Desert star gazing

Let me begin by saying that our visit to the Atacama desert far surpassed anything we had done in a long time. It was truly amazing and some of the coolest landscapes we had ever seen. It was, without a doubt, the most unique of all scenery on our trip. If anyone is planning a trip to Chile, this should not be missed.

After spending all day checking out geysers, volcanoes, lagoons, salt and flamingos at super high altitudes with long intermissions in the  van, it was nice to join up with a ‘star tour’ in the middle of the night. I, for one, was plain giddy about this “tour’’ and was looking forward to it for awhile. I guess I am a bit of a nerd, but whatev. Stars and space are cool.

To give a little background, the Atacama desert has the best star gazing, planet watching, and constellation admiring in the world, hands down. The US and other countries have an official observatory there, too. We met the rest of our group and jumped on a coach bus which drove us out of the small town of San Pedro. Fifteen minutes later, the driver cut the lights and we rolled up to a pitch dark place and that’s when I looked out the window and saw this.

Yeah. not too bad at all. Our “tour” was led by a Canadian astronomer from Space Obs with an interesting sense of humor. He helped us find ALL of the constellations with the naked eye. I have never seen so many stars. We couldn’t get any photos of the stars to come out, so I borrowed this one from another space tourist on Trip Advisor. After we had a 45 minute conversation with the group and astronomer, we were just about to freeze to death. It was more than worth it, though. We learned a lot and the stars.. just, wow. We then moved on to the telescopes which were trained or positioned on various constellations, stars and planets. But the coolest was Saturn.

I took this photo through the telescope, so it’s not great (my camera doesn’t have a long enough exposure). The view with the telescope was crystal clear, though. You could even see the individual rings.

We finished the tour with a chat about space, black matter, black holes and other cool space things while wrapped up in blankets, sipping hot chocolate. I managed to stay awake for most of it and we went back to the town around 1 am. It was a night well spent :)

-a

Volcanoes, Lagoons and Salt

 

We arrived in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile after an epic, although very long, bus ride from Salta in northern Argentina. After finding our hostel, we realized we could not pay for it without local currency, so we set off to find an ATM. We quickly found out that the town has 2 ATMS and no one actually accepts credit cards, even though they claim to accept them. We then found out that all of the two ATMs were out of service. We were hungry and anxious to book some tours for the next day, but mainly hungry. And I am not pleasant when I’m hungry. After a couple of hours, the ATMs were back up and running (how does that even happen, anyways?) and we were thrilled to have some Chilean pesos in hand. First thing we did was book two tours for the next day: one which began at 7am and visited all sorts of cool sights way out of town and the other was a super cool star gazing, planet gazing tour at 10pm. With all of that in order, we sat down for one of the nicest meals we had in awhile. All of the food in San Pedro is really expensive by South American prices so we had an excuse to spend a little more and feel good about it :)

church in the town square

After a dinner full of Austral Merluza, we settled into our room for the night. We remembered to turn our clocks back one hour as we had read in the traveler forums and bundled up for a chilly night’s sleep. Six hours later, we were awoken by the night guard banging on our door, telling us the tour company was waiting for us. We didn’t understand what happened – did we have the tour start time wrong?? Nope. There was just no time difference between Argentina and Chile. We threw on our clothes and ran out the door to join the rest of the tourists. Turns out our tour guide was a British born Chilean and we were a little thrown off when he spoke English with a British accent. Anyways, we visited some really cool places, all at 4,000 – 5,000 meters up (if you don’t have any reference, that is super high, like Mount Kilimanjaro high). First off, we visited the second largest salt flat in the world, where all of our lithium batteries come from, among other things, which is also home to a really cool, four-species-of-flamingo reserve. The salt here was not flat like the Salinas Grandes in Argentina, rather it was rock like.

We enjoyed a nice breakfast while the sun was still rising and set off for the next stop: antiplanicos, which turned out to be a really cool sacred volcano, lagoon and bird nesting place. The altitude was starting to get to me at the antiplanicos, but it was impossible to not enjoy such amazing scenery.

 volcanoes make for some cool landscapes

We met a cool Swiss couple and took turns playing photographer for the each other.

After sufficient time gazing at the volcano and lagoon, we loaded back up into our super hot and super crowded mini van. We did our best to sleep in between sights as there was a lot of driving and the altitude-heat-crowded bus combination was not working for us. We had a pit stop in a cute village and mingled with the locals a bit. I’m sure they were thrilled that we had come to look at them. One woman was making quinoa and charging people to take photos of her..

church in the village with more volcanoes in the background

Once again, we loaded back up into the van and took a rather long ride to the Salar de Talar or Salar de Tara – I could never figure out if they were different. This was the highest point reached on our day trip. The colors were surreal. Our group hung out here for awhile, had lunch (pretty sure I polished off most of the food) and set off for our final stop.

Our last stop was in another village, but this time the village had really good ice cream. We ended the day hanging out in the town square, eating ice cream and chatting with our new Italian friend (who asked me how long I cook my pasta for and then told me I cook it too long when I answered “4 –5 minutes”).

 

 

-a