Earthquakes and Moonscapes

Earthquakes and Moonscapes
San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

Arriving into Chile was a much smoother easier process than we had anticipated. We were whisked off in a bus from the Bolivian border, we travelled on tarmac highways for the first time in 3 days and found ourselves at the Chilean border. Here we had to unload our bags from the bus for the most adorable looking search dog to run all over them in search of contraband. Chile actually has pretty strict border controls as they more or less consider themselves an island as from the north they are protected by the Salar de Uyuni, to the west they are protected by the ocean, to the East they are protected by the Andes mountain range and to the South there is nothing but ocean between Chile and Antactica, therefore protecting their flora and fauna is pretty important to them. The sniffer dog did a great job and managed to sniff out all kinds of contraband, why anyone was carrying a bunch of oregano from Bolivia to Chile was beyond me but strangely they were allowed to keep it. I was just willing some idiot to have a bag of coca leaves in their bag, but no such luck. Once our bags were cleared we had to go to the angry looking passport stamp man and things here didn’t go so well. For the last few months Tim has had post-it notes on his last two blank pages trying to control the stamp happy customs that love to put a stamp in the middle of your last remaining page. This angry customs man was not having any of it and after flicking through Tim’s passport twice he decided that there was no space and he had to either remove the post-its or not get stamped in. Obviously he removed the post-its.

This left us with a huge dilemma, how on earth were we going to continue our travels with a full passport. The annoying thing about living in Jersey is that we don’t have a standard UK passport and despite our best efforts we could not find any way of getting new passports without going home so an executive decision was made and with the help of skyscanner a flight was booked for November from Colombia, we just needed to keep enough space to get through the countries we needed to, to get into and out of Colombia.

After days of travelling across the Salar de Uyuni we were pretty tired and so we just relaxed at our hostel for the first day, the sun was shining and the days were hot, but the second you were in the shade or the sun set the temperatures plummeted and in true South American standard the rooms had no heating, just a pile of blankets so big that made our legs went dead after a while.

We wondered around San Pedro de Atacama to get a feel for the town and were ever so slightly amazed at just how small it was. This tiny dusty oasis in the desert with dust roads lined with small one story mud houses is home to around 5,000 people and I suspect an equal number of dogs who have perfected the routine of sitting at your table watching you eat with the saddest possible look in their eyes until you give in and share whatever you have on your plate. We made several doggy friends around the town, but our hearts were won over by our hostel cats. I had read online that this hostel had cats which may well have influenced my choice ever so slightly! One room tip on trip adviser suggested you need to get the room with the cats, inadvertently we somehow managed to do just that. we had two big furry friends who were continuously asleep on either the front porch in the sun or just snuggled on our bed. They would stay in with us all night and in the morning would cry to go out for their breakfast and deal with their morning ablutions and then cry to come back in for another sleep. Occasionally we had to deal with a shredded toilet roll or had to chase them out of our bags but all in all we got on famously and their furry body heat was a welcome addition to our freezing cold room.

We had been told somewhere along our journey that Chile is located in a highly active volcanic and seismic part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and were soon to discover that earthquakes are more or less a normal part of everyday Chilean life. Interestingly on the 22 May 1960 Chile had the most powerful earthquake ever recorded at 9.5 magnitude. It is known as The Great Chilean Earthquake, it lasted for 10 minutes and destroyed 40% of the town of Valdivia where it hit. The resulting tsunamis caused massive damage to the Chilean coast and further tsunamis were recorded in Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines. Whilst happily sitting on the bed playing with the cat suddenly our roof started to shake, as it was just a mud building with a straw roof it sounded a bit like a big bird had landed on it, but when the walls started to sway it was pretty clear that this was not a bird but an earthquake. We rushed outside into the courtyard along with every other confused looking tourist and we all asked the obvious question ‘did you feel that?’. Thanks to the modern technological age we live in we could instantly look online and determine that yes indeed we had just been in an earthquake and it was 57km NNW from where we were and measured 6 on the Richter scale. Well that was exciting, although the cat didn’t seem to think so, she didn’t move off of the bed!

The second night that we were there I didn’t feel so good, I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong with me, I had the occasional wave of nausea but felt ok and then as the night progressed I just got colder and colder and colder. I had on every layer of clothing I had, I was under the foot thick layer of blankets, I had two cats and my teeth were still chattering. It seemed that I had picked up some kind of bug and one that I really wasn’t enjoying in the slightest. Over the next few days we just took it easy, I had no appetite and no energy and just felt awful. We chilled out and relaxed and sadly didn’t have much time to see much of Atacama, thankfully many of the tours were very similar to what we had just done coming from Bolivia but I did manage to pull myself together for one tour as we couldn’t be this close and no go into the Atacama desert for real.

The Atacama Desert is the driest non polar desert in the world and covers over 105,000 square kilometers. The average rainfall is around 15mm per year and in some areas it is as little as 1-3mm per year. However climate change does seem to be having its impact on the Atacama Desert as in March 2015 heavy rainfall in the southern desert produced floods and mudslides which resulted in over 100 deaths.

The Atacama Desert is mainly composed of stony terrain, salt lakes, sand and lava flows. The red ground has left the Atacama Desert being compared to Mars, in fact mars scenes from the movie A Space Odyssey were filmed here and the NASA team use the desert to test their instruments that they plan to use on Mars missions. With this in mind we obviously booked ourselves on the Vallee de la Luna tour to see for ourselves the moon and mars like qualities of the desert.

We set off on buses from the town with pretty much every other tourist in the town, but amazingly there seems to have been some discussions amongst the various tour companies and they all go to different sights at different times so there are not 200 people at the same place, well until we got to the sunset section anyway. First up we visited a salt cave and immediately I was worried that my poor little broken body was not going to be up for the amount of climbing and crawling involved in this tour. Thankfully I managed to man up, but the climb up the side of the salt cave was just too much for my poor jeans and with one stretch too far I ripped a pretty spectacular hole in the ******, oh bugger! After exploring the luna valley and climbing a dune to get a fabulous view we headed to see sunset. Oddly this tour wasn’t actually about watching the sunset as that happened to the right of where we were sat, but we did have a great view perched on a cliff overlooking the valley and could watch as the colours of the ground changed as the sun slowly set.

We could have quite happily stayed in San Pedro for a fe
w more days and despite the cold there were still other things that we wanted to do, most notably we wanted to go to the Astronomical Observatory which is one of the best places in the world to see the night sky dues to its high altitude and low light pollution, sadly with me feeling rubbish it was not to be, it is always good to leave something to come back to!

Atacama was truly beautiful and a sight to behold but it was time to get out of the desert and back to civilisation, Santiago here we come.