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Otherworldly Chilean landscape rivals the moon
Otherworldly Chilean landscape rivals the moon
It's hard not to question your world view during a visit to this strange place
Before I arrived in this place," a guide tells us in Chile's Atacama Desert, "I thought I had my life figured out. First, I'd go to school, then I'd get a job, get married, and have children."
The guide, who came from the Chilean capital city of Santiago, spent a miserable year working in an office upon graduating from university. She quit that job and moved to the desert. "After being here, I realize life doesn't have to follow a set pattern. Now I think anything is possible."
We're in the Salar de Atacama, the third-largest salt flat in the world. All around us are lumpy, football-sized pieces of salt rock. The falling sun makes the field whiter than bone. Like the rest of the Atacama Desert, the salt lake was covered in water over 20 million years ago before being drained by shifts in the earth's land masses that opened ocean pathways.
It's not hard to see why one could seriously question their world view in the Atacama, where the view of the world is so seriously unusual. While here, a visitor often feels far away from the earth they know--if not in a movie set or on another planet, then in God's sketch pad.
A narrow, 1000 kilometre-long strip of elevated land, the Atacama Desert is couched between the Andes and Domeyko mountains. Acting in combination, these ranges block rain-inducing weather systems from entering the desert and make it the driest place on earth. On average, the region collects only 15 to 20 millimetres of rain a year. Some areas in the Atacama have never seen any recorded rainfall at all.
As the sun dips behind the Domeyko mountains, we cross the salt flat to a lagoon where flamingos linger. As tourists fire away their camera, the leggy, pink birds feed on microscopic brine shrimp. From behind us more flamingos swoop over, flying in squadrons of three.
For a visitor, it's difficult to imagine any life in this otherworldly place, much less flamingos. And yet not only do birds, llamas, and alpacas inhabit Atacama, but humans, subsisting on the area's pockets of underground water, have made this arid moonscape home for over 10,000 years, when hunter-gatherers originally from Asia first settled the area. The driest place not only contains life, but a long, rich history.
The launching pad for any modern-day visit to the Chilean desert is San Pedro, which is built on an oasis at the foot of the Licancabur volcano. Now a grid of adobe buildings that house hotels, restaurants, and Internet cafes, the town of 3000 people has an economy that primarily caters to backpacking tourists. Those who want to avoid roughing it can even stay at Hotel de Larache, a lodge run by the Chilean luxury adventure company Explora that has four swimming pools, a wine-tasting room, a spa, a stable of riding horses, and its own observatory for stargazing.
In San Pedro, one can visit a 16th-century church, but the area's first traces of human settlement by the Atacamen indigenous people, who once spoke a language called Cunza, go back for two millennia.
Tulor, the original Atacamenan settlement in the area, was first built in 100 BCE and abandoned hundreds of years ago when erosion pushed the San Pedro River, which originates in the Andes, to the town's current location several kilometres away. The foundations of the ancient village are still intact, interlocked like honeycombs. Visitors can also step inside a reconstructed adobe house, which uses actual llama skin, as was the tradition, to tie together the roof's ceiling beams. |
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發表於 2011-2-11 07:43
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