I'm now back home in Sydney after a fairly epic journey that involved a 12 hour wait at Santiago airport, a four hour delay and an 18 hour flight via Auckland.
Here is the first of several blog posts of the last section of our trip, starting with the Atacama Desert. We flew from Santiago up to northern Chile, close to its borders with Bolivia, Peru and Argentina. The Atacama is arguably the driest place on earth - parts of it have not seen rain for around 40 000 years. We hired a four wheel drive from the airport and drove to a desert town called San Pedro. We had no idea what the roads would be like and were racing to cover the 100km before the sun set. We were then up at 4am to drive on an unpaved road in to the mountains to a height of around 14 000m to see the geysers and thermal bath for sunrise (it was very cold), then to the salt plain, lake and flamingos in the heart of the desert after lunch where it was blisteringly hot, before going to the Valley of the Moon for sunset. My camera wasn't capable of capturing the incredible night sky, which is among the clearest in the world, or the total isolation and silence of the desert. Neither Andrew or I have experienced anything like it.
Anyway, here's a selection of the photos of the day....
No comments:
Post a Comment