Round the World Chelle: Flamingos, Geysers, and the Moon

October 31, 2011

After the salt flats was desert. Very dusty desert. Very dusty desert that manages to find its way into the four by fours and get everyone and everything covered in a dark film. You feel pretty isolated while traveling through the desert—an isolation where you’d dread getting left behind on a pit stop because you’d have absolutely no idea where to walk and the chances of seeing another car, or any living life form for that matter, are very slim. And people would probably never find your body because it would be covered in dust and just blend into the rest of the desert. The drivers don’t drive on a road, just paths that have been created by other trucks that he may or may not follow. Because it is so dusty, each of the three Land Cruisers in our caravan would drive on different paths to avoid the dust trail left created by the others. Every so often we might come across a car heading in the other direction, something about which to must be diligent in order to roll up the window before receiving a face full of dust.

Glad I didn't have to deal with this!

All fixed in less than five minutes!

We had to get out to let the car up here.

But as I wasn’t left behind and typically managed to get the window up before cross traffic, the all-day drive was actually quite nice. I enjoy riding in a car as long as I don’t have to drive, and there was some good conversation and some fun iPod name-that-tune with the others in the group. Along the way we made periodic stops at different lagoons and parks.

There are flamingos living at 4200 meters above sea level in the lagoons on the Bolivian/Chilean border. (I don’t really know a lot about flamingos, but I wasn’t expecting to see them in such a cold, high altitude—I guess because I usually associate them with Florida or the zoo.) They are quite pretty and quite hardy. In one lagoon we visited there was a picture of a dead vicuna (llama-like animal) that was poisoned by the water the flamingos were drinking. Our guide explained that the flamingos have a filter in their beaks. Who knew?

Emma, Zoe, Aaron, and Me in front of the Red Lagoon

Blue Lagoon. Chile is on the
other side of that volcano.

We also visited a very old petrified tree in the middle of some rock formations. The most memorable part about this stop was my race with a plastic bag that blew out of the car when we opened the door. It was extremely windy and I gave it my all running through the sand, shedding my flip-flops to quicken my stride, but I lost once the bag flew up the hill. It escaped. (We saw a couple white plastic bags floating above us as we entered Chile and joked that one of them was mine. I couldn’t reach that one either. I will be picking up littered plastic bags for the rest of my time here to compensate for my environmental infraction. The number of plastic bags consumed here is unreasonable.)

Very old petrified tree,

We stayed at a shelter the second night and were up at 4:15 the next morning to visit some geysers and hot springs before crossing the border into Chile. While 4:30 is an early start (as attested to by my sleepy face and pajama pants in the photos), the wakeup was worth it!

I'm jumping over the geyser. Hard to make out how I've contorted my body.
Probably related to my funny running form.

Camel feet. 4:30 fashion.

Hot springs in the morning. Great way to begin the day!

The crossing into Chile was a long process. It was a holiday weekend here (Halloween and The Day of the Dead), and the immigration point was packed. We stood in line for at least an hour and a half. When we finally made it to our hotel in San Pedro, the group couldn’t wait to shower and connect to the internet.

We've arrived in Chile... Computers out!

San Pedro is a tourist town for Chileans, Argentineans, and Bolivians. People take tours of the lagoons, see the flamingos, and visit geysers. Since we’d done all of that on our way to Chile, instead of taking a tour or doing adventure sports, we decided to spend the majority of our full day there relaxing at the pool.

A few of us took the Valley of the Moon tour in the evening, which was pretty neat. The valley gets its name because of its physical resemblance to the surface of the moon. There is a small “mountain range” which is 80% made up of salt. The salt is covered in brown dust blown from the Andes Mountains, and as it rains only two or three times a year, the salt mountain stays brown. Then we saw the “Three Maries”, though one has broken so it’s now like 2.5 Maries. (I think this may have become an attraction because it was there and they needed something to show the tourists between the valley walk and next stop.)

Salt Mountains

Three (well, two and a half) Maries

The next stop was a salt mine. As a social program, men were put to work mining salt from the mountain. They did this for about five years before ending the program because it wasn’t practical to use explosives and other expensive mining techniques to extract salt from a mountain when you can get 50 kilos of salt from the salt flats in Bolivia for $2. We also saw some big sand dunes, the Valley of Death (this was supposed to be named “The Valley of Mars” (mars is Marte in Spanish)”, but evidently the foreigner who named it didn’t speak Spanish very well and people thought he had named it “Valle del Muerte” (muerte is dead). Unfortunate misunderstanding.

Finally, we watched the sun set over the Andean Mountains.