Otherworldly Chilean landscape rivals the moon Desert, office

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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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Another human settlement from Atacama's distant past is Pukara Quitor, a Atacamen fort on a hill by the San Pedro River that was built in the 12th century. Three hundred years later, when the Incan people from Peru conquered and settled the area, the fort was used as an administrative centre. Spanish Conquistadors arrived a century later but had no use for the stronghold. Now partly restored, the tiered, stone structures on the hill were declared national monuments in 1982.

Outside these cultural excursions, one's time in Atacama is best spent exploring the area's varied landscapes by foot, car, or horseback. One essential excursion is a visit to the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon), a three kilometre-long crater in the middle of a salt mountain. To get to the moon-like crater floor, one first has to pass through wind-eroded fingers of rock and rhomboid monoliths, dotted with salt and gypsum crystals.

At the other side of the valley, one comes across a three-fingered rock formation called "Las Tres Marias" (The Three Marys), after its supposed resemblance to three praying women, just as the actual moon rises in the darkening sky over its desert namesake.

A completely different natural wonder awaits visitors at the Tatio geysers in the Andes at a nose-burning elevation of 5,000 metres. As the sun starts to rise, one can see the vicunas, wispier, high-altitude versions of the llama, off the dirt road.

We get to the geysers, which form when volcanic rock meets underground water, at seven. This early in the morning, the temperature is below freezing and the geysers pour out hot water, which boils at 85 degrees Celsius at this altitude. The steam billows out into huge, diamond-shaped forms, like monstrous genies.

Vans are already parked in the distance; other tourists have arrived before us. In fact, a bus full of German twenty-somethings are in their swim trunks splashing in a chest-high pool heated by one geyser.

As the rising morning sun warms up Tatio and the steam grows clear, we settle for tea instead of a dip. Through my toque, I scratch my sunburnt forehead and think about the guide whose life was changed in a place where steam rises from the ground and life thrives where it doesn't rain.

If You Go

Getting there: LAN, Chile's national airline, flies to the city of Calama (an hour's drive from San Pedro) twice daily. To get to Calama you need to fly to Santiago, which has direct flights from Toronto and Los Angeles.

Where to stay: Hotel de Larache, (56 2) 206 6060, [email protected], www.explora.com

Hotel Tulur, (56) (55) 851027, [email protected], www.tulor.cl

Don Raul Residencial, (56) (55) 851138, [email protected], [email protected].

What to do: Hotels like Explora's Hotel de Larache organize hikes and outings to various sites. Let's Tour Chile also offers tours: [email protected],(56) (55) 851573.

For history of the area, visit the Pare Le Piage Museum: www.sanpedroatacama.com/ingles/museo.htm

Rancho Cactus offers trips on horseback: (56) (55) 851506, [email protected], www.rancho-cactus.cl

San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Explorations (SPACE) offers astronomical tours: (56) (55) 851935, [email protected], www.spaceobs.com

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The floor of the moon-like Valle de la Luna is over two kilometres long