What it’s like to visit the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth

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It is without greenery, shade, cities or pollution. This is both dreamlike and discombobulating. I have arrived in the desert from Bolivia, from the Peruvian border and from the Pacific coast, and what sticks most in my memory is the dead straight roads crossing the massive golden plain, fringed by haze and mountains on one side and deep blue sea on the other. It makes you dizzy, plays with your sense of scale and perspective. It freaks you out.

As if this wasn’t enough, the landmarks are as strange as the canvas. The Salar de Atacama, Chile’s largest salt flat, is a barren valley of salt that has hardened into an ice rink-lookalike of hexagons framed by wavelike white crests created by invisible winds and subterranean pressures. Flamingos forage in the pools of salty water and are startlingly pink against the creamy saltscape. The sky is – needless to say – impossibly blue, forever, always, unblemished.

The El Tatio geysers are at 14,173ft above sea level, and in the middle of nowhere, so you get up in the dark and traverse the spooky black desert and, just as the sun slips above the horizon, you arrive in a sandy, dusty, rocky field of 80 geysers. They spurt highest when the cold morning atmosphere prevents the steam from evaporating.

This world is unreal, but it’s not dead. Cacti and grasses survive in the desert, and bromeliads flourish in zones prone to fogs. There are mammals, including the chinchilla-like viscacha, South American grey fox and Darwin’s leaf-eared mouse. Birdlife abounds, from the tamarugo conebill to the Chilean woodstar to the slender-billed finch.

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Source link : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/south-america/chile/what-its-like-to-visit-the-atacama-desert-chile/ Author : Publish date : 2023-10-24 03:00:00 Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source .

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What it’s like to visit the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth

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