Atacama: Stunning.

The first weekend in November is extended to 4 days for All Saints and All Souls days.  5 of us took advantage of the long weekend and headed North to the Atacama Desert.  We stayed in San Pedro which is accessible by bus from Calama which is where we flew Thursday from Santiago.  This map shows the trip and this map will help you follow along.

My travel companions!  Emily on the left and Rachel in the sweet Aviators.

And the engaged couple, Alex and Elisa.  Emily, Rachel, and Alex will all finish up their ChACE experience in December.  Elisa was in town to visit.

One activity that drew me to Atacama was sandboarding.  The huge dunes and excellent sand quality here (Atacama is the driest and highest elevation desert in the world) make for a great ride.  So Friday morning we set out with our guide Sebastian to shred the slopes.  The location is called Valle de la Muerte, or Valley of Death.

Everyone gave it a shot and we had lots of success!  It's a lot like riding powder that's been sitting around a few days.  You have to wax the board after every run and keep a lot of weight on your back foot.  Here is a video of me riding down.  I like it because you can see at the end just how sticky the sand is.  I'd say in this video I'm going between 15 and 20 mph.

After a huge lunch we had our tour of Valle de la Muerte and Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley).  It was cool to see Death Valley from the top--for scale, the pure sand dune in the upper left of this picture is the dune we were riding down.  This valley was created by a massive geological collapse, probably as a result of magmatic activity.  The formations are beautiful.

We lucked out with guides on this trip.  Here I am with Gonzalo about Valle de la Muerte.  More about him in a minute.

Getting down into the valley was a lot of fun.  I took the adventurous route by jumping off a cliff (maybe 8 feet at most Mom, no worries) into the sand.  Here's the result.  It was like landing in a pillow, I just sunk down.  Everything here is so dry!  We then ran down the sand dune barefoot at full speed.  So much fun.

I have lots of pictures like this.  The sun always looked so huge and was very strong.  I went through a lot of sun screen on this trip.  This is the ridge of Valle de la Luna, probably the most popular attraction of San Pedro.  If you're following along on the map, both Valle de la Muerte and Valle de la Luna are northwest of San Pedro.

Here I am high above Valle de la Luna.  I've mentioned previously how much I love the physics of water carving out rock formations.  I'll add wind to the list.  All these rocks have been sculpted and shaped by the wind.  Wind also causes the sand dunes to move (migrate is the technical term).  This was the first of many places where I couldn't decide which camera angle was most beautiful.  360 degrees of breathtaking scenery.

We headed out of the valley to watch the sunset.  The sunset itself isn't very impressive because there are never clouds here.  What's impressive is looking at the Andes to the East and watching them turn purple.  Another breathtaking view.

A note on the lack of clouds.  Atacama is the only place in the world that has locations that have no recorded rainfall--ever.

Looking out over Valle de la Luna at sunset (towards the West).

When we returned from our tour, we asked Gonzalo if he knew of any places to get a good empanada since San Pedro is rumored to have the best in Chile.  He said he was planning on going to get some anyway and we should follow him.  We walked up to an unmarked blue door and knocked.  A 5 foot nothing Chilean woman opened the door and we asked for empanadas.  After a half hour and a beer at a nearby open-air bar we came back and I had the best empanadas I will probably ever eat.  It was such a great experience to be able to talk with Gonzalo about his travels in Chile and to have some insider knowledge on the good food.  I returned both Saturday and Sunday for more.  Señora Sida and her blue door empanadas.

Friday was a very full day.  After our empanadas we had a star tour out in the middle of nowhere.  Atacama is rated as the best place to stargaze in the world.  The whole lack of clouds thing again.  Pictures of the stars weren't working out so well but here you can see the moon rising above the Andes.  It was very cool to see the rays shooting out over us.  Our astronomer Les (from Canada) had a super strong laser pointer that could point at stars in the sky.

After showing us all the visible constellations, the planets, and the major stars of interest and telling us about the history of navigation by using the stars, we got to look through 10 huge telescopes up at the sky.  Some of them have motors to make them move with the earth to stay focused on the same thing.  Cool.

