There was a moment in the Atacama desert where this adventure I’ve started suddenly made sense…
If you read my post The Story of Kelscapades you’ll have some background about why I decided to take this trip. The short version is: my job went away, I was given a severance*, I have no real responsibilities keeping me in the US, and I love to travel. There is another short version: I knew, in a way that is difficult to put into words, that if I didn’t go I would somehow be betraying myself. The first version was my permission to go, the second version was my reason to. I say this to explain that while I’m in exotic destinations and doing amazing things, this is not just one long vacation to me. My journey is as much interneral as it is external. By breaking my routine I’m able to pressure test my beliefs, examine what I consider ‘normal’ from alternative perspectives, and through this understand myself better. I am opening my mind in order to return with a direction and energy for my life that I felt I was lacking when I left.
*I will note, that I was incredibly lucky to receive a severance when my job ended. This made the decision much easier as I am able to afford my travels and have a safety net to come back to when I return. But for the record (and those who think they do not have enough money to travel) I’ve met many people who are traveling with much less to spend and yet are still doing it. These people are awesome.
Okay, back to exotic location part. It took a day of travel to reach the desert. We woke up in an art filled city on the Pacific and went to bed in the most arid desert (after Antarctica) on the planet. To get there we took a short bus ride to the main bus terminal, a two hour bus ride to Santiago, a two hour flight to Calama, and lastly, a one hour drive to San Pedro de Atacama. It sounds complicated as I write it, but doing it is really not difficult, you look up directions before hand, follow signs, ask strangers for directions, and somehow end up in one of the strangest places on earth.
The town of San Pedro is unlike anywhere I’ve been before. The narrow streets are made of red dirt, the one story buildings are made of red adobe, stray dogs loiter on the corners, and there is a constant stream of people excitedly planning their next day’s adventure. From the outside it looks like you’ve gone back several centuries in time to a small desert village, but inside the buildings are modern with running water, electricity (although no air conditioning), convenience stores that accept credit cards, restaurants with live jazz music, cafes with wifi, and even a North Face store. It is simultaneously approachable, exotic, and dusty. There will be no staying clean in this town.
We arrived at sunset and immediately became acquainted with the large temperature swings of the desert. The temperature dropped steadily from sunset to sunrise, with lows in the 50’s. By 7am it was climbing again, reaching the mid 80’s by early afternoon. It was surprisingly bearable. I was expecting the heat of Arizona; 100+ degree days of scorching sun. But the Atacama desert is in the Andes Mountains, the town of San Pedro resides at 7,500 feet and some of the places we visited went as high as 14,000 feet with many of the volcanic peaks that surrounded the town even higher still. This altitude meant that even though this was a desert, it was reasonable in temperature, dry, but not overly hot.
One of the most distinctive visual aspects of the desert is the snow capped volcanic peaks that surround it. From town you can see two in particular right next to each other, one with a cone shaped top and one with a flattened top that looks as if it had erupted at some point in the past. As we explored the area we found many more snow capped peaks. Chile, it turns out, is one of the most volcanically active countries in the world with something like 200 volcanoes in total and over 50 still active. On our third day in the desert we visited a geyser field, the second largest one in the world after Yellowstone, to witness the volcanic activity in the region.
It is difficult to describe the diversity of the landscape in the Atacama desert. The first day we visited the Valley of the Moon which is named as such because it feels as if you are on the surface of the moon (or a Star Wars movie). Smooth, giant sand dunes meet rocky ridges, everything bathed in a vaguely reddish brown color. Canyons open up into the earth, with white lines of mineral deposits running through the craggy peaks. All of it gives a sense of space, openness, it goes on in every direction for miles and miles. That afternoon we went sandboarding (snowboarding on a giant sand dune). Falling countless times was worth it to be in the midst of the red earth, the blue sky, and the ever present volcanic peaks in the distance.
The second day we expected to see a similar landscape play out in different ways, but instead it was completely different. We rented a car in order to have the freedom to roam the area ourselves and within an hour of leaving town the second day we realized how wrong our assumption was. We drove down a paved desert road, passing no signs of civilization. We watched as the landscape morphed from the red, flat desert to a hilly, rocky place with green desert plants, a crystal blue sky and almost 360 degrees of snow capped peaks. While we could see two volcanoes on the first day, on the second we could see at least ten. They were not mountains in a chain, but single peaks interrupting the desert landscape to soar into the sky.
We drove our way through them, each bend in the road a new combination of colors and textures. Almost three hours in we turned the bend and came across one of the most beautiful views I’ve ever seen. It was a salt flat, white with the mineral deposit, but with a thin layer of water over the top in parts. The water reflected the blue of the sky, but in lighter, turquoise pools. We could see green fields leading up to the flat, and black hills behind it, red rocks cut into the countryside, and snow capped peaks jutted into the sky in the distance. The combination of colors was stunning. Our first view was from afar, 10 minutes later we reached the edge of the salt flat and the view up close was even more overwhelming. From close in we could see dark crevasses in the salt, green algae growing along the cracks, the reflection of the dark mountains onto the turquoise pools bringing a gradient of shades, and even a few pale white flamingos feeding in the distance. I loved everything about it, all the more so because it was so unexpected.
On our way to the salt flat there was a moment of rightness, of flow, that I hadn’t felt so far on the trip.
We had just switched drivers, I had taken the wheel for the first time behind our mid-sized (by American standards) Chevy SUV. I have to admit, driving usually stresses me out. If I’m in an unfamiliar place I obsessively check my GPS; any bit of traffic, even a few cars at a four way stop will cause me a little stress. I’m better my myself, but any passenger somehow adds pressure, that I may make a mistake or turn the wrong way. It’s illogical, irrational and not something I like about myself, but there it is. Something to work on I suppose. There is, however, an exception. I love to drive on highways, on long open roads where space extends in all directions, where the scenery is so vast that it appears to move slowly, even when you are moving fast. Driving in the desert was like this. I had the windows down, music blasting, and an open road that stretched for miles. But not just any open road, one in the Northern part of Chile, so far north it was almost in Bolivia. A road in such a remote part of the world that of even those people who made the journey to Atacama few would have the time, money, or independence to rent their own car and make the same drive. But I was here. This was the opposite of self betrayal, this was self trust.
I felt the weight of the freedom I had given myself lift, a moment of complete awe and gratitude for everything that had brought me to this place where I felt so small, just one tiny (literally) human on this planet.
We saw many other beautiful things over the next several days. Lakes in every shade of blue, from a light, milky turquoise, to deep greenish aqua, to pools of deep blue where we floated effortlessly in salted water. Volcanoes, mountains, and geysers in every shape, size and formation. Lush green valleys in the midst of red canyons and more of the bizarre moonlike desert. But when it comes to Atacama, that moment will always be the highlight for me. Well that moment, and one other. But that story is for another post.
Comments