San Pedro de Atacama, Chile
You get off the plane from Santiago and suddenly, your throat is very, very dry. A fiery sun beams down but you’re so parched that your body can’t even dump up an ounce of sweat. In the distance, moving quickly across the horizon, you spot a tornado–but no, that can’t be right. It’s a cloudless day! You start to wonder if you’re going mad. They say that happens to people in the desert, right? You shake your head and peer into the horizon. It’s a dust devil, a cloud fifty feet tall of red-orange dirt, whipping through the highway lanes and temporarily blinding all in its path.
On the hour-long drive from the Calama airport to San Pedro de Atacama, a sleepy town in the middle of the desert, you blast the car’s A/C but somehow still can’t get cool. The horizon is an endless, vast sea of orange, red dirt.
Abruptly, a mountain sneaks into view and you start to wonder if it’s been there all along. Its crags and peaks seem to melt against the desert floor. Sparkles of something blue and clear flash in your peripheral vision. Against your better judgment, you conclude that it’s a pool of water, peppered against the unbroken expanse of desert. When you come to your senses (some Gatorade helps), you realize you’ve been the victim of a mirage. Yes, they do exist.
As the car approaches the small town of San Pedro, the landscape changes. Flat strips of earth rise into jagged crusts that shed themselves a few miles away into hot, sweeping sand dunes.
The distant feature you thought was a mountain now reveals itself in a glint of sunlight, and you realize that that ominous, cone-shaped peak can only be one thing–the Licancabur Volcano, an ever-watchful presence lording over the town.
The town is very small–a handful of streets fortified by brown walls baked with mud and clay. The city walls, which sit low against the buildings, are sheltered by an astonishing sight in this hot, arid world: green, leafy trees, swinging loftily in the gentle breeze.
Within these walls, the air is cooler and softer and the sun doesn’t quite have as stern a grip. San Pedro is a true desert oasis.
The Desert
One of the first things that visitors to San Pedro might notice are the stray dogs. To our surprise, these dogs seem very well-fed. Not a single one looks skinny or starving, and almost every dog suspiciously appears to be some type of full-breed: mastiffs, bulldogs, poodles, golden retrievers, labs, and basset hounds each make an appearance (as well as lots of sheep!).
Matt and I park our rental car in a tree-shaded alley flanked by high mud walls and wander into the town, searching for food. Maybe because we are in the desert, or maybe because the town seems so sleepy, but we don’t have high hopes for our meal. We take a seat at an indoor-outdoor cafe and study the menu. After a few seconds, we look at each other, surprised.
“Vegetable curry served inside a coconut?” I ask. Matt and I order two espressos and a hundred bottles of water. Our waiter serves them with a smile and I compliment her earrings, two silver half-circles inlaid with lapis lazuli, an intense blue stone native to Chile.
“They were my grandmother’s,” she explains. “We are Mapuche and this is a traditional design.”
The Atacama desert is so barren and arid that Matt and I have a hard time imagining it as a hospitable place for human habitation. The indigenous Atacameños, however, including the Mapuche, have lived here for centuries, even before the desert could claim the title of “World’s Driest Desert.” The Atacama Desert stretches 600 miles from the Pacific coast of Chile to the western Andes mountains. Three countries lay claim to its territories: Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina, although most of the desert is located in the Antofagasta region of Northern Chile.
This region receives less than half an inch of rain a year (and some weather stations in Atacama have never received rain before) and sits at an elevation ranging from 10,000 feet above sea level to 20,000 feet above sea level. Due to its hyperaridity, some of its tallest peaks never even form glaciers.
The soil in Atacama is so barren and so arid that researchers compare it to the geography of Mars and use Atacama soil-testing for microbes to duplicate soil-sample tests from the Voyager missions to Mars. The area is so Mars-like that the desert is a popular place for space film crews.
Finally, due to its high altitude, its lack of cloud cover, and lack of light pollution, the Atacama Desert is one of the best places in the world to see the stars.
Orion’s Belt
San Pedro
After we eat, we sip our water and coffees as a guitarist serenades the lunch crowd before heading out to peer into the shops.
Despite its size and inaccessibility, San Pedro feels like a tourist town. Within its walls, you are guaranteed to find a couple of sure things: shops selling indigenous crafts, shops advertising tours of the desert, and cafes.
We explore the shops for a while, picking up tiny, fluffy alpaca figurines, staring at lapis lazuli jewelry, and wondering if we should have booked tours for ourselves.
Within minutes, I’ve picked up a hat with a full brim and four more water bottles, which Matt gets to carry. It doesn’t help that I’ve come down with a nasty cold. Being congested in the desert is, in a word, miserable.
We visit San Pedro’s incredible church, La Iglesia de San Pedro, which is the second-oldest church in Chile, built during Spanish colonial times. Simple and elegant in appearance, its adobe, cactus wood, and llama leather structure makes a stunning town centerpiece. For the next few days, we navigate the maze-like city walls of San Pedro with constant references to the church: “I think the church is to our right.” “If we can just find the church, we’ll know where we parked our car!” I suppose that’s how good Catholic travelers navigate.
We stop at the hotel where we will be staying for the next three days, which, like everywhere else in town, is a beautiful oasis with incredible views of the desert, but does not have A/C. For the next three days, my sick body suffers.
On our last day in San Pedro, we make a final tour of all the shops, catch a breakfast in a sunny courtyard cafe, and visit the Meteorite Museum of San Pedro.
The Meteorite Museum, a geodesic dome on the outskirts of town, features a chronological exhibit of various meteorites found in the Atacama Desert. It has one of the largest collections of meteorites in the world (over 3,200, about 70 of which are on display). All of them fell in the Atacama Desert. After touring the main exhibits, a museum guide showed us a hands-on exhibit where he taught us how to distinguish earthly rocks from meteorites, based on weight, color, smell, and magnestism. He left us with an inspiring message to always be on the lookout for special extraterrestrial rocks while we toured the vast desert. More on our Atacama Desert adventures (salt flats, flamingoes, alpine lakes, and the Valley of the Moon) to come!
