Valle de la Luna / Valle de la Muerte
This excursion was recommended for our first day as it was beautiful but not too strenuous – the town is at ~7,900 ft, so oxygen is thin (for us). We lucked out and were the only room to sign up for this day. Our guide met us in the lobby and escorted us to the van, which took us about 15 minutes out of town to an amazing unmarked overlook over the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon).
A sense of scale
Valle de la Luna
Our guide told us that there was an unusually high level of white salt encrusting the hills due to the recent rains. Referencing the rain would become a consistent refrain during our Atacama excursions… This first day in the desert was also the clearest, and our guide pointed out a volcano that was over 100 miles away!
We then drove to a short distance to a second overlook, this time of Valle de la Muerte (though the original namer had meant Mars, bad pronunciation lead to modern name Valley of Death).
We had booked a longer hike through the Valle de la Muerte for our second day and these views definitely whetted our appetites for more.
The third part of our excursion was a short hike in Valle de la Luna. After a short walk along a dirt road, we took a path up a hill to a cliff with an amazing vantage point over the valley floor. Lots of photos ensued:
looking left
looking right
We hiked back to the van and then drove through the valley seen in the above photo.
the road cutting through the photo taken on the right above
Half way across we stopped to view the Tres Marias, small rock outcroppings on the salt floor.
What is amazing here is the floor of the valley– solid crystal salt, and distances that are hard to estimate due to the lack of trees for scale.
After a nice morning we returned to the resort to relax, have lunch, and relax some more before our afternoon excursion.
Atacama Salt Flat (Chaxa Lagoon & Flamingo Reserve)
Around 4p we made our way to the reception area for our second excursion of the day, this time a longer drive out to the briny Chaxa Lagoon in the hope of seeing some flamingos. Along the way we get a sense for the beautiful, desolate surroundings.
We were a little unlucky in that the recent rains had reduced the salinity of the water, thus driving some flamingos to more remote lagoons. Altogether we saw about 10 flamingos and several other water fowl.
it’s surprisingly difficult to photograph them with their beaks out of the water…
red algae = food for brine shrimp = pink feathers on flamingos
On our way back to the resort we stopped for a quick tour of Toconao. The chapel in the village square featured unique cactus wood in parts including the door, a curving staircase and a portion of the ceiling.
cactus wood door
We also visited a small local shop which had a few llamas in the backyard.
fancy llamas
On the way out of town we had a nice view of the gorge created by a river that allows the village to farm in the desert.
Clouds were building on the horizon, and that evening would provide quite a light show courtesy of mother nature.
Sunset and Storms
The sun was setting as we returned from our second excursion, lighting up the valley and resort with an amazing glow.
Shortly after sunset we began to see a number of lightning strikes on the mountains, so I grabbed my tripod to see if we could photograph the storm. We headed up to the main reception area which had a good view of the Licancabur volcano and valley. Over the next 45 minutes we sat outside watching the storm roll over the Andes.
Clearly this was not a normal event as a number of employees came out to watch too, and everyone was talking about the storm the next day. Even in the driest place on earth you can still get a rain! The resort received a few drops of rain but nothing like the mountains. After enjoying the storm (with a cocktail) we headed in for dinner and discussed our plans for day 2.