San Pedro de Atacama

Lago Blanco (White Lake) in Bolivia borders Chile

After the magnificient Salt Flats in Uyuni, Bolivia we move towards Chile. The Jeep that brings us to the border leaves at 4am, meaning a 3.30am rise for us. The trip to the border takes 4 hours and we are freezing in the jeep. The inside windows of the vehicle are literally frosted up.

We finally arrive to the border and the immigration goes on smoothly. Sure enough, once again I had to explain where and what Mauritius was. This time they had a World Map on which I could show where the island lies. They were quite interested to see how far it was from Chile and wanted to know by what means I got to South America. After this we drive into San Pedro de Atacama.

The beautiful small town of San Pedro with white walls

San Pedro de Atacama is a beautiful white washed desert village where 2000 relaxed souls lead a peaceful life only disturbed by the occasional tourist who uses this village as a point of entry into Chile. We take our quarters in a nice little hostel with a beautiful interior yard filled with hammocks, garden chairs and tables and a few matresses to lie down and sunbathe. There is also a nice barbecue set up and a central fire place for a camp fire.

Beautifully sunlight valley cliffs at sunset

Lickancabur and Láscar

The Atacama desert is the driest place on earth. It receives about 12mm of rain a year! It is a most amazing place. We took a tour into the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) and enjoyed again more breathtaking sceneries and yet another magnificent sunset. The Volcanoes Lickancabur and Láscar towering at 6000m and 5590m respectively on the other side of the valley is tainted with a beautiful pink hue at sunset.

Table's set for dinner

When we return, we put the chicken we had marinated and some Chorizo on the barbecue that is now red hot. Charmaine stayed back to prepare some pasta salad and Steve whipped up some garlic butter for the bread.

Jonathan and Titiana who live on Reunion Island and whom we met in Bolivia accepted our invitation and turned up with some more sausages and ice cold beer. We had of course procured ourselves some excellent Chilean white and red wine. This was a long awaited treat as in the first three countries we had been, locally produced wine had been well below standards and imported wine very expensive. So to be able to enjoy again some crisp cold Chardonnay was a treat for my taste buds. After having feasted on this delicious meal we sat down by the fire which David has masterly lit.

Enjoying the wine, warmth and good company

More pictures on San Pedro de Atacama

The other highlight of our stay in San Pedro was the unforgettable visit to the star observatory. We headed out there at 11pm for the English tour. Lars, from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, welcomed us and immediately started giving us the first part of the tour: "star gazing from antiquity to 402 years ago" when Galileo Galilei proved that Copernicus’ theory about the rotation of the Earth around the Sun was true.

Lars' fantastic story telling talents and sophisticated sense of humour gripped us from start to finish. We (almost) forgot that the temperature of the air was around 6°C. He told us about the origin and importance of the three main time units people lived by then : days, months and years. He also showed us 5 of the twelve zodiac constellations that could be seen at this time of night and year in this hemisphere.

Then we moved to the second part of the tour: actual star gazing! They have 10 high power telescopes set up to look at different things. The relatively “small” telescopes cost anything between US$40.000 and US$100.000 each. We had a look at the Andromeda Galaxy and it’s 200-400 billion stars, Beetle Juice  600 light years away and which scientists say could explode into a supernova anytime between now and the next 10.000 years which is obviously nothing in cosmic time. We looked the big and small Magellanic clouds too.

Beautiful church on the Plaza de Armas

But the best part of the night was to see Jupiter through a 125x high gain telescope. We could clearly see the horizontal patterns running across the planets face. Jupiter has 11 times the diameter of the earth and has a huge dark spot the size of the Earth (a cyclonic formation) running across its surface and we saw that too. I could also clearly see 3 moons of Jupiter while only discerning a 4^th one (Jupiter has about 64 moons).

Then we went into a warmer place inside for the 3^rd part of the night : Questions and Answers. Lars opened the floor and insisted there were no taboo questions, neither stupid ones. Sure enough the first question was : Do you believe that  intelligent life exists somewhere else in the Universe ? I loved the way he answered this question. He began by saying that there are two parts to that question, namely could there be life elsewhere in the Universe and if so could it be intelligent.

To the first part he gave us some facts and told us we could probably answer the question ourselves :from latest 2001 data we’ve received by looking at a little bit of dark sky 1/13.000.000^th of the total north and south hemispheres, we discovered about 10.000 new galaxies we had never seen before because of light pollution of other stars. And since the scientific community agrees that the average number of stars in any galaxy is 100 billion, then purely statistically, the number of stars in the universe could be = 13.000.000 little bits of sky x 10.000 undiscovered galaxies x 100.000.000.000 average n° of stars =  13.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 stars in the universe.  So he asked if any of us really believed that we could be the only star (solar) system to have a planet with life on it … I think everyone came to the same conclusion.

The second part of the question was even more interesting. He said that if there are intelligent life forms out there, we (humanity) would probably live our entire period (however long this might be) without ever managing to catch a single signal from ETI (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence). He gave us some information so that it would be easier to have a feel for it. I actually loved his “Bill Bryson” style : he said that even if there was ETI out there emitting signals in a form and at frequencies we could receive,  we would have as much chance of “seeing” the signal as seeing with our eyes a camera flash 1000km away across an ocean.

He also told us something I did not quite realize : The more advanced a civilization is, the less “cosmic noise” they make. For example for us, the most signal we’ve emitted in our history was between the 1900’s and the 1970’s. We have then “evolved” to better techniques of information transmission such a fibre optics. So the “loudest” we’ve been was a short 70 years in our 100.000 years in our history. That’s where the analogy with the camera flash comes from.

He also showed us in the distance the ALMA (Link to ALMA Project) project being built. This US$1.2 billion project planning to install 50 radio signal receivers is th second biggest scientific project in the world behind the CERN (particle accelerator) in Switzerland. The project is financed by the EU, Japan, the US and Canada.

They chose this location because the Atacama desert is the driest place on Earth. You see, water vapour blocks a lot of the signal and here there isn’t much. On top of that they will pace the complex at about 5000m altitude which will also eliminate half of the atmosphere density.

We finished this great night out at 2am and went immediately to bed as we had a bus at 9am to Salta, Argentina.

Quite symbolic, a blue door to Argentina!