Thursday's Child: Atacama Salt Flats, Chile

"Near Antofagasta
the whole
saline plain
resounds:
it is a
broken
voice,
a song filled
with sorrow."

- from "Ode to Salt", Pablo Neruda

This month, I've been writing about some of the spectacular places we've seen, and I'll end where I began – in Chile.

The Atacama desert in the north of Chile is home to a number of salt plains, one of which is the Chaxa Lagoon.  Craggy mounds of hardened salt thrust up from the earth for miles and miles, extending to the border of the distant mountains.

These salt crystals were left behind after the evaporation of underground water. The scarcity of rainfall in the region, and the absence of a place for water to drain, have enhanced the strange beauty of these saline formations.

Thanks to the microscopic life in the lagoons, the flats are home to a wide variety of birds, some of which are endangered or vulnerable.  The area is particularly known for the flamingoes that live there, and has been designated a nature reserve.

But all these facts pale next to the otherworldly beauty of this stark, white terrain. And no one could describe it more beautifully than the brilliant Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda:


"Then in its caverns
the gem salt, mountain
of a buried light,
transparent cathedral,
crystal of the sea, oblivion
of the waves."
- from "Ode to Salt", Pablo Neruda

Thursday's Child: Valle de la Luna, Chile

Last week I wrote about The Great Wall of China, and promised that I’d post about other breathtaking sights we’ve seen on our travels.  One place that I’ll never forget for its haunting beauty is Chile’s Valle de la Luna, or Moon Valley.

We visited Chile’s Atacama Desert in March 2009, and it was one of the most beautiful and diverse places I’ve ever seen.  Every day we went on one or two excursions in the San Pedro area, and every day was a new adventure. On our first day in the Atacama region, we visited Valle de la Luna.  This valley is one of the driest places in the world; some parts haven’t received rainfall in over a hundred years.  It’s well named, for the bleak, red landscape seems lunar in its beauty and remoteness. 

The diversity in this single valley is incredible. Red craggy hills give way to endless stretches of flat sandy plains.  Jagged stone outcrops have been carved by the wind over centuries.  Salt crystals cling to the stones and, in places, a veil of crystallized salt coats the flats.  The desert is ringed by volcanoes, some of which are still active, and in the distance the Andes soar to the sky.

This valley, barren and inhospitable to the eye, is actually a sanctuary of serenity.  When we visited, we apparently had the miles of desert to ourselves.  Something about this solitude made us feel like time had stopped.  Our guide invited us to close our eyes, and in the silence – no animals, no insects, no other people – we felt like we were wrapped in a cocoon of tranquility.

Thursday's Child: El Tatio geysers, Chile

Being on holidays can sometimes be a great chance to catch up on the sleep you've missed the rest of the year.  To stay in bed luxuriously long, then gracefully rise to greet the day.

So if you’re setting the alarm for 4:30 in the morning, it must be for something really special.

In the case of the El Tatio geysers in the Atacama desert of Chile, the early hour was more than worth it.  The geysers were about a two-hour drive from our hotel, and they’re most spectacular in the cold air of dawn before the air warms up and the mist disperses.  Thus, the early morning wake up call.

This is the kind of adventure you hire a guide for.  The roads to the geysers are terrible, and the idea of navigating them at night is unimaginable.  As we slowly climbed the winding roads, some of us slept, but I gazed into the impossibly black sky that was punctuated by the brightest stars I’ve ever seen.  The geysers lay at an altitude of 4200 metres, and I could almost feel the air getting cooler and thinner as we traversed the hairpin turns uphill.

El Tatio is home to 8% of the geysers in the world. And it was amazing to walk from one geyser to the next – gingerly, because the ground is fragile in places.  If there’s one thing you don’t want at 7:00 in the morning, it’s a geyser bath. 

When we arrived, our guide Veronica put some tetra packs of chocolate milk into one of the geysers, which we later enjoyed as hot chocolate with our breakfast.

From some vantage points, it felt like we were watching the fountains at Versailles, except these were bursts of hot water and steam gushing into the air.  Some of them erupted, some bubbled, but being in the midst of this field of geysers felt ethereal, like we had stepped into a land of our imaginations.  A land where a variety of heavenly beings might emerge from behind the next column of steam.

Surrounded by the misty air, drifting from one geyser to the next, we could have been in the middle of a Monet landscape.  And as the sun rose, we witnessed an ever-changing view of these wispy miracles.

Veronica at El Tatio geysers