Will Freeze For Geysers

I woke up a few minutes before 4 AM yesterday morning. Purposefully. To go look at geysers. The Tatio Geysers, to be specific.

I´m in an itty bitty town in northern Chile called San Pedro de Atacama. It´s a town of about 16 blocks, I´d say, full of one-story white adobe buildings with rust color rooftops. There is literally nothing to do in this town except for shop for souvenirs, sign up for tours, and eat. And, oh yes, the internet. The little town endeared itself to me, though, almost as soon as walked down the main drag after crawling off my 24 hour bus ride. The town was positively bumping on Wednesday night, locals and tourists wandering around, laughter spilling out of restaurants and bars, stray dogs begging for love or for dinner.

This is the kind of town where you feel at ease with doing nothing. It´s not like Buenos Aires or Santiago, where you feel guilty if you spend an entire afternoon reading on a sunny terrace (which is exactly what I did Thursday). You can feel safe in your laziness. Soak it up. If I didn´t have places to be, I could easily laze around here for a week.

People come here, though, for the Atacama desert surrounding the town. The town is merely a starting place for tourists. And the geyers I went to see this morning are one of the area´s main attractions.

We arrived at the geysers a little before 7 AM. There´s no glorious sunrise to view, nothing like that. But apparently the geysers are most active during the hours between 6 AM and 8 AM, and of course, they´re two hours away from town, on a bumpy dirt road. So, every morning in this town, you will find tourists standing outside their hostals or hotels, bundled up in everything they own to keep warm, at around 4 AM, waiting for their ride.

The geysers sit at about 4,600 meters, so it is FREEZING cold up there, especially before the sun comes up. Someone estimated that most mornings it´s about -10 degrees Celsius. (I still cannot make sense of Celsius, so I cannot tell you what that means except that it´s cold. I´d estimate around 25 degrees Fareinheit.) The sun was still sitting behind a mountain as we piled off the tourist van this morning, so I hopped around from geyser to geyser, trying to keep my feet warm, taking as many pictures I could before the fingers went numb.

But I think the geysers were worth the early morning and the freezing cold. They were neat-o. Huge spirals of white steam poured out of the dry earth every few feet. I felt like I was walking around in the clouds. In some spots, the geysers simply burst from seemingly nowhere. Just a crack in the ground. In others, there were little puddles, gurgling and bubbling with scalding hot water. The biggest geysers had huge pools of boiling water, and apparently several tourists have died, falling in! Yikes! Not a pleasant way to go, I´d imagine. I´m melting!!!

After we´d gawked at all the geysers, we were allowed a few minutes to soak in the natural hot springs. If you´d zoomed in on my life yesterday at 9 AM, I was standing in the freezing cold, taking off layer after layer of warmth until I was standing, barefoot, in just my swimsuit. FREEZING! I made a beeline for the hot springs, and oooh, did it feel nice in there. Getting out and drying off in the freezing cold a few minutes later was brutal, but I´m glad I got in. Not too often you get to bathe in a natural pool of warm water in the middle of the desert, is it?

I´m going sandboarding this afternoon. Don´t ask. I have no idea what I´ve gotten into. I´m hoping that it´s impossible to break anything when falling into sand because I have a feeling that accident-prone me is going to be falling into the sand a lot. Should be interesting. After that, we´re going to see the sun go down over the Valle de la Luna, which should be awesome since it´s a full moon here tonight.

After that, I am saying goodbye to Liam and Mikes and boarding the night bus to Arica, which sits on the Chilean side of the Chile-Peru border. I´m going to be traveling on buses for the next three days, making my way up to Puno, Peru (which sits on Lake Titicaca) to meet my old/new friend Bjorn. Not sure what will happen after that! That´s as far as the plans go now. But it´s adios to Chile, hola to Peru!