the Atacama desert

I so love the Sahara - whether entering it in Mauritania, Mali, Chad, or Sudan - that I have long been quite keen to visit other deserts.  So I was pretty happy that my Bolivia holiday ended with three days in northern Chile, in the Atacama.

This was pretty different from the Sahara, however.  At much higher altitude so very cold, and mountainous too - to be honest, nothing whatsoever like the Sahara apart from the lack of rain.  But it was scenic. The white in the Moon Valley above is not snow (although it was very cold up there) but borax (a continuation from the salt flats of southern Bolivia), and I loved the rock formations and the volcanoes all around.

There was little life up there, no lizards on the rocks and no birds that I could see (sadly we had left the flamingoes behind).  It appeared that there was not even any vegetation, but these cute little vizcacha - like rabbits with squirrel tails - apparently find roots and seeds to eat, somewhere.  All they seemed to do when we found them was to sit motionless on a rock, maybe needing to warm themselves in the sun every so often.

The coldest it got was when we visited the El Tatio geysers.  It's necessary to go there early in the morning, before the wind gets up (so that the steam rises from the geysers instead of being blown horizontally!), and it was apparently minus five when we arrived.  The geysers were pretty spectacular, this being the third largest geyser field in the world, I believe, and we were actually quite lucky to see them as they had only reopened that day after a five day closure.  A Belgian tourist, trying to take a selfie, had taken a couple of steps backwards and fallen into one of the geysers; her husband pulled her out, suffering serious injury himself, but his wife died of her burns.  The authorities had closed the place while they put little yellow-painted stones around to mark out the more dangerous areas.  You can see some of the stones in this photo.