Entering the Atacama Desert
After a two-hour flight north from Santiago, we landed on the high plateau of the Atacama Desert. This blog provides an overview of the four days we spent in the desert and what we did. We managed to pack a lot into this short time as you will find out soon. Over the up coming four blogs, I will go into detail about our desert adventures. You will get to read about beautiful vicuñas and hot steam geysers four and a half kilometres above sea level; heavy industry in the desert alongside incredible landscapes; amateur and professional astronomy; and the great fun I had conducting astrophotography. Each exciting part will have its own space in four separate blog posts.
For now, let’s kick off with our Atacama Desert overview.
During the last few weeks, we have had time to reset and relax, which was much needed. After three weeks, it was time to move again to see some unexplored areas of Chile, as our visas were about to run out. We originally thought we would only spend two months in Chile, but we almost spent our full 90 days (the maximum allowed on our type of visas). Overall, we have really enjoyed Chile.
For our desert adventure we packed up and headed to Santiago where we had a one-night stay in the airport hotel. We were very happy that we slept a night in the airport before heading to the Atacama because moving ourselves to the big city was more tiring than we had envisaged.
The day of the flight, we had to get up extremely early at 4 am to get to our plane for departure at 7 am. A few hours later we arrived in El Loa Airport, Calama located in the Atacama Desert in the north of Chile.
The Atacama Desert is very high. During this trip we had to take altitude pills because of the rapid change of elevation we were experiencing. Our starting point, the city of Calama is already 2,250 metres above sea level (even the airport is higher than Mt Kosciusko).
Once we arrived, we picked up the hire car and David explained the plan of where we were planning to drive that day, and what the plan for the four days was. Two nights would be spent in San Pedro de Atacama and two nights in Antofagasta, a desert city next to the ocean. We would do significant amounts of driving each day but that would be the best way to see the variety of the landscape around us.
This is a map of the places we went on our four days in the desert. I have even broken everything up into each day.
On our first day we planned to drive to San Pedro de Atacama and take a slight detour to see the geysers. The whole trip was about 3 hr 46 min and 220 km. During this drive which was beautiful we managed to hit 4500 metres above sea level, which is more than half the height of Mount Everest. There is less oxygen up there than down at sea level, so you get puffed out more easily.
One very exciting thing on this day was that we got to see our very first wild vicuñas which you may remember from my earlier blog: ¿Que es a Guanaco? on the different camelids that live in South America, their similarities and how they're related to each other. It turns out that vicuñas only live between 3500 and 5750 metres above sea level in the high-altitude Andes. We saw dozens of them; we also saw guanacos, wild donkeys and a number of exotic bird’s native to this region.
Once we reached the geysers the employees let us know that geysers were quite inactive at his time and we should come back really early tomorrow morning when there would be more geothermal activity.
Later in our trip, we would also do some nighttime adventures, as the visibility of the stars in the desert is on another level. We had the opportunity to visit the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and go inside one of their famous Very Large Telescopes (VLT) on a 2600 m high mountaintop overlooking the Pacific Ocean and see them building the gigantic new Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) which I will tell you about in an upcoming blog.
The next blog, however, will be about our experience at the geysers. Now let’s get started with our Atacama adventure!
