How to Spend the Perfect 48 Hours in the Atacama
(Photo: Thinkstock)
I would never advocate for anyone to visit the Atacama desert for just two days. if time is no object you could spend weeks here exploring the vast and varied ecosystems created when some of the tallest mountains in the world meet the driest desert on Earth. But a carefully plotted 48 hours can make you feel like you’ve spent a week.
The Atacama has long intrigued me and I jumped at the chance to visit following a ski trip just outside of Santiago. The downside of this particular trip was that I could spend just over two days enjoying the region. I knew I needed to make those days count.
(Photo: Thinkstock)
The Northern Andean desert plateaus known as the Altiplano occupy a territory of 600 miles long, loosely confined by the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains.
San Pedro de Atacama acts as base camp for most exploration of the region. It’s a tiny town of about 4,000 people with a distinct hippie vibe, a backpacker’s paradise.
San Pedro is built almost entirely of adobe bricks and for years the only accommodations there were hostels and guest houses, but recently luxury hotels and resorts have been popping up on the outskirts of town, to provide adventurous luxury travelers access to this incredible place.
I called the Tierra Atacama home during my visit. The resort is luxurious for sure, but it takes pains to integrate itself into the Atacaman landscape to create a seamless experience of relaxation and desert living.
(Photo: Tierra Atacama)
The backyard of the resort overlooks the somnolent giant, Licancabur volcano, which sits, waiting to be disturbed on the border with Bolivia. The first thing the Tierra Atacama does when you check in is sit you down and tell you there is a lot for you to do during your visit. The concierge doubles as a travel agent, helping you maximize the amount of trips you can plausibly take in a single day. With their help I was able to enjoy a good bit of this vast geological wonderland in a very short amount of time.
Day One
Visit spectacular geysers
To visit the Tatio geysers you’ll need to wake up while it is still dark in order to reach your destination just before sunrise. Located at an altitude of 14,190 feet this geothermic maze, the third largest geyser site on Earth, is not to be missed.
(All Photos Below: Jo Piazza)
Naturally I slept most of the meandering path into the mountains which made waking up there to the sunrise over a scene straight out of Middle Earth even more spectacular.The view was enough to shake off the sleepiness. The more than 80 active geysers had been awake for hours, creating a symphony of steam that wafted towards the volcanic peaks in the distance.
The rocky hills surrounding the geysers are home to one of the most peculiar animals on the planet, the vizcacha, a rodent that resembles a rabbit with a large tail or perhaps a very large chinchilla with giant ears that hops like a kangaroo.
You’ll also catch site of the vicuña, a wild and endangered cousin of the llama that roams this part of the Andes.
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Eat some BBQ Llama
Winding away from the mountains have a stop in the tiny village of Machuca, one of the few places to indulge in the delicacy of BBQ llama meat.
These days Machuca is more of a re-creation of a traditional Andean altiplanic village than anything else, but there are still a few locals around making the anticuchos of llama meat.
Soak in the Puritama Hot Springs
Take a swift hike into the steep sided gorge and down to the the River Puritama to find a stunning desert oasis. Puritama means “warm river” and its waters can average a temperature around 91 degrees. One of the local resorts has sectioned off eight pools alongside the river for visitors to enjoy long restorative dips before heading back towards San Pedro for the next adventure.
Visit the salt flats
No visit to the Atacama is complete without visiting the Salar de Atacama, the third largest salt flat in the world. The salar has different personalities, depending on where you visit her. There’s the smooth and glassy flats, the deep salty lakes where you can take a swim and the lagoons, filled with riled up chunks of salt and filled with wildlife.
One of the highlights of the salar region is the National Flamingo Reserve in the Chaxa Lagoon, home to three types of flamingos, the Andean, the Chilean and the James’ flamingo.
You come here for the flamingos but you stay for the sunset.
The setting sun does a dance over the originally drab rock of the Cordillera de la Sal mountain range turning it from brown into yellow then orange then red and finally a deep violet.
