Friday 16th
I awoke to blazing sunshine, amazing desert scenery, and a new attachment to Manjar biscuits.
The landscape as we approached San Pedro de Atacama was stunning – the red rocks of the desert rose majestically from sandy plains, and weather-beaten ridges and hollows flashed past in the walls of stone carved out for the road. All of a sudden wide plateaux would open up around a corner and the ground would drop away for miles to distant mountain ridges. I was getting very excited about our desert adventure!
We finally approached the oasis village that sits at 2,440m above sea level; the small patch of green stood out proud and bright against the dusty surroundings. At the bus station, we donned our packs and I plonked my ill-fitting cap on my head to shade my burnt nose from the heat of the midday desert sun as we walked through the streets to our hostel, Eden Atacamena. I didn’t see much from under the peak of my cap as I wandered head-down through the streets, but I had a good feeling about the place; flashes of white from the walls, a lovely shady Plaza de Armas with thickly knotted trees, brightly waving Chilean flags, friendly dogs sleeping in the sun, and narrow dusty streets with gates opening into courtyard bars, restaurants, dark Aladdin’s cave shops and hostels. I liked it already.
Once a humble stop on the trans-Andean cattle drive, SP de A has become prime real estate, and a favourite of the wealthy holidaying North Americans. As a consequence of massive investment and development, San Pedro is now much more expensive than other Chilean towns and villages. Eden Atacamena though, was lovely and worth its slightly expensive rate. The outdoor areas were shady with loads of trees, tables, chairs, benches and strewn with hammocks; we were shown to a matrimonial room with cool floors, and a big soft bed laden with blankets for the cold desert nights. It was a shared bathroom-only place, but there were three lovely clean bathrooms – complete with frilly covers for the toilet seat and cistern! (Hyacinth Bucket would have loved it).
No time for dallying though, we were straight out – hat on, head down, hugging the shade like the Artful Dodger – to book tours for stargazing, the Uyuni salt flats, and the day trips to the desert to see geysers and the Valle de la Luna. The most important one – and the most expensive – was the four day trip into Bolivia for the salt flats, and we finally settled on Cordillera Travel where the fierce woman impressed us with her matter-of-fact almost militarily precise description and no nonsense approach. When her child fell over, crying for her, she just told shouted ‘Arriba!’ at her. She may not be a winning candidate for ‘Compassionate Mother of the Year’, but we figured if anyone could run a tight 4×4 operation into the desert, it would be her.
She advised us that owing to the Chilean Fiestas Patrias on the 18th and afterwards, we would be better to go before then and avoid drunk drivers in SP de Ata, and come back when it’s all over. So we booked for the next day! Worried about my sunburn as we had planned to go into the desert a few days hence rather than in less than 24hrs (!), she told me that rubbing a tomato onto my face would sort me out…. So, after a visit to the market to get bread, cheese and salad stuff for dinner, we were back at the hostel where I was to be found duly rubbing tomato juice and seeds all over my face. If it hadn’t been so painful, it would have been ridiculously hilarious. David made us a lovely salad for dinner, and we sat out in the last of the evening sun (with me under an umbrella!) to enjoy it. Full of good stuff, we had a nap to make sure we were fresh for stargazing at 10pm.
Wearing everything we owned, we waddled out into the dark streets of San Pedro and waited with a group of other tourists at the rendezvous point for the bus which would take us out into the desert to look at the un-light-polluted night sky. A bone-rattling half an hour later and we were dropped off outside a red-lit house and introduced in the pitch black to a Canadian guy called Lars who would be our charismatic and slightly geeky host for the evening. He was good fun, full of cheesy jokes and fascinating facts in equal measure – which definitely helped to fend off the freezing cold for the first hour as he took us through the night sky and the history of astronomy. I learnt that our word ‘month’ comes from ‘Moonth’ – as in; ‘I’ll see you in a [time it takes to get a new] Moon, or Moonth’… I learned that the phrase ‘Seventh Heaven’ comes from when people believed there were only 6 planets, and the Sun & Moon were one, all spinning around in their own little spheres. So If you were in the ‘Seventh Heaven’ you were in the highest and most exalted of them all – ie. On top of the world, and indeed the heavens.
The final part of the tour – as the freeze began to creep along my toes and fingers, squeezing all feeling out of them – was to use the ten massive telescopes they had set up just outside the huts. Each one was positioned in a different area of the sky in order to illuminate a different astronomical phenomenon. We saw the moon at such a high resolution I could actually take a photo of the craters; a glowing clump of thousands of stars that looked like a firework exploding; Jupiter and its moons; and a grey fuzzy clump which I wasn’t very impressed with until Lars explained it: the fuzzy clump was light that was from stars so far away, that the light that we were seeing that night had left the stars before humans even existed on earth. It had travelled across the vastness of space, through our galaxy, past meteors, avoiding the space dust, through the earth’s atmosphere and all the particles there, negotiated the trees, and buildings to get to the telescope, and the only thing that actually stopped the photons of light was our eyes. I almost felt guilty!
We finished the night in the hut with a steaming mug of creamy hot chocolate and the opportunity for questions. Someone asked about black holes and the only thing I remember (probably because they were the only words I understood in a jargon-filled explanation!) was that he said if we could take a teaspoon of matter from a black hole, it would weigh more than our whole galaxy. He also told us about a science project that was being initiated in the desert to create the biggest radio telescope array; apparently the second biggest Science project in the world after CERN. He got very excited about it, but if I’m honest, I got why they were building it in the desert, and why the Atacama was the best choice, but I just didn’t understand what these telescopes were actually for. I’m sure David will explain it to me!!
I learned that the Atacama desert is the driest desert on earth, but not the driest place, because the driest place is in the Antarctic. But the final, and probably best thing I learned that night, is that the night time sky in the Atacama desert is so full of blazing, multi-coloured stars and shooting trails, that you feel like you aren’t even standing on Earth, but transported high above our reality into Space. It is perhaps the most beautiful, vast, awe-inspiring, and humbling thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
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