Moving on

We have completed 4 tours & enjoyed them all. The high altitudes have been our favourites a& today we went to Tatio Geysers for sunrise. This required a 3am wake up for the tour bus to collect us around 4am. We slept as we drove through the dark & awoke to a landscape of steaming fumaroles at 4,300m.
It is hard to get one's breath at this altitude but our guide gave us handy tips & all was good with us. There were so many tour buses & cars at the spot for sunrise, a time when the steam is most spectacular in the cold. Needed to rug up before dawn!
Moon Valley is the opposite- a place to visit before so set & then watch sunset from Coyote Rock. The extremely windy conditions has sand grains blasting any exposed flesh.
A plane flight to Santiago awaits us early tomorrow morning & from there we drive to wine country! Santa Cruz here we come!

Flamingos and other things

It has been a busy time, with a couple of tours now completed and our appreciation of this majestic landscape fully realised. Getting out of town is easy with so many tour companies touting for business & many options available. But don't get on the wrong bus!
We did, due to the language barrier & our limited Spanish. We did wonder if we were going to the Valley of the Moon for sunset, when the guide began talking about swimming! However all was not lost, as this was a tour we had planned to do later anyway.
The Cejar lagoon is home to flamingos, as are most of the salty lagoons in the Salar de Atacama & the high plateau. Although only a few were present for our first sighting, one took off &  flew overhead. We were to learn there are 3 varieties in this area & this one was the Chilean variety , not Andean or James. It's all about the colours of the wing tips, which form the tail of the bird.
Our full day tour was the best! Lakes, small towns, high plateau, herds of  vicunos, flamingos & other water birds, smoking volcano and dormant volcanoes, yellow flowering bushes, wild quinoa, cactus wood, a llama, simple churches and lunch at 4.30pm! A wild, dry, salty, beautiful land.
We were so tired we didn't make it to see in the new year, but the party in the hotel courtyard & fireworks woke me briefly to announce it was here.
Wishing you all the very best for 2017! May your hearts, hands and fabric produce beautiful creations for yourself or the ones you love!

San Pedro de Atacama

We arrived in San Pedro de Atacama yesterday following a short 2 hour flight from Santiago. This is a small dusty town, full of tourists. At 2400metres above sea level, it is the world's driest desert at altitude. This altitude gave us our first souvenir- a mild headache. However this passed quickly with medication and today we are fine.
Our 2 year old hotel is a 10 minute walk from the Plaza, down mostly unpaved roads. When the wind blows and cars pass on the road, we are covered in our second souvenir!
Looking beyond the tourist trappings, it is a tough life here in the desert. Irrigated crops of fruit & vegetables are grown in the valleys & we will see this tomorrow on a full day tour. The landscape is the main attraction with volcanoes as far as the eye can see. When the sun goes down the temperature drops immediately. As it is a dry heat we are not finding 29 C unbearable!
I have done a little sketching in the plaza. We have also visited the amazing meteorite museum and I am coming home with a small piece, cut, polished & set in a necklace. This makes me feel like an extremely
 small speck in the universe!