Salar

I grew up in Frome, a cultural desert (unless you count the Merlin Theatre), but a real desert has a lot more to offer.  After a couple of hours of post-geyser sleep we drove with Silvi and Ignacio to Aldea de Tulor, an archaeological site that was recently discovered beneath Atacama's sands.  You can see the remaining walls of a whole complex of structures, lots of round homes and interconnecting rectangular walkways.  The place is around 4,000 years old, and finds there suggest the people traded extensively with their friends on the coast and over the Andes mountains.

From there we ventured to another high point of the trip (it's full of high points, so I don't know why I bother to say that) which was a float in the salar.  It's the Atacama equivalent of the Dead Sea, a highly salty lake that you can leisurely swim in.

What the guide doesn't tell you is how incredibly cold it is.  After paddling around in 10cm of water, wondering how you can float when you're sitting on the bottom, we found the part of the lagoon where the magic happens.  It's a huge, round sink hole where the bottom of the lake drops into deep blue nothingness.  The temperature also drops by roughly the same precipitous amount.

Hannah, as ever, was the first to take the plunge, and her screaming and thrashing around, though amusing, did little to encourage the rest of us.  After a lot of um-ing and ah-ing Silvi and Ignacio jumped in hand in hand, and after that it would have been bad form to miss out.

It was indeed very floaty.  The temperature was less of a bother than the worry that some huge prehistoric monster might rise from the hidden depths and eat me (a paranoid after-effect of the coca chewing?)  As usual, I stayed in long enough to get a photo for the blog and then got out quick.

Thankfully the sun was high and a warming desert wind was blowing, but after a while the salt crystals began to form everywhere.  Suddenly we found ourselves with white hair (or more white hair, in my case) and wrinkles in funny places.  Putting on clothes led to a sort of sandpapering effect, excellent for the skin, I'm sure, but very uncomfortable.

We rounded off the trip with a visit to los ojos del salar, "the eyes of the salar", two perfectly round freshwater holes that were meant to be great for jumping into to mitigate the salt's effects.  Unfortunately they were dirty, muddy, and surrounded by the tour parties that breed in this area.  Ignacio drove us masterfully back across the sandy and rocky tracks (as he has all trip) and we washed off the desert in the private luxury of our hotel.

Back into the desert.

Blatant discrimination!  And I didn't think my Spanish was quite good enough to fool the ticket person.

Silvi and Igancio get back in touch with their roots at a reconstructed model of the typical houses here.

Hannah checks out the interior.  It was amazingly cool on a hot day.

Viewing platform.

Stuck in a Chilean prison.

The remains.  They're desperately struggling to preserve it from the wind, sand and salt.

Over at the salar, Hannah does her best white trash impression (that's not really our truck).

The lagoon, looking pretty shallow and disappointing.

The Davieses abroad.

Ignacio tests the waters.  Pleasantly warm, but where do you float?

Ah, ok, here.

You're not selling it to me.

Woo, floating!

Ignacio and Silvi take the plunge while I cringe.

Three in a tub...but not for long.

Quick quick, take the photo!

Silvi's glasses suffer the brunt of the salt abuse.

One of the eyes of the salar.  It actually looks a lot better in this picture than in real life.

The moon over San Pedro church at the end of a long day.