Christmas in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

Next: Córdoba, Argentina to ring in 2023 with dear friends

Worlds Elsewhere photo journal: comprehensive photos of our adventures

Instagram: @worldselsewhere

*********

Feliz Navidad from the Termas Puritama in the Atacama Desert. Christmas hats courtesy of a Christmas stall vendor in Lima :)

Before traveling to the Atacama Desert for Christmas, Theo, Emerson, Hudson & I spent a few days in Viña del Mar, by the Pacific Ocean in Chile. We perfectly executed our plan to do nothing but gaze at the water, sleep, eat and relax. Jackson joined us after completing his penultimate set of college finals and avoiding the winter storm travel snarls. Happily reunited, we traveled to Atacama on Christmas Eve.

View from our apartment terrace in Viña del Mar. We were able to see Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter with the naked eye just after sunset.

To encounter Atacama is to realize your mortality in the starkest, most humbling terms. Before traveling to the desert, our family watched Nostalgia for the Light by the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán. With its extreme aridity, high altitude, clear skies and lack of light pollution, Atacama is an ideal home for dozens of international astronomical observatories. Guzmán wrenchingly juxtaposes humanity’s timeless quest for meaning in the stars with our seemingly inevitable urge to harm, documenting Chilean families’ searches for bodies of murdered family members dumped in the desert during Pinochet’s dictatorship. The seemingly hopeless search in an unforgiving scape that stretches into oblivion yields findings, just as our sky questing, within a universe that races away from us at an increasing pace, does.

The desert implacably holds things we view as secrets or as unknown. For example, an inevitable reality of the driest place on Earth is that bodies mummify in the aridity; indeed, the oldest mummies in the world (predating Egypt’s by 2000 years) have been found in the Atacama. But - as I was reminded when I naively asked a guide when certain petroglyphs were discovered, and she simply replied: “Never, the locals have always known they were there”- the concept of discovery is relative: what you see for the first time is a reality someone has been living for longer than you realize.

Our astronomer guide, while showing us nebulae and planets through a powerful telescope, said he is driven by the question: Where do we come from? Bound with this, of course, is, what are we made of? where do we go? Staring at the countless stars- stunned, I had never before realized I could see so many with the naked eye- I deeply felt this urge for meaning. We know so little- about ourselves, our environment, our place in the universe- and seek more.

And so it goes with the Atacama Desert.

Emerson and I walked into town (San Pedro de Atacama) on Christmas afternoon. We saw several firetrucks, sirens on, meandering down the dirt road, and wondered aloud why they were moving so slowly toward an emergency. As the trucks pulled into town, I heard a mom whisper to her child, “Ahí viene Papa Noel!” and I excitedly realized Santa (his sleigh in a flatbed pulled by a fire truck), intoning over his microphone “Ho Ho Ho!”, was coming to town!!! Complete with accompanying elves giving out candy! A Christmas parade, in the desert heat and sun. What more could a pageantry-loving girl ask for?

We toured the Yerba Buenas Petroglyphs, evidence of trade routes along which multiple cultures congregated, a hundred centuries ago. We befriended a community member’s dog; Hudson dubbed him Pablo. Pablo trotted through the site with us but we couldn’t take him home with us, sadly.

Photo credit Hudson Lubke.

Near the tiny town of Guatín, a huge lagoon at 14,000 feet hosts dozens of pink flamingos, who feast on shrimp (thus the pink color).

Jackson, Emerson and I took a guided hike through a canyon, navigating the Rio Grande. We saw skeletal remains of a donkey and a llama (both, we speculated, victims of a puma). At the end (below) we hiked up a steep scree-littered hill to catch breathtaking views of the 19,000’ high sacred Volcano Licancabur above the mountains.

The Geysers del Tatío, at nearly 14,000’ above sea level, are the third-largest geyser fields in the world.

The Atacama area hosts several types of camelids. Guanacos, like vicuñas, are considered wild (alpacas and llamas may be domesticated; usage of llamas led ancient cultures to become less nomadic and more agricultural).

Theo and Jackson biked through the stark moon-like landscape of the Valle de la Luna.