Well it was until our planned visit. The Atacama Desert in Chile is widely thought to be the driest place on earth. There are weather stations there that have never recorded rain. We were visiting the desert on our travels through Chile as a precursor to visiting Easter Island (another story).
We’d arrived in Santiago de Chile the previous day and done some sightseeing of the city itself. Susan answered the hotel phone in the evening and the conversation was along the lines of “not sure we can do your tour of the Atacama Desert – a lot of the roads have been washed away by flooding”. Susan’s answer was a definite – “we’ll go whatever”. And so we went …
From the aeroplane window as we approached the airport near to San Pedro de Atacama Susan commented on the sand being white, I wasn’t convinced. On landing the guide said we’d have to wait a while as the road through to San Pedro wasn’t open yet and he took us for a ride round the area. The roads had been closed for several days and there was a huge tailback of traffic which we could see as we travelled around the airport area. No problem says the driver and, true to form, as soon as he received a call that the road was open we whizzed along some small tracks through the desert and popped out at the front of the queue!
It turns out that the sand had been turned white due to the water extracting the salts from it and then them drying on the surface.
When we arrived at our hotel it looked a little, well, droopy. The walls were adobe-type, made of clay and they were dripping. The small swimming pool was a lovely rich brown colour. When we went for a walk later there were still puddles in the main street and the church walls normally pristine white, were brown where they hadn’t washed away all together.
Despite the unusual circumstances we enjoyed our stay in the desert. Highlights included an evening picnic in Moon Valley, seeing flamingos and floating in a salt lake.
The rainstorm apparently happens every ten or so years – according to the locals that’s not often enough to build from something more substantial. It is called the “Bolivia Rain” by those living in Chile – presumably something else by those in Bolivia.
