Eating dust and crunching salt in the Atacama Desert, Chile
A view of the driest desert in the world, the Atacama Desert in Chile as we approached in the bus.
The dust was everywhere, in my hair, in my socks, in my mouth, and liberally coating anything that was not covered. San Pedro de Atacama is a small oasis in the middle of the Atacama desert in Northern Chile, the driest desert in the world. Some of the places in the desert have never recorded rain, ever. Not surprisingly then, that the unrelenting heat from the sun and the dryness gave rise to the omnipresent dust.
A 26 hour bus journey from Valparaiso dumped us in a San Pedro de Atacama at close to midnight, with dim streetlights covering only the central part of town, we shuffled our way in the darkness and the dust looking for our hostel, “an easy 10 minute walk from town”, perhaps in the day, but certainly not at night, disorientated from an obscenely long bus journey and carrying our luggage along dirt roads in the pitch black. We eventually found the place only to learn that hot water was shut off at midnight and we had missed our chance for a shower. Morning was just a few hours away and sleep seemed like the most sensible thing to do.
The salt crusted dry riverbed where we cycled in Valle de la Luna
No obstacle too great to overcome
Almost totally dominated by tourism, San Pedro de Atacama exists as a base to visit the amazing and bizarre landscape surrounding the town, and as a starting point for trips to the famous Salar de Uyuni, just across the border in Bolivia.
