Atacama: A Desert of Superlatives

After almost getting robbed, passing through one of the strangest border crossings seen yet, and sliding through Peru's customs with an over-extended visa sans charge (but not without getting written up on a legal document for attempting to smuggle Peruvian Granny Smith apples into Chile), Amanda and I are in finally in the longest and skinniest country in Latin America.

Chile is 2,600 miles long but only reaches a maximum width of 110 miles. That said, there is pretty much only one way to pass through Chile - from top to bottom, or bottom to top. Our first stop was Arica, an industrial beach town - barely 20 minutes away from the northern border. We arrived just 2 days after Chile's President Pinera had declared a tsunami warning across the entire country, and specifically an evacuation of Arica on March 11, following the disaster in Japan. "Is it safe to enter Chile?" we asked dubiously as we loaded our bags into the mysterious "taxi" that would carry us out of Peru. "I wouldn't be taking you across if it wasn't, would I?" our sly driver replied. After 5 months in Latin America, I was a little wary of this answer...

Regardless we arrived. And our first impression of a new country? Arica - be it because of the tsunami scare or because it was Sunday, was a ghost town. It was as though we had been dropped off in a Latin American version of Jim Carrey's Truman Show and then they had spontaneously cut funding; we had landed in Chilean Pleasant Ville but without any people. Too tired to enjoy the beach (and for Mands and I, that's tired) and too confused to want to explore the city, we left and headed inland - if there is such a thing in this thin country - to the desert. The Atacama Desert: THE highest, THE driest and one of the coldest deserts in the world.

The Highest

We arrived in San Pedro de Atacama, a village that sadly exists almost exclusively for tourism, early in the morning and beyond groggy from our 12 hour bus ride. Completely exhausted from spending 2 of the last 3 nights on buses, we dropped our bags and decided to get our daily run over with before it got too hot. We set off into the desert but quickly our legs ached, our throats burned, our lungs panted, and we felt to put it bluntly, like shit. Had we lost all fitness that quickly? When we weren't running we were at least hiking the Andes!

Had I taken the time to read my Lonely Planet Bible - chapter Chile, section Atacama Desert - before we arrived, I would have known that we were in fact situated almost 2 miles high, at one of the lowest points of the highest desert in the world. The average height across the desert is 13,000 ft (Note: The highest peak of the Rockies is 14,440 ft.)

The Driest

Yesterday we rented bikes and rode through the dusty dirt roads at our own pace - a welcome change from the herding cattle feel that Machu Picchu was at times. Amanda, Robert - a journalist from Texas who we Spirit Bumped into in Cuzco and again here in San Pedro (you always meet twice!), and I packed our water bottles and cameras and mounted our in-surprisingly-good-shape Treks. We rode relaxed, exploring new paths and attempting to understand how such a barren, dry, hot landscape could kiss the base of snow covered volcanoes.

As we passed through small towns of adobe houses with shallow irrigation ditches lining the roads and sage bushes struggling to grow, I was hit with a pang of homesickness - stronger than I have felt yet. The dry heat, the similar plant species, and the looming mountains all reminded me so strongly of New Mexico. Yet I kept reminding myself that not only am I miles and miles south, I am also in the driest desert in the world. Though I'm still not sure whether this reminder helps me cope with feeling so far away or if it just confuses me more...

The Atacama desert is one of the few deserts on earth that does not receive any rain. Moisture is blocked on both sides; on one side of the 600 mile-long strip of desert lies the Andes Mountains, on the other the Chilean Coast Range - a mountain range that runs parallel between the Pacific coast and the Andes. The town of San Pedro was born out of one of the few natural oases within the vast dry emptiness.

[One of] the Coldest

Determined to get into the heart of the Atacama and away from NM look-alike, Amanda and I woke up this morning at 3:30 am (we seem to do this a lot these days...) to join a tour to the Tatio Geothermal field to watch the famous geysers at sunrise. We drove 2 hours east and over 2000m up in elevation, so that when we stepped out of the car our toes and noses froze instantly. Oh. My. Gosh. Who would have thought that a desert could be so dang freezing! But then I suppose when you're standing 8km from the Bolivian border (the only thing anyone says about Bolivia is how cheap and cold it is) and when you find yourself suddenly much closer to the snow capped volcanoes than you were before, it at least makes a little more sense. Kind of.

Our guide Salvador whisked us along through the field casually explaining that there are 600 volcanoes in Chile, of which 150 are active. The magma under our feet is constantly boiling the water of the underground river that is fueled by snow melt from the tops of the volcanoes. Every few feet a hole bubbling over with hotter than hot water would shoot a burst of steam. And to make things more ridiculous, this field boasts The Highest Geysers in the World. The contrast of the steam against the frost-forming air was definitely worth the 3:30 a.m. brutal awakening. And after a couple hours of huddling in the llama sweater I spontaneously splurged on in Cuzco, the sun began shining, making one of the coldest deserts in the world seem a little less cold.

At times the last fews days have looked like New Mexico, and at times it has looked like Mars. But despite it's different faces, the Atacama Desert of Chile will at least be remembered for a long time as being high, dry, and cold. It is, as climatologists describe it, an "absolute desert."