Dan goes back in time: visiting the North of Chile once again

We’re back in Chile again and visiting places Dan visited more than 25 years ago! Can you believe it? He travelled to Chile for six months after university and, now, going back to the same places, I guess, it must feel a bit of a time travelling for him. We’re visiting some of the areas in the northern part of Chile that Dan enjoyed the most: the National Parks of Lauca, Vicunas, Salar de Suriri (another salt flat) and Volcan Isluga.👍The whole trip was over 4,000m high.

The northern part of Chile is one of the most untouched areas of Chile and, sadly, several of the indigenous villages are now abandoned. It is a harsh environment, hot in the day, and extremely cold at night. As it is now winter in South America, it is colder than usual, and frost and ice are around throughout the day!

The whole trip was a real adventure, because of the extreme landscape, the altitude but also the crazy weather.  The scenery was amazing in a very harsh kind of way. During our three days driving in the parks, we saw hills of the same dry, arid landscape covered with small shrubs and gigantic sand-coloured boulders here and there. Not only did we have this amazing landscape around us but we could also see snow capped mountains and volcanos everywhere we looked!

On our first night, we camped outside one of the park ranger's hut, overlooking a beautiful lake called Lake Chungara, and a wonderfully perfect volcano called Parinacota (not to be confused with Panacota :))! But it was very cold. So cold that, in the morning, we had to wait a while before packing up the tents as there was ice on our tents and our pillows. It was properly-properly cold!

On the second night, we camped inside another park ranger's hut at the Salar de Suriri. In fact, Dan has memories of spending two weeks in the same hut, volunteering with the biologists and helping out with a project they did back then with the vicunas. The park guard, Ephraim, was working back then, and Dan think that he remembers him as well. The salar was incredibly beautiful, though being mined in the parts outside the national park :( 

In the afternoon, we went to the thermal baths which were crazy hot but really great. Best combo - cold outside, hot inside.

As well as the amazing landscape around us, we had several animal sightings along the way. The most wonderful of them was the vicunas, a type of wild llama which is common in this part of Chile, and we saw a lot of them as we drove along the dirt track. We even saw rheas, a bird rather like the ostrich. They are very funny, especially when they run to get away from cars.

On the second park ranger's hut at the Salar de Suriri where we stayed, there were lots of flamingos nearby and also viscachas, a rabbit like rodent. They were very cute hoping around on the rocks beside us and trying to steal our lunch. 

And last but definitely not least, on our last day while we were driving out of the park, we spotted an andean fox!! We were driving along when Ioanna spotted it. He looked a bit shocked to see us, then a bit curious about who or what we were, and seemed to play hide-and-seek with us, hiding behind low bushes and vegetation. He soon got bored though and vanished into the shrubs. He was so handsome...

I am going to finish today's post with a little something that happened after we left the national parks, on our way to our next destination. We visited a geoglyph on a dune in the desert who is known as El Gigante de Tarapaca. Apparently, he is the largest prehistoric human representation in the world, close to a 120 meters long. The geoglyph is believed to show the God Tacapu going down from his home in Titicaca to the Pacific ocean to die. There are several other geoglyphs that have been discovered in this area, I guess because of the dry
climate in the desert of Atacama. We saw several others on our way but the giant was definitely the most impressive and my favourite.

We are heading to the coast now so maybe we get a chance to do some swimming too. But I think it might be too cold. We are in winter after all! Although Ioni with her superhuman all-year-around swimming will probably disagree with me :)