It’s cold. The kind of cold that makes you think about what good firewood the bodies of your friends would make. We are all just meat popsicles. I can see my breath in the air in front of computer screen. We had two hours of power earlier from a gas generator somewhere on the premises growling away in the evil night. It was enough to cook some food and drink a toast with our strange band of travelers.
In the predawn flashlight my thermometer reads minus 8 Celsius… inside our hotel room. Yesterday was a picturesque but challenging day.
I first had an inkling of what we were in for when our guide bought a large sweatshirt at a snack stop in the morning. Seriously, the guides will not tell you how cold it is going to be. Our guide did warn us about the elevation; which in itself is no joke. 5000 meters above sea level is the real deal. Most of us had coca leaves and catalyst to chew on to alleviate some of the effects and I had some elevation sickness medication as well.
Even with all this it was quite easy to be short of breath after a short run, people were burning from the sunshine relatively quickly, and the cold was bitter even in full sunlight as there was little protection from the wind. For both sun and wind protection, I resort to bandanas. Again. I would encourage anyone traveling anywhere to bring several bandanas.
We did get to see some amazing rock sculptures while truckign through the desert. It really was this beautiful.
The rest of the day was less impressive to the color impaired people on the trip. We spent a large remainder of the day visiting lagoons of varied colors (red, green, blue, brown, silver, etc) and looking at the flamingoes that were indigenous to each pond.
Parts of the trip truly felt like another planet; As if we were stranded on another planet. Nothing but odd tracks through the rocks for as far as the eye could see. This is not a place to explore on your own unless you are insanely well prepared… and insane. Trust me, stay on the barely beaten path for Atacama and Uyuni.
Now preparing to leave the negative 8 hotel for the last day of our Atacama Uyuni tour, I am glad that I’ll be heading on to Chile instead of trying to make the entire return drive in one day, as many of my compatriots will be doing later.