About freezing toes and hot geysers

Again without Machiel we had to leave as early as 4:30am with our tour to see the highest and third largest geothermal area of the world - Géisers del Tatio. Already in San Pedro we noticed that it was quite cold this early.

After a 90 minute bus ride through the moonlit desert, we arrived once more at an altitude of 4200m and it was freezingly cold with -10 degrees. The contrast between all the steam and boiling water on one side and the frozen water on the marked paths, was quite a thing. And while walking with our tour guide through the area, I was happy to wear 2 pants and 4 upper layers. Nonetheless our toes and fingers started freezing pretty quickly and the sunrise was not only nice for the light effect but also appreciated for the warmth it brought. Overall a nice experience but after having been to Iceland also not that special. I was a bit disappointed by the lack of high water splashes.

After breakfast in the first sunlight of the day, we had the chance to bath in some lukewarm springs to try to warm up our frozen body parts.

Our next stop was a wetland with birds and on the way we were lucky to see again some cool local animals: rheas or ñandús (South American ostriches), viscachas (something looking like long-tailed bunnys which camouflage so well they are hard to spot in the rocky landscape), again vicuñas, more lamas and again flamingos 😊

The last stop before returning to San Pedro was a small town with - according to our tour guide - 10 inhabitants but 20 houses and they were still busy building more... we did not really understand this but the local goat cheese was appreciated by Daniel 😉Read more