Friday Nov. 2
Four am. Another early morning.
We expected it though – the Geysers de Tatio are an infamous tourist spot in Atacama – particularly notorious for tours starting at 5 am, when the desert is freezing. Like 5-10 below in Celsius. We forced ourselves out of bed, layered up, and made our way to the gate to wait for our tour.
While we were waiting (our bus arrived late) we looked at the stars. Atacama is notorious for having some of the clearest skies in the world. This was evident as our eyes adjusted to see the thick band of the Milky Way above us. It was pretty incredible.
Also, incredible (I overuse that word, I know) was that, in the dark, at 5 am, we the aforementioned guy from Cleveland (see Week 6/7: ValparaÃso). His name is Lucas, and he was backpacking South America after finishing a year in AmeriCorps. He was traveling with Lisa – a girl from Austria in our room. Lucas and Lisa were wearing shorts… we advised them not to.
After waiting in the cold for 40 minutes, our tour bus arrived.
On the ride up to the geysers, we were advised to sleep – there was nothing to see in the dark, we had over an hour to get there and our bodies needed to adjust to the altitude, as we climbed higher and higher. There was, surprisingly, a little bit of traffic (in the desert at 6 am…) due the popularity of the destination.
We arrived at the entrance of the state park and paid our tickets (they thought Susi was Chilean so she got a discount) after the sun had risen. When stopped for a bathroom break (the niiiiicest bathrooms I had seen in a while in Chile) I washed my hands and they felt frozen. It was cold.
We finally arrived to the geysers and it was cool I guess?
Personal opinion, and potentially unpopular, but the geysers are kinda over hyped. They’re cool and all, but I had to wake up at 5 am, freeze my butt off, and get short of breath due to the altitude in order to watch water bubble up out of the ground. Maybe I just wasn’t feeling it, Susi seemed to enjoy it enough.
Also present in Tatio was a hot spring – like a large, natural jacuzzi in the ground in the mountains of the desert. Though it was warming up, I was still unwilling to peel off a single one of my three layers. Meanwhile, people were in bikinis. Amazing.
Fortunately, they fed us a nice, warm breakfast of eggs and toast with turkey and cheese and pound cake and tea.
Thankfully, there was a lot more to the tour than the geysers.
As we drove back toward San Pedro, we saw beautiful landscapes unravel before us. Our guide stopped us at certain points and pointed out wildlife. We saw cute vicuñas (a small, South American camel that resembled a llama) and learned that they were surprisingly aggressive. We saw flamingos in the wild – bathing in a salt lagoon. We missed the viscachas – which makes sense because the chinchilla like animals are known for their camouflage.
Last stop was a canyon with a greenery running along its base. This was the same canyon as the Termas de Puritama, which we visited the following day.
All and all in was a good tour, kinda of exhausting though. We got back to the town around 1 and took a shuttle back to the hostel. Afterward, we returned town in the afternoon to check it out some more (wanted to go on a Tours4Tips, but could not seem to find them) and walked back to the hostel. The walk wasn’t bad around sunset – it had cooled down and it was only like 30 minutes walking through the desert.
