14/01/2026
Atacama Desert, north of Chile🇨🇱 Together with Arjan and Danny, I travelled for a couple of weeks in Chile.
Our home base in Atacama was San Pedro de Atacama, at 2.400m, a small lodge just outside the centre. Dusty roads without asphalt, barely wide enough for one car, became familiar quickly. Cold nights, burning sun during the day, ands temperatures around 26°C
From there we moved toward lakes above 4.000m, and finally to steam rising at El Tatio. Lakes Chaxa, Legar, Miscanti and my favourite lake Miñiques at 4.200 (see photo 7)
The Atacama is the driest desert on Earth, with less than 1 mm of rain per year, yet it is kept alive by meltwater from the Andes. Beneath the salt flats lie vast lithium reserves, roughly one third of the world’s known supply. Lake Chaxa, see photo 3, with the Pelicans is next to that reserve)
Life adapts quietly at altitude. Vicuñas, which I kept calling mini llamas, suri that look like a kind of desert ostrich, and Andean geese live where oxygen is thin. Vegetation shifts color through minerals, water, and lichen, Lizan R would have loved this
Salt lakes are so dense you float effortlessly, the water clearer than the Dead Sea. In Laguna Legar, we could float standing up
All of this sits in a volcanic landscape. 🌋Around 200 volcanoes rise in the Atacama, part of nearly 2.000 across Chile, with about 90 still active. El Tatio covers 10 km² as the third largest geyser field in the world. The sunset above the valley of Moon, see final photo was beautiful. And at night, with almost no light pollution, the darkness is deep enough to lose count of the stars, just sitting there, looking up. Thanks
