was a quaint white church in the town.

Our first stop of the weekend was to try and find Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley). We were unsuccessful in finding the park, but instead found a beautiful lookout and watched the sunset. It was incredibly windy though, so we only stayed long enough to take pictures (the theme of our exploring).

The next day we traveled to La Reserva Nacional Los Flamencos. It’s kind of hard to describe what this place was, but it was really pretty. The ground was made of rocky, salt formations.

We actually tried the salt and it was pretty tasty! The view of the entire place was beautiful though. (Sorry the panoramic picture is really small...hopefully you can still get a good idea of how beautiful it really was!)

The next day we went to Las Lagunas Altiplanicas. Absolutely breathe taking!

So cold!!!! 

Normally, you can swim in these lagunas, but it was way too cold that day and was super windy. We were all bundled up, and again only stayed long enough to take pictures.

After the cold mountains, we went to another laguna called Laguna Cejar. Since we went down in altitude, it was a lot warmer outside and we were able to go swimming in this laguna. The water was FREEZING, but totally worth swimming in because there was a lot of salt in the water, so floating was effortless. That was a really neat feeling. I was able to sit like I was in a chair and still float. I have never experienced something like that, so I enjoyed it for sure.

The next day we drove around a lot and ended up seeing some really cool things. We came across a herd of lamas.

There was a guy with the lamas who said it was one luka ($2) per photo. I couldn’t tell if he was joking around or not so I took a few pictures real quick and ran back to the car. Later on, a few of us needed to pee so we pulled off to the side of the road for a pit stop and this was our view:

Not bad eh? We later discovered that we drove too far and found ourselves accidentally crossing over into Argentina…so that was unexpected.

After that, we crossed over into Bolivia!

The boarder was very sketchy looking. There was an abandoned bus and a shack. Very official...

Amy and Katie were taking pictures when a guy came out of the shack and started yelling at them. So they ran back to the car and we returned to Chile. During our drive back into town, we went off the road for a bit to check out these HUGE boulders on the side of the road. They kind of resembled the face statues on Easter Island (use your imagination!).

              Look how tiny the man in the background is compared to that rock!

Later in the day we went to El Valle de la Luna. I had thought our first stop of the trip was the Valle de la Luna, but where we went that day was way better and much prettier. I saw sand dunes for the first time; that was pretty neat! We also saw a bunch of other salt and rock formations too.

We hiked up one side of the mountain to watch the sun set and the 360 view was amazing (this picture does absolutely no justice to what I actually saw, but kind of gives you an idea...again sorry it's so small!).

Sand Dune! 

On our last morning we visited El Tatio Geysers. These are the highest geysers in the world - at an altitude of 4200 meters. We woke up at 3 in the morning and drove for about 2 hours to make it to the geysers just in time for the sun to rise (apparently the best time of day to see them). It was hard to get a good picture of the geysers with my camera, but I got one with us standing in front of one of them.

The geysers themselves were pretty neat to see - smoke rising out of the ground, with the lovely smell of sulfur. There were small pools of water boiling on the ground, and a few of the geysers were spewing water. Over all it was a pretty interesting morning. The drive to the geysers was a little scary. We were driving on an unpaved road, with zero lights, not knowing if to our left and/or right was a field or a cliff. The four of us crammed in the backseat, wearing no seatbelts, were a little on edge the entire drive, but we made it! So all was good. The drive back was actually very pretty, and there were a lot less cliffs than we had originally thought earlier in the morning.

These four days were so amazing. I had so much fun exploring the desert with old and new friends. Everyone there spoke really good Spanish so we decided to speak Spanish the entire trip. It was so much fun (I was in Spanish heaven ha)! And I learned a lot too. It made me realize that I need to step up my Spanish game though, so I’ll be working on that my last two months here in Chile. I cannot believe I only have two more months before I come back home…where has the time gone?!?!


(If you want to see my panoramic pictures better and bigger go to this site: 
http://goodbellows.photoshelter.com/gallery/Decorative-Prints/G0000QUVc2XCHlQM/
This is Jason's new photography business...so feel free to explore the site!)

Until Next Time,

Liz