Les said his last year in Canada they had 300 cloudy nights.  His first year in Chile they had 325 clear nights.  Good move.

The main project going on in Atacama right now is called ALMA: Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.  Alma means "soul" in Spanish.  They're building 12 giant telescopes that will be placed in a circle 15 km wide to compose the largest telescope ever created.  It's going to revolutionize astronomy and how we view the universe.  It's the second biggest science project in existence; CERN's large hadron collider is first.

A French astronomer came out to answer questions and to take pictures with our cameras through a telescope if we wanted.

So this is a picture of the moon.  Taken with my camera.  Through a telescope.  Cool.

We came back to the hostel quite exhausted.  Saturday was another early morning--I cought the sunrise around 7 a.m.  We had a private tour booked which was a great call on Rachel's part (she did all our planning; thanks a million Rachel!).  It allowed us to move quickly when we wanted to and to slow down to see the things that interested us most.

Stop number one: the intersection of the Tropic of Capricorn with the Inca Trail.  Note that Em, who is "in the tropics" (between the Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer) is hot and Alex, who is subtropical, is cold.

The tropics are located at 23.5 degrees on either side of the equator (south in this case).  On the solstices the sun stays directly above one tropic (because of the earth's 23.5 degree tilt) then begins its journey to the other.

Continuing our great line of tour guides, Williams was awesome.  He actually met us at the airport Thursday night to welcome us to Atacama and to collect for our tour.  He has crazy hair that flips out at the sides but I don't have a picture that accurately depicts his style.  He knows everything about the region.  He told us a lot about the Spanish Conquistadors and how the desert has changed over the years.

All of our tour with Williams was to the South of San Pedro.

Our next stop was 2 lagoons surrounded by volcanoes.  It's kind of odd seeing water in the middle of the desert, but I can say it's sure beautiful.  This one is called Miscanti.

 And this one is called Miñiques.  They were so calm, the only disturbances were the ducks swimming in them.  Yup, ducks in the desert.  Stay tuned for more ridiculous animals in the desert.  Anyway, the mountains reflected in them were beautiful.

These guys were all over the place.  They're called Vicuña and they kind of look like deer.  They must not need much water because we saw some far away from any sort of drinking source.

Back to those Conquistadors.  We encountered lots of cities like Socaire, pictured here.  They were always characterized by ruins of what was the Inca village and a Catholic church constructed by the Spanish.

We ate lunch in Socaire.  There is very typical Chilean food served in this region.  The brown in quinua, the purple thing is a potato (I was happy to give that away), and the meat is, I kid you not, llama.  It wasn't bad.  A little chewy, but kind of like a roast on the dry end.

Our next stop was arguably the most unique feature of the Atacama Desert, the Salar de Atacama, a giant salt flat.  This is nothing like the salt flats in Utah where they've set land speed records.  You could never drive across these sharp rocks.  Basically tectonic activity pushed two mountain ranges together to form an oval, and when the water drains to the center it carries salt along with it.  The water has two options, either evaporate or go underground.  Either way the salt is left behind and it's pushed up by the underground lake.  So it's like the rocks are growing from the bottom up.  Cool.

Some places the underground lake creeps through the cracks.  You can't really call it water because the salt content is through the roof, so they call it brine.  What animal would you least expect in the middle of the driest desert in the middle of a salt flat in a pool of brine?  Well let's just say Flamingo wouldn't have been at the top of my list, but there they were.  They feed on "brine shrimp", these tiny anaerobic organisms that thrive on salt.  Yummy.  There's a huge reserve dedicated to protecting the flamingos.  Again, very cool.

Our last stop with Williams was at La Laguna Cejar which is very similar to The Dead Sea in the holy land in that the salt content is so high you don't have to expend any effort to float.  All the good pictures (there were some really good ones) were taken by other cameras so watch out for them in a future post.  We wrapped up our day with Williams with wine and cheese as the sun was going down.  What a great day.  We made it back for mass, ate dinner, and went to sleep.

