We spend several days in the Atacama desert, doing daytrips with our rental car and staying in a cabaña, just before the corona crisis hit Chile.
The Atacama desert had been at the top of our todo list for Chile since the beginning, and this showed in the number of days we booked there – six. This was twice the time we’d spent at any place along our itinerary so far, and although it didn’t end the way we’d hoped, we do not regret spending so much time here.
There’s lots to see in this area, but only a few things can be reached on foot or by bike from San Pedro de Atacama, which is where pretty much everyone stays. So that leaves you with 2 options: booking plenty of tours to get everywhere, or rent a car. Because we’re not big fans of discovering places in a big group, and prefer to do things at our own pace, we went for the latter option. We rented ours from Europcar in San Pedro itself, but there is more choice if you choose to rent a car from Calama. The only reason that we didn’t is because our plan was not to return to Calama after San Pedro. Instead we planned to go east to Salta in Argentina.
While car hire may seem expensive even against a bunch of tours, it does allow you to stay in places that are further away from the centre. These tend to be cheaper, more spacious and more secluded, and often include a kitchen, which allows you to further cut costs by cooking yourself. There isn’t a great abundance of shops that do fresh food in San Pedro though. Most of the supermercados aren’t very super, and the only place where we managed to find meat other than the prepackaged chorizos was a small butchery located about here. Parking tip: the section of Tocopilla north of Ruta 23/Licancabur has free parking.
Laguna Tebinquinche
We never had this laguna on our list, and only stumbled upon it after driving up to Laguna Cejar and baulking at the 17.000 CHP entry price (you can swim – or rather float – in it, hence the price is higher than most other lagunas). So if you follow the dirt road signs to Laguna Cejar from ruta 23, then just before you get to it the road forks to the left and takes you onto Laguna Tebinquinche after about 40 minutes on some more dirt road. About 5 minutes before you arrive you’ll also spot two emerald green ‘ponds’ which were also worth getting out of the car for.
Laguna Tebinquinche costs 2000 CHP and you get a little info and flyer (available in English too) from the park warden at the little hut. They also have free toilets here. Because it was very sunny the warden advised us to park closer to the lake, take a little stroll, then drive up to the other car park rather than walking. We spent a good hour here, walking along the path by the lake and spotting a couple of flamingos dancing about in the water (presumably trying to encourage some food to the surface).
Aguas Caliente, Lagunas Tuyajto, Miscarti and Miniques
These four lagunas are all to the south of San Pedro so we combined them into a laguna-tastic day trip. The furthest is Laguna Tuyajto but if you enter this into Google Maps, you’ll be told it’ll take 5 hours to drive there from the town. That’s rubbish. We left San Pedro (the gas station – there’s only one) at 9.30am and we arrived at the laguna about 2 hours later. However, we stopped a lot on the way to take photos. The drive is superb – only the pictures can do it justice really. You’ll come across Aguas Caliente first – we only really spotted it because there were several tour buses parked up. As we approached, the ranger told us that it was free to visit (same goes for Laguna Tuyajto) and gave us some info. From the mirador we could spot flamingos and vicunas feeding. After stopping here we went onto Laguna Tuyajto where we got a closer look at some flamingos. We then returned on the same main road for about 30 minutes before the right-hand turn off to Lagunas Miscarti and Miniques (it’s well signposted). Before you reach the lagunas you have a windy, slightly bumpy drive up a narrow dirt road up to the rangers’ station where you need to pay 3000 CLP. You can then drive down to both lagunas, get out/wander around/take photos. There are toilets after you’ve paid the entrance fee. We liked Miniques the best because it feels a bit more secluded. After these lagunas we drove another 30 minutes on the main road to the town of Socaire where we managed to score some lunch from one of the cocinerias by the side of the road – even at 3.30pm they were still open and serving. We just walked in and sat down and they started bringing us a menu del dia (3 courses) which ended up costing 7000 CLP/person including a rather larger than expected coke. It’s then about an hour’s drive back along the same road back to San Pedro.
Valle de la Luna
If you come to San Pedro by ruta 23 from Calama, chances are high you already saw parts of one of the biggest and easiest to reach attractions around San Pedro: Valle de la Luna. Named after its supposed likeness to the surface of the moon, it is an area full of odd geological formations, canyons, dunes, and salt caves. Many people visit it on a tour, but it is easy to do this yourself with a rental car, or even with a rented mountain bike from San Pedro. It is worth knowing that, if you are not going with a tour, you need to enter the park before 1pm. After that only tours are allowed in. It is also slightly cheaper (2500 CLP instead of 3000) if you arrive before 12pm. There is no price difference between driving or cycling in, although I feel there should be. We saw quite a few cyclists struggling up the sandy roads under a bright sun with temperatures well over 30 degrees, as we whizzed by in our airconditioned SUV.
