Atacama Desert

We survived Santiago and made it onto the plane to the Atacama Desert. We arrived with high expectations of stars, sand, salt, big rocks and sun.

Stars

I’ve collected earrings from each continent we’ve been to (the only souvenir I can fit in my backpack). We have correlated stars with Atacama for as long as we have been planning the trip; the bar was set high. I had already bought my South American earrings: they were stars. I had never really seen the Milky Way, but my parents had, including on their anniversary trip to Peru. They were excited for me to see it. We booked a viewing at the planetarium. On the night of our reservation, we waited at midnight in the dark for the van to pick us up. After being at the planetarium for a while, I discovered I wouldn’t be seeing the Milky Way. Sadly, the Milky Way was positioned below the horizon and the sliver of moon gave off too much light. Triste. With our chin still up we walked into a room with a large telescope. That’s when I saw it: Saturn. I peered through the scope: a milky cream-beige dot and around it, almost like a halo, there was a crisp solid ring. There are actually more rings around Saturn but the telescope wasn’t powerful enough to see all of them. Instead, all of the rings looked like one. The ring was only about the size of my pinkie finger on the telescope but it took up my whole mind to process what I was looking at. We saw more, too: nebulae that looked like rainbow chalk paint, craters on the moon and star constellations that included the Pleiades (a constellation that has seven stars and one of the stars is named Maia)! The stars were maybe not what we expected but they were still pretty great.

Sand (and Salt)

I don’t know what people picture when they think of the Atacama. Maybe, it’s stars or large rocks, but for me it was sand. Multi-colored sand painted the ground. It was pretty until the wind came. Large piles of sand departed into the sky, creating a very uncomfortable walk or run. One day, a huge dust storm lifted up into the sky. Dust devils spiraled up into the air and ran across the open landscape. We were driving along the road, when a big cloud of dust in front of us emerged. When we entered the cloud, we could only see as far as ten feet. Finally, we left the cloud behind us. There was also lots of salt. One of the main attractions was the salt pools. We went to the first pool and we saw 4 flamingos! The second salt pool was one that you could swim in. Supposedly, you could easily float because of all the salt. Now, let me tell you, this is true, but what they never tell you is that the salt hurts really, really, really bad! I had to get out after almost two minutes because the sting was getting so intense I couldn’t stand it any longer. When I got out, my skin was bright red and raw. It hurt sooo bad! Despite this, the quantity of the sand and salt was still pretty amazing!

Rock Formations

The entire town was made out of rock/stone walls. It looked like a desert fort in Egypt. The rock formations were outstanding! Red, tan, white and other colors were striped into the rocks. Thousands of different shapes of rock were always towering over you or you were stepping on them.

Sun

The sun was intense; it burned throughout the day, and when it set, the temperature dropped significantly. It wasn’t as cold as we had expected it to be. I had been prepared to put on five layers or more to sleep in. In the day, if you weren’t wearing sunglasses, you had to be wearing a sun hat.

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