Greetings from Punta Arenas

It's already the end of Week 1 and it's been jam-packed, exhausting and awesome.  We started out with couple of 1/2 days in Santiago that we spent walking, people watching, checking out the markets and street entertainment.  We've been to Santiago before and we hit the highlights back then so we were happy just to check out the plazas, markets and pedestrian streets, of which there are many.  We arrived in Calama by Monday evening and had recovered from the overnight flight from Toronto.

We toured the world's largest open pit copper mine, which is the key to the existence of Calama.  Everything there is king size.  I felt like I was in a cartoon.  The mine is 1200 meters deep and trucks as big as our house are being loaded by equipment that dwarfs the trucks!   Most of what we saw was so big that I couldn't fit it into a photo.  It was an interesting experience, for sure.

Then we were off to San Pedro de Atacama in the Atacama Desert, on the high plateau of Los Andes.  The actual town of San Pedro is just a tourist trap and we only spent enough time there to have a couple of meals and exchange some money.  The main attraction for us was the desert and we were not disappointed.  Of course, the scenery was spectacular and varied quite a lot from place to place.  We hit some aptly named places like La Valle de la Luna ( Valley of the Moon) and Valle de la Muerte (Valley of Death), which reminded both of us of the backdrop for some scenes in Star Trek tv shows  We also visited several massive salt lakes and salt flats and places with lots and lots of sand - massive sand dunes 300 feet high, all with Los Andes as a backdrop.

A number of places that we went to were over 4000 meters.  Jogging not recommended.  We climbed a couple of massive sand dunes and even going at a slow pace, you get winded.  It gets windy and cold up there, too.  My face has been thoroughly sand-blasted and any time that I spent on my hair in the morning was pretty much wasted.

The most memorable thing for me was the salt lake in Tebinquiche.  It looks like a vast field of snow and ice on a plateau beneath the mountains.  We could walk right out onto the lake and the water was only about an inch deep but I still had visions of falling through the non-existent ice.   There were almost no people around and we had a picnic lunch sitting beside the lake.  There were no other people there and it felt totally isolated and it was absolutely silent.  No wind, no rustling of grass or trees (there aren't any grass or trees) no traffic, no birds, no animals and no other people.  I don't think I've ever experienced silence like that before.
And then Gord reached into his bag of Doritos......

We could have spent an extra day or 2 there.  We didn't have time to do all of the things that we had on our list.  One of the things that I wanted to do was sand-boarding.  We saw someone doing it.  You have to climb up the sand dune with board in tow in order to get to the top.  It's a long way up and a tough climb through the sand.  Having climbed a few big dunes already, I can appreciate the amount of energy that it takes to make it uop to the top so I think that I probably would only have done a couple of runs anyway.  Alison, my chiropractor will be happy to learn that I missed the opportunity to wipe out in yet another way.


We spent today travelling south to Punta Arenas in Patagonia.  It's the start of our 3 weeks in Patagonia, which was the original premise for this trip.  (Patagonia is on the long list of places on my Bucket List).  We just overnight in Punta Arenas and on Sunday morning, we go to Torres del Paine.  The adventure continues......

Here's the link to the photos of the trip.