overview
You may never get to walk on the surface of Mars, but head to the remote Atacama Desert in Northern Chile and you can explore a bare but beautiful landscape that's out of this world.
The Atacama Desert is a virtually rainless plateau in Chile, covering a 600 mile strip of land on the Pacific coast of South America, west of the Andes mountains. The rain shadow on the leeward side of the Andes keeps this over 20 million-year-old desert 50 times drier than the California’s Death Valley. It is the second-driest desert in the world and is composed mostly of salt flats and hot springs, sand, volcanoes, and lava flows.
Chileans combine northern European calm and measure with Latin warmth and friendliness. You'll notice this wherever you stay or stop in Atacama, particularly in the town of San Pedro de Atacama, where all tourists to the region stay at some point. It has a beautifully preserved colonial centre, with a charming main square and a simple but lovely 16th-century church. It is the last area where human life is possible; where a visitor can still be harboured. Once you leave San Pedro towards the altiplanos and the volcanoes, you will truly experience remoteness, an entirely different world, an untamed place far from civilization as we know it.
The altiplano is more a metaphor than a geographical entity. More than a physical exploration, the trip through the altiplano is a spiritual exploration inside oneself in an unearthly world. And that is what makes the trip to Atacama one of the most magnificent experiences that one can ever have.