Out of this world in the Atacama Desert

Who needs Elon Musk to bring you into space when you can imagine yourself having landed on the moon and Mars, never having left the earth’s atmosphere?  If this peaks your interest, then grab your shades and catch the next flight to Calama, in the Atacama valley of northern Chile.  Drive south past expansive solar fields and wind farms until the earth begins to fill in the surrounding horizon with spectacular desert landscape, as if you were in the middle of God’s global sand art project.  Welcome to the real life sci-fi movie set otherwise known as the Atacama desert.

    

The vastness fascinated us all.  Traversing across an endless vista of nothingness for an hour while barely turing the steering wheel reminded us that, for lack of a wittier phrase, this earth is just plain massive.  The boys made a game of searching for mirages along the horizon’s heat waves.  Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to discount the endless reruns of Loony Tunes cartoons on Saturday mornings.  Could it be that our favorite roadrunner and coyote actually helped establish a basic understanding of desert topography for the kids?

Despite being the driest desert on earth, the week of our visit fell right in the middle of the region’s brief rainy season.  Who knew?  We decided that it simply must be that great Lavin energy again and a sign of “good luck” (as we’ve dubbed many unexpected elements of our travels).   San Pedro de Atacama is actually an oasis amidst the arid desert, with the San Pedro river running right through the small town. 

Late afternoon storms in the rainy season are reliably certain, so mountain runoff from the Andes mountains instantly elevates river levels in the valley 12 hours after the deluge.  As a result, many parts of the national park were unfortunately closed, as access roads were frequently washed out.   

Nonetheless, we tried to sniff out active adventure where we could, creating some remarkable moments in unexpected places.  Sean and JP ventured out on their own the first afternoon to salt lagoon and wasted no time becoming one with the desert.  

The group excursion was to be a walking visit around a lagoon in the moon valley, but that just didn’t generate enough enthusiasm for this tribe, so Sean took matters into his own hands.  If you know this guy at all you know he has always been a sucker for sparkling uninhabited bodies of water.  As such, he found his #happyplace very quickly.    

Thanks to Jane and Ken Condon, fellow Greenwich”ites” and former GCDS parents who coincidentally were on this excursion, for the fantastic photo!

The next day’s excursion took us into the cliffs and sand dunes and of the Mars valley.  Seriously, if I had suddenly fainted from heat exhaustion and woke up two minutes later, I’d swear I was on a different planet.  We began by traversing along the high ridge of the valley, learning about the geology of the region.   It felt like an eternity of walking along this ridge, so much that the kids were ready to turn back and proclaim that we tricked them into another “boring hike”.  

Within moments however, our guide found a drop off and plunged into the deep and steep sand dunes.  Where is Warren Miller’s desert twin when we needed him to film us?

I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that traveling with kids, while definitely not easy, is an opportunity to remember how certain moments in life are to be experienced.  If you were at the top of a massive slope of endless sand, would you gingerly walk down or would you hurl your body in any which way with reckless abandon.  You get my point.

   

Watching JP, Owen, and Eamon was a thrill for anyone who had a visual of them.  They jumped, slid, rolled, even supermanned their way down the dunes.   Their energy levels were endless as they climbed back up to seek the thrill.

Safe to say that sand dune running will go down as an undisputed highlight of the OurLatinLeap adventure.   

Next up, mountain biking.   Why shower when you can just cover yourself with more sand?  Eamon was less enthusiastic about this adventure, and decided to remit his “I don’t want to do anything” ticket of the week.  The four of us set out with our same guide across San Pedro, the wind at our backs.  

Limited in our destinations due to the rains, we headed towards the most rural bookstore likely in the continent.   Apparently this place is quite a hit as Chileans from across the desert venture here for the latest and greatest reads.  Who knew dejá vu?

Why shower off two layers of sand when you can rinse off in a desert lagoon and replace it with equal amounts of salt.   Science teachers, it doesn’t get better than this as a teachable moment.   In the salt lagoons, it’s physically impossible to sink, much less immerse one’s entire body due to the elevated levels of salt.  As before, I’ll spare you the geeky details on how this exists, so you’ll have to check it out yourself to learn why.  

Even two weeks later as I finish this post my body still craves an hourly dose of Nivea Extra Emollient lotion.   

Santiago is a necessary stopover when traversing a country that covers over half of the length of the continent.   Our visit was brief as our focus in Chile was more nature than city, however we were pleasantly surprised.  We would have loved an extra day or two to explore more of the city’s offerings, or perhaps a vineyard in the outskirts, but logistics were not in our favor.  We settled for a great bike tour, some unbelievable ice cream, and a fascinating lesson in Chilean political history at the Museum of Human Rights.

 

If you’re going to explore a continent, or at the very least the massively diverse terrain of one country, then get involved and see it all.   Steamy jungles, check.  Bountiful oceans, check.   Fiery red deserts, check.  What we need now, is mountains…big ones.   Let’s head to Patagonia….