Bedtime was early but I wish it would have been earlier.  We got up at 4 a.m. for our tour of the Geysers on Sunday morning.  This is our tour receipt for Valle de la Luna and the Geysers de Tatio.  I thought it was interesting because of the system they use for what to wear.  On the left, the one dot with a circle means wear something to block the wind.  On the right, a dot with lots of circles means wear warm clothing.  The X means hat and gloves.  Also, those temperatures were no joke.  When we arrived it was -8 degrees Celsius or about 18 Fahrenheit.  The desert gets cold at night.

Here's a picture looking East just before sunrise.  They schedule the tours so early because when the temperature rises the geysers aren't as impressive.  The landscape was amazing.

The Geysers de Tatio, North of San Pedro on the map, is the 3rd largest geyser field in the world.  Number one is Yellowstone, two is somewhere in Russia.  This one was very different from what I remember of Yellowstone.  They geysers don't erupt, they're big pools of boiling water on the surface that emit steam.  They're heated by massive magma pools below the surface; we were actually in the crater of a dormant volcano.

Apparently they tried to use the steam as a power source a few decades back.  The machinery is still sitting in the field but it was inefficient to get the power to places it would be used so they shut it down.

I love this picture.  The sun against the steam was awesome.

We tried to get creative with our shadows in the steam.  It was a cool effect but difficult to capture on camera.

Our geyser guide Mauricio.  He liked to use volunteers to describe the geology of the region.  He morphed hands into techtonic plates, mountain ranges, lakes, and the salt flat.  He also speaks English Spanish and French fluently.  That was helpful for the two families from France that were on the tour.

Result of wearing a hat all morning.  And not shaving for a week.  More pictures of me, just like I promised Mom!

Appropriately there is a hot spring heated by a geyser.  The water just bubbles out of the ground and into the pool.  It was a very unique experience--the surface by the source could easily burn you, but just a few inches below the water could almost be called cool.  It took some engineering to find the right spot.

We made several stops on the way back to San Pedro.  One was at a very interesting lake covered in algae.  The photos were great, contrasting the blue and green with the brown from the desert and sometimes with the snow on the mountains.  There are already too many pictures in this post so I settled on one of the group.  Alex and Elisa had to leave Sunday morning so they had to skip out on the geysers.

Wouldn't be a desert without cacti!  The Cactus Forest was pretty cool.  Very much what you would think of when you imagine a desert.  The rock in some areas was darker.  Mauricio told us this is volcanic rock and it holds moisture better so there were more cacti in these areas.

Bigger than they look.  They ranged from 10 to 20 feet I'd say.  The spines were almost like pine needles, only spiky at the ends.

Apparently the snow doesn't stay on the mountains all summer long.  I'm glad it was still there, it made for some great pictures.

After the tour we returned to San Pedro, packed, had some Blue Door Empanadas, did a little shopping, caught our shuttle to Calama, and flew out.  I took pictures out the window the whole way back.  Our flight in was at night so we couldn't see a thing.  The desert goes on forever.  We flew over all kinds of interesting rock and sand formations.  Here is an open pit copper mine we passed.  Chile has to my knowledge the 2 biggest copper mines in the world and that number is probably bigger.

We didn't see a single cloud until our approach into La Serena where we traded out some passengers before heading to Santiago.  The mountains poking up through the clouds at sunset were amazing.

La Serena lit up at takeoff.  Jenny spent the weekend here along with an estimated 120,000 other Chileans.  you can see the bay at the top of this shot, the beaches are supposed to be incredible.

Last week was a very normal work week.  I'm teaching a little more these days, and I set up a bank account, but those are the highlights.  This past weekend, November 10th, was Clemente's birthday.  I made no-bake cookies at his request and most of their extended family came on Sunday for a pool party.  On that note, it's getting hot in Chile.  The pool will be getting a lot of use in the coming weeks.

I was charged with the English bulletin board for the month.  After googling for a while I came up with this colorful turkey.  Art was never my strong point so I used a lot of geometry so it ended up being fun and I don't think it's too bad.

The plan for Thanksgiving is to head to St. Geoge's school for mass and dinner.  That weekend the Irish will beat USC and be destined for the National Championship.  This weekend I'm hoping to do some kite boarding so check back next week for an update!  Love to all from Chile.