Atacama Desert

Another early start as it was an hour and a half by minibus to the geyser field. Apparently there are only six countries in the world with geysers - Iceland, New Zealand, Chile, USA, Bolivia and Italy. It was necessary to be there at first light in order to see the steam - when the temperature rose it was too warm to show the steam. When we arrived it was spectacular to see the steam whooshing out at varying heights across the unstable area. We were warned to follow right behind the guide and stay within markers, as recently a Belgian woman had fallen into one of the smaller mud ploppy things, and suffered somewhere between 50-75% burns. Her husband who pulled her out was badly burned on his arms. They think she was photographing down into one of them when the crust gave way.

When the spectacle died down (well it was still active, we just couldn't see the steam) we had breakfast of milk we heated in a geyser, a stale roll, plastic cheese slices and spam - I had food envy of those other groups having fruit, eggs etc - but that's what happens when you go for a budget tour! We then moved on to an area where we could swim in the coldest hot spring I've ever been in. There was one small boiling spring feeding in to quite a big pool. However it was fun, and in places it was possible to feel the heat when I wiggled my toes in the sandy bottom.

We were dropped off at the hotel and had time to get some lunch in the town, before we were picked up for our visit to the Valley of the Moon. Basically this is a desert landscape with wonderful rocks caused by the pyroclastic flow from the surrounding volcanoes. We had a crawl through a cave to emerge onto a cliff face we had to scramble up. I was a bit cross with our guide who had not warned us that this would be on the cards - I'd assumed we'd be wandering around in the sandy desert, so wore trekking sandals. The poor woman Mr C had helped down the path after we'd made our offerings to panchamama last week was really cross too as she'd have chosen not to go - she was scared to tears this time. However we all survived though the adrenaline rush tired some of us, and we still had another walk, this time up a sand dune to watch the sunset. The light then over the rocks was lovely, but I decided to make my blip one of the many geysers.