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Travel
Tuesday, 01 December 2009 01:12 Written by Jade Bremner Flamingos, astrology, trains and bucket loads of salt: the Atacama Desert The Atacama Desert, Chile [in the voice of David Attenborough] “is the driest place in the world”. It sits on Chile’s skinny body in a 105,000 sqkm space between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean in the north of the country. Virtually nothing lives in this area, but if you put aside any panic, from knowing you are the only people around for hundreds of miles in any direction, you’ll experience some of the most jaw-dropping, saliva-inducing vistas in the world. Be warned though, conditions are harsh. You certainly wouldn’t want to be stranded here. In Antofagasta (a northern desert town) for example, rainfall is a skimpy one millimeter per year and there’s none at all in most other parts of the desert.Driving from Santiago by mini-bus, we traveled up Chile’s back to the desolate territory. Over the decades people tried to settle in all the free space this area offers and make their living mining the huge salt plains, extracting minerals, copper and sodium nitrate from the land. But the waterless and often excruciatingly hot (during the day) and bitterly cold (during the night) conditions wiped out entire generations of families. Babies rarely survived, and their elders have since died out. On our journey we passed giant burial grounds. The wind had knocked over the modest wooden crosses and tomb placards of the dead. Grave robbers had torn open wooden coffins and the valuables were gone, but looking around the silent but eerie desert upon us, we caught glimpses of human skeletons; some still had skin and hair, still dressed in their clothing and shoes, just lying there in partially open coffins. Nothing had decayed because of the lack of moisture in the air. The roads make you tired. Visitors lose all bearings in the myriad of yellow dunes. Then you realize you are in a vast area of salt flats. These are the third-largest salt flats in the world. They crumbled and crunched under our feet as we walked on them. A couple of hours in this area inevitably made us thirstier than usual, but there’s more water here than most parts of the Atacama. A bizarre sight, in the center of it all is the bright pink flamingos, which mince about among the salt ponds. They feed off microorganisms called Artemia Salina and filter the land-locked salt water with their special saliva membrane. The most magnificent aspect this area, by far, is the multi-colored sunset over the salt planes, which looks photoshopped before you’ve even taken a picture. The still active Lascar volcano can be seen in the east and makes for a mind-blowing frame. Continuing up to San Pedro, in the north, we passed the famous giant fiberglass hand created by Chilean artist Mario Irrizábal. Known as La Mano del Desierto, it sits in the desert waving to the passing traffic. We ventured on to a fully intact Switchyard with dozens of steam trains. This same incredible place is where scenes in the recent James Bond film Quantum of Solace were shot. The trains used to export nitrogen but when liquid nitrogen came about and there was no longer a need for them, a whole industry died out overnight. They grandly sit here, fully preserved in their own graveyard, worth a fortune. Touristy San Pedro, has a population of 5000 people living in adobe buildings, made from sand, water, clay and other available materials such as straw and dung. These highly durable buildings are the ideal material to withstand the temperamental desert climate and often abrasive windy conditions. They store the daytime heat and warm the building during the often minus-10 degree night. In this sleepy town there are plenty of things to do, including visiting the nearby hot pools, mountain biking through the Valle de la Luna and Valle de la Muerte, with its towering termite-mound-like natural sand sculptures and moon-like landscape. Still feeling energetic, even at such high altitude we tried sand-boarding and horse riding reaching places virtually impossible to get to by foot or car. As a finale to the trip, and squeezing the remaining pennies out of the budget, we visited the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory. On its own for miles around and 5,104m above sea level, a French astronomger set up base here to practice submillimeter astronomy. The area’s dryness, means the moisture in the air is absorbed, which is (apparently) perfect conditions for wavelength radio astronomy. Just sitting there in the middle of the desert are some of the largest and most expensive telescopes in the world, which for a handsome fee we were allowed to play with for the evening. Wrapped up in seven layers peering through the lenses we were able to see, perfectly clearly, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. It was easy to identify the ring around Saturn and that the circumference of Mars was actually moving, almost bubbling, from its heat. Next up , a lesson on how to identify constellations in the night sky. Travel Pack How to get there Accommodation
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