It’s inevitable that you’ll leave covered in a fine coating of white salt, a surefire way to ensure being licked by the street dogs wandering the streets of San Pedro.
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Explore the town of San Pedro
You could write San Pedro off as just another stop on the Gringo Trail that takes backpackers from Peru all the way down to the tip of Chile. You could, but you shouldn’t. Look past the hostels and the dime a dozen restaurants serving pizzas, burgers and the rare empanada to find San Pedro’s hidden gems.
Local artisans handcraft beautiful jewelry from locally mined metals including copper, which is inexpensive, but pliable enough to create intricate designs for earrings and rings. Bypass the dozens of stalls selling scratchy Peruvian chic sweaters that were likely imported from China and head into the smaller boutiques selling finely woven clothing and scarves made from the silky baby alpaca wool.
Make sure to visit the town’s Meteorite Museum, a labor of love created by a local scientist who has found more than $29 million worth of space rocks right in the Atacama.
Day Two
Go horseback riding in the Valley of Death
This was the first thing that I asked the fine folks at the Tierra Atacama to plan for me. You can’t visit the desert and not spend time on horseback.
Early in the morning we were introduced to our riding guide Danielo, a sturdy 37-year-old who came to the Atacama on vacation fifteen years earlier and never left. We set off on hoof from San Pedro to the Valle de la Muerte. The name of the valley is a misnomer. Originally it was called the Valle de la Marte (the Valley of Mars) for it’s jigsawed landscape of red rocks and sand, but something was lost in translation when the signs for local attractions were written a couple of decades ago.
We rode a couple of hours through the Martian landscape, never coming across another human being. You could bellow into the canyons and hear your cries echo back to you. We galloped up enormous sand dunes, leaving our horses to rest for a few moments while we explored the rolling hills of fine red sand.
It’s not a long ride, but it is a rewarding one with horses and guides who know the path, the sites and the best places to take an Instagram or two.
Try sand boarding with the locals
Before sand boarding became a “thing,” intrepid guides (or just dudes in your San Pedro hostel) would lead hikes out to the dunes, hand you a plank of wood with some leather straps on it and a plastic baggy filled with melted butter to grease the bottom so you’d glide the down immense dunes here. Things have changed.
Wander into just about any shop or hostel in San Pedro and you can find a tour operator who will equip you with all manner of fancy snow boards to ride the dunes of the Valle de la Muerte which can reach heights of 100 meters.
Watch the sun set in the Valley of the Moon
Named because the locals thought the landscape of the Valley resembled the moon due to the high composition of salt in the mountains here, the Valle de la Luna is one of the driest places on Earth, with some spots going a century without rain.
It’s best to hike into the Valley about an hour before sunset. This is one of San Pedro’s most popular organized tours so you won’t be on your own. Still, the sunset over the lunar landscape is one of the grandest you’ll ever see.
Star gaze the Andean way
Gazing up at the stars is one of the oldest recorded human activities. The oldest evidence of human beings trying to decipher what they saw in the sky dates back more than 35,000 years.
This is one of the best places to view the stars in the entire world.due mainly to the dryness, the low population and the altitude.
Related: Why the Atacama is the Best Star Gazing Spot on Planet Earth
The gazing is so good in the Atacama that you can see the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye.
This desert is home to one of the most advanced observatory projects in the world, ALMA, but for an evening of amateur star gazing you can’t go wrong with the Ahlarkapin observatory, run by indigenous entrepreneurs and located directly behind the Tierra Atacama resort. Ahlarkapin combines scientific astronomy with traditional Andean astronomy.
The Andean people referred to the Milky Way as Hatun Majuk, “the huge river of the sky” and within it they found their own constellations of warriors and animals. They looked towards the dark spaces, the reverse of traditional astronomy, looking for shapes in between the points of light.
Star gazing sessions start at 10 pm and typically run past midnight. Bundle up. The temperature in the desert drops precipitously when the sun goes down.
From the observatory you can see the rings of Saturn and its moon Titan, supernovas, star nebulas and the craters of the moon in wildly intricate detail.
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