James’ and Sara’s Excellent Atacama Adventure

Day 1-3: Antarctica to Atacama

Very sad to say goodbye to Antarctica. But we are going from the driest continent in the world to the second driest place on earth, the Atacama desert in Chile, and from one of the coldest places on earth to something a little warmer.

Two travel days to get from Ushuaia to the Atacama desert via Buenos Aires, Santiago and Calama. Our hotel, Tierra Atacama is about 15 minutes from the main tourist town of San Pedro de Atacama. All the rooms face the Andes mountains, with some large active volcanoes in view. Hotel is at 2500 metres above sea level, and they like you to acclimatise before you do the higher altitude excursions which go as high as 5000 metres above sea level.

Overall, it’s very dusty and the landscape is like a moonscape.

Our first excursion was to see a set of mountains called Moon Valley which was the site of a salt mine in the past. It closed because it produced non iodised salt when the market was demanding the iodised version.

In the afternoon Sara went to see the pink flamingoes on the salt plain while James clambered around rocks and cactus in a river gorge.

The salt plain is surrounded by the Andes mountains. In the distance you can see the site of where lithium mining occurs… Chile accounts for about 30% of global lithium production and the worlds largest lithium producer operates at the salt plain in Atacama (called Salar de Atacama). The problem is the mining activity is draining water from the salt plain and threatening the pink flamingoes.


On the way to the salt plain, we passed ALMA, the worlds largest radio telescope. This was not something I expected to find here

ALMA stands for Atacama Large Millimetre/ submillimetre Array and is the largest astronomical project in existence. It has 66 high precision antennas located at 5000 metres altitude. It’s an international collaboration of several countries.

The food at our hotel is exceptional. Some really interesting dishes served at both lunch and dinner

More tomorrow. Keen to send this as am sure you are all waiting expectedly (not)