At the ticket office, you get a little explanation and a map which has all the miradors and senderos you can do. We set off to dutifully do all of them, apart from the ones that were closed for fear of instability. Apparently, 3 days of rain is not good for structures consisting mainly of sandstone, clay and salt.
The first couple of stops are around Duna Mayor, which is – surprise, surprise – a big dune. There are several hikes to several viewpoints, none of which are very long. The surface of this dune is so smooth and uniformly coloured that you can’t quite put it into perspective or estimate its scale when you look at it.
Another stop is reserved for Las Tres Marias – The Three Marias – which is a formation that has eroded away in a peculiar way so that there’s three columns that stick out above the bit of rock that they’re stood on. They don’t look like any kind of Maria I’ve ever seen, and I wondered why it isn’t Las Quatro Marias, because there is a fourth bit of rock that looks exactly like the other three only a few metres away. Anyway, we took a picture and continued.
The salt mine stop was a bit disappointing. I was hopeful as we walked up and passed some disused machinery, and a few derelict shacks, but then there wasn’t an actual mine to explore. We found a pit about three metres deep, and a hatch that had been bricked shut, but no way to go underground.
Last but not least, Mirador de Kari – Piedra del Coyote. If you do a Google Image search for Valle de la Luna, you’ll find a ton of sunset images, and this viewpoint is where they’re taken from. Here again, the rules are different if you’re not on a tour: you’re only allowed in until 7pm if you’re driving or cycling yourself. For us, sunset was at 7.50pm, so we figured we’d just get there before 7pm and wait for the sun to set. It was actually quite funny to see about a dozen minibuses storm in at 15 minutes before sunset, and head back out half an hour later.
El Tatio Geysers
This is one of the best places to visit in the Atacama desert, but many people keep it as one of the last things to do on their stay here. This has 2 advantages.
Firstly, it gives your body time to adjust to the altitude. If you’ve come from anywhere near the coast, San Pedro is already a fair bit higher at 2400 metres, but the road to El Tatio will take you past the 4300 metre mark. Altitude sickness is definitely something to take into account here – even after several days in the area, we weren’t spared from the occasional headache on the way to the geysers.
The second advantage is that it would be harder to appreciate the rest of the landscape in Atacama if you went to El Tatio first. Just driving there is magnificent, with many stopping occasions to check out canyons, vicuñas, flamingos, and active volcanoes. The vistas are the best we’ve seen in all of Chile.
Many people visit El Tatio on a tour, and try to get there for sunrise, because that’s when the geysers are most impressive due to the bigger temperature difference between the water and the outside air. We chose to avoid this time, mostly because we couldn’t be bothered to get up at 4am to drive up sand and gravel roads in the dark, but also to avoid the crowds. This is the most popular tour in San Pedro, and we crossed dozens of tour busses packed with tourists. They were already on their way back down, while we only had to contend with a few other self driving tourists, and could stop as frequently and as long as we wanted to. The geysers were still very much worth seeing (despite the steep 10.000 CLP entry), and with most of the people gone, there were herds of vicuñas crossing the geyser fields.
That said, the road there isn’t the easiest if you don’t have a lot of driving experience. Our rental car was a 2WD compact SUV and a bit underpowered in the steeper sections, but we made it without any issues. Ground clearance isn’t an issue on this road, so you don’t even need to go for an SUV. If you do decide to drive yourself, be extra careful with the altitude sickness. Descending is the quickest relief, but it takes quite some time to get back below 4000 metres from El Tatio, and you don’t want to be driving on this road with a headache, nausea and/or shortness of breath!
The shots below are all either from the park itself, or on the way there.
Laguna Baltinache
We’d already had a go at reaching Laguna Baltinache, but as it turns out, you shouldn’t just trust Google Maps to navigate there from San Pedro. There are apparently multiple entries for this laguna, and on our first attempt Google sent us up the road to Laguna Cejar (the one where you’re allowed to swim but at the extortionate price of 17.000 CLP each), and then through the desert. We did find a track through the desert that seemed to go in the right direction, until we almost got stuck in the soft soil.
The rain showers of the past couple of days combined with the heat had created a thin dry crust on top of fairly deep mud in certain places. We parked the car on a bit of a hill where it wouldn’t sink into the mud, and carried on a bit on foot, with a GPS tracker to find our way back to the car. After about a kilometre, we made it to what may have been a laguna at some point, but was now just a salt-covered hollow. It became clear that we were in the wrong spot and decided to give up and find a better route another day.
We did this, and we think we found the correct route, but we never got to put it to the test. Until now, the coronavirus crisis hadn’t affected us much, but we were keeping an eye on the news and measures taken in South America. On the day that we wanted to try to get to Baltinache again, we learned that Argentina had closed its borders to foreigners. That was a bit of a problem for our plans, since we were going to head back into Argentina’s Salta region before moving on to Bolivia. And so, instead of heading to a laguna, we spent a day planning for alternative routes, which would eventually see us leave Chile in a wholly unexpected way.