November 28, 2013

Bienvenidos a Marte. From our not-so-great experience a little further south, Holly and I ventured into one of the driest places on Earth, the Atacama Desert.  Fortunately for us, the sun is so intense that there is roughly zero cloud cover, so it was nothing but blue skies and martian red rock. Upon arrival, Holly was still feeling a little off and we were both dehydrated. Naturally, our bus stop was different from the ¨Main¨ bus stop so our directions were of no use. After asking around for a while, we finally got to the hostel to find the water undrinkable and no lockers still under construction. This was ok because we one of the owners told us that he would be in the rooms all day and that bottled water was cheap. Sweet. After fighting all temptation to leave, Holly and I dumped our bags and decided to go out and see why so many people were drawn to this seemingly uninhabitable place. After buying a massive bottle of water we walked around town and were pleasantly surprised. Passing through a market, we entered the town center which was filled with bustling shops selling the usual indigenous tchotchkes, restaurants, and clothing shops. After a good wander Holly was feeling brave and we stopped in shack type restaurant and had the typical grilled chicken with rice. A seemingly simple dish made so much better by our recovering state and deep hunger. Feeling revived, we made the walk back to our work-in-progress hostel and rested through the strongest heat of the day. Towards sunset, we took a walk out of town to watch the sun set on the alien planet that we thought we knew.

The next day was much the same, more wandering and relaxing until 4pm, where we met up with a tour to check out La Valle de la Luna: Moon Valley. The tour started off much like many others with the usual where are you from? how long have you been traveling? what do you know about the area? look at how cool the guides are. etc etc. We listened to some rather sweet local tunes on the way out to our first stop, which turned out to be a giant sand dune. Sand dunes! In the desert!? Well of course! This is interesting for the fact that the sand doesn’t come from the desert, but instead from the Chilean coast a couple hundred kilometers west. Turns out they can get some pretty intense winds in those parts which explains a lot of the erosion in the absence of water and helps draw a picture for how the area came to be. Anyways, after that we checked out a cave that hadn’t seen sunlight in thousands of years and then on to Chilean Death Valley, which was originally called Mars Valley but translational errors between Marte and Muerte made it what it is today. Fascinating stuff, I know. We concluded the tour at another spot to watch the sun set over the area and watch it light up the volcano Lincancabur which dominates the area. Notice that its still shaped like a volcano because it hasn’t totally blown its top yet. The gamble continues under Lincancabur’s long fuse, or so they say. We enjoyed the sunset with some more altiplano music, a little wine, and some chips. We returned to a relatively quiet hostile, made a simple dinner and hit the hay.  The next day we said our third and final farewell to Chile as we crossed back into Argentina. Salta bound.