Flamingos and moonscapes

Returning now to our desert trip, after a brief jaunt to the Elqui Valley (in a literary sense that is).

Sightseeing in the Atacama Desert requires booking tours, of which there are hundreds. That is, there are hundreds of companies (or at least it feels that way) but the tour content of each is much of a muchness. Going by a recommendation, we opted for Desert Adventure and reserved everything before we left Santiago.

Our first tour of the trip was to the Salar de Atacama to see some flamingos. But we were left dangling tantalised for a while; first we were taken to a nearby river oasis, where fruit grows in the middle of the arid wasteland; second, to the village of Toconao, with an interesting church and bell tower and a handicraft shop. Finally, as the sun began to set, we were taken to the Salar.

The Salar de Atacama is a vast salt flat, formed when rivers coming down from the mountains simply dry up in the desert heat. We were surprised to discover that the Chilean flats aren't the dazzling white expanses we were expecting; instead, the wind and the sand of the desert churns them up into a brown, knobbly texture - a little like the top of a crumble!

It's a stunning view, with salt and sand as far as the eye can see on one side, and volcanoes on the other. And plonked right in the middle, are a series of lagoons created by underground water sources, on which live the flamingos. 

Showing a surprising lack of timidity, the flamingos continued eating, drinking and roosting as flocks of cooing tourists snapped photo after photo of a sunset flushed with pink.

On the second afternoon, we travelled out to the Valle de la Muerte (Valley of Death) and Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley). Both are unreal landscapes, carved into the stone and sand by the constantly eroding force of the wind. In Valle de la Luna, we saw the obligatory Tres Marias rock formation, which is sadly now only two Marias after an unknown culprit knocked part of it down. We also saw an old salt mine and miners refuge now returned to the sands.

The afternoon culminated in another breathtaking sunset, the dry rock awash with soft pinks and oranges and long shadows sliding up the sides of the mountains. We had to be dragged away by our tour guide, or we would have been tumbling back down the sand dunes in the dark.