Tuesday, August 26, 2014

The Driest Place On Earth

The Atacama gets 4 inches of rain every 1.000 years… Never have I ever drank so much water. Sweat evaporates instantly, the harsh desert air snatching all moisture from skin and tongues. Even in late winter both chapstick and sunscreen are revered to slow the desert's leeching. The landscape is unearthly, no animals or insects or plants. The most water around for hundreds of kilometers resides within you, a negligible vitality wandering among towering stacks of sand and mud and salt.

Overlooking some salty lunar landscapes in la Valle de la Luna.
 Hostel life. Adventurers from around the world settling briefly to share their stories, laughter, and wine before taking flight around the next corner.
 Salt canyon adventures. The rock looks twisted and melted and crumbling.
 Salt and sand blown and eroded for kilometers into massive spikes and ridges and dunes.
 Desert days.
 Laguna Cejar, a ridiculously high salt concentration making for some easy floating. It was about 20 degrees colder than it looks.
 Un de los Ojos de Salar. Two deep pockets of sweet water in the literal middle of nowhere.
 Pisco sunsets with the crew.
 Getting charged by goats.
 The view is always better from the top!
 Pukara del Quitor ruins.
 Stars over San Pedro.


Sunday, August 10, 2014

Aviones, Trenes, y Automóviles


The roads here are more cutthroat than NASCAR. The micro (bus) drivers have a reckless adherence to never coming to a complete stop on their route. It’s a constant race to hustle customers, exchange tickets for money, and evade pedestrians/stray dogs/missing pieces of road/other cars, all while shifting manually with one hand and perpetually leaning on the horn with the other. I'm pretty sure that the micros here were the inspiration for J.K. Rowling’s Knight bus (based on their flexibility in driving both on roads and sidewalks). For the more nomadic partygoers, some micros also transform at sundown into blacklight-illuminated discotecas, although it’s definitely an ab workout trying to stay in your seat as both people and their baggage are tossed in your face with each jolt. Somehow though, naturals at micro transit exist: the fearless girls applying mascara while rattling around corners at 70 km/hr. For a smoother ride, there’s the metro system as well, where we're often joined for a few stops by "musicians" (mostly high school rappers and vagabond recorder-players, but there are a few legitimate guitar-riff slayers). The metro is also "street-dog approved" by the few perritos that slink on, maybe to avoid other dog-gang territory?