The first morning is an object lesson in disorientation: I wake up in a spacious, well-appointed hotel room, with no idea what day it is, or even what season. Opening the door, I see a barren Martian landscape dominated by a huge volcano. Never before have I felt more justified in asking: ‘Where am I?’
I am in the Atacama desert in Chile, said to be the driest place on earth. In some parts, they have not seen any rainfall for 400 years, and its forbidding vistas have indeed stood in for Mars on celluloid. It is October, so it is spring, although the seasons here don’t correspond to familiar patterns (summer, the only time it rains, is cooler than winter). It can be blazing hot in the day and freezing cold at night.
My immediate and somewhat contradictory surroundings are the grounds of Explora’s Hotel de Larache, just outside the oasis village of San Pedro de Atacama. It is the first time I have seen any of this in daylight, after landing at Calama airport, two hours to the south, the previous evening. The Hotel de Larache offers a luxurious base for a range of pursuits – hiking, riding, cycling – but I am here to take up one of Explora’s more daunting challenges: the Travesía, a week-long journey right across the Andes into Argentina. In the meantime, my stay here has just one purpose. I’m acclimatising.
San Pedro is 2,400m above sea level, an elevation sufficient to produce the first symptoms of altitude sickness (locally they call it ‘la puna’, which translates roughly as ‘the heights’) in those who are prone to it. Our itinerary will eventually take us much higher, so it is necessary to adjust to the marked lack of oxygen in the air. I had foolishly assumed that I would do my acclimatising while lying by one of the four swimming pools, testing the strength of various cocktails at altitude.
‘For us, the luxury is on the outside,’ says our guide Romina, as she outlines our programme for the next day. We begin with a gentle bicycle ride into town. San Pedro de Atacama is dominated by two buildings, a 16th-century church and a museum dedicated to the rich archaeological history of the area. It is strange to think that this uninviting desert, where one might travel for days before seeing a river, only to find its waters too salty to drink, has been inhabited for 12,000 years, its outposts tied together by a network of trade routes first laid out by the Incas.
From San Pedro we ride along rutted roads and river beds, through farmland irrigated by a system of canals, to Pukara de Quitor, the ruins of a hill fortress to which the locals retreated during a particularly dark period in their history. Climbing the winding path to the top, one begins to notice the dearth of oxygen, which produces a fluttering sensation in the chest akin to anticipation, if not fear.
The afternoon excursion takes us, by design, that little bit higher, trekking across the Valle de la Luna (the Valley of the Moon), a haunting, sterile landscape sculpted of salt, clay and gypsum, its every dip and gouge brimming with sand. In some places, the salt leaches out of the rock to form what looks like a dusting of snow; in others it stands in dark crystalline peaks, a testament to how little moisture this valley receives. The contrasting light sand is a geological import, blown here from the Domeyko mountain range to the west. At sunset the whole scene is bathed in a purplish glow, and our shadows stretch right across the flat valley floor. As the sun winks out, the air turns instantly cold. The only sound is the whistling of the wind in the dark.
