San Pedro de Atacama

This desert is one hot mother. Our first day there we swam in a salt lake that makes you float, I tried to walk on the water like Jesus but floating like a buoy was the best I could do. We also saw the small salt flat there. It looked like icy snow, in the middle of a barren desert., like someone had dumped a bunch of ice in the middle of a sand box. It was so gorgeous and yet confounding.

The second day we woke up at the ungodly hour of 3:40 am to go the Geyser Tatio. Up in the altiplano (high desert plain) which was freaking freezing. It felt like being on the moon, and I should know a little bit about the moon considering I did attend NASA space camp. I am practically an astronaut.

The actual geysers looked more like pots of boiling water to me than geysers, which was tempting due to the extremely frigid weather but I kept my distance. The landscape of the desert was the highlight. It was so vast and beautiful that it was hypnotic. After freezing my booty off we were taken to hot springs surrounded by boiling geysers. I was so excited about the prospect of getting warm I got a little over eager and tried to throw myself on the opening to the hot spring. I burned my foot and was screaming bloody murder because I was engulfed in 200 degree water. I was one of those people our morbidly obese guide warned us about: the slow tourist who is too frozen to think logically. I wanted to get warm at any cost even if it meant scalding myself. Thankfully I was clear headed enough to stay away from the center of the actual geysers. Every year some really dense tourist apparently tries to get too close to the geyser, ends up falling in and does not make the bus ride home. Hotsprings are one thing, I definitely would not try to stick myself into an actual geyser. My parents will be happy to hear I have that much sense.

We stopped in a small village and ate some llama kabob. Llama is incredibly tasty, I think it would be a big hit in the U.S. I don't know why llamas are used purely for petting zoos in the U.S. because it is a total waste of a delicious animal. So that was my time in the desert. It was beautiful, dry, dusty and full of landscapes that play with one's perception. Atacama you are anything but a god forsaken desert.