X. High & dry

December 2, 2018

Uyuni Salt Flats Hello again dear reader!
We do hope you've been enjoying reading about our adventures because we are definitely having a great time sharing it with you.
This week was particularly exhausting for us due to the high altitudes we've been passing through, which have been causing our bodies some distress adjusting to the lower oxygen pressure. Altitude sickness didn't actually affect us very hard as some stories we've heard or people we've seen, but just enough to make us feel as if we had run a marathon when in fact we walked some 5 minutes with our backpacks on (which btw weight between 19kg to 23kg each).

Atacama desert
Atacama
Atacama
Atacama
Atacama desert
Diogo at Atacama desert
Atacama desert
Sunset at Atacama desert
Salar de Uyuni
Salar de Uyuni
Salar de Uyuni
Salar de Uyuni
Sunset at Uyuni Salt flat
Salar de Uyuni
Street vendor lady at Uyuni
An island at the salt flats
An island at the salt flats

Two deserts in 3 days

After we left the volunteer at Pirque, Santiago, we hopped on a bus to Atacama desert, the driest place on Earth! And indeed, as soon as we arrived near we could tell why it had such title. For as far as the eye could see, there was not even a tiny little bush to sign for live, just dirt and rocks. It's like a moon landscape. This particularly gives this desert something incredibly magic about it. The shapes of the rocks (like "the dinosaur" or "the three maries"), the canyons, the dunes and even the reddish colors of the landscape were very different from what we've seen before, for example, at Sahara desert. Best part with no doubts was the sky at night. Atacama is known, besides many other things, by being one of the top places on Earth for stargazing due to its altitude (2500m), remoteness, minimal light pollution and because it's the driest non-polar desert on Earth (therefore, no moisture, no clouds). We went a bit wild on our wallets and got ourselves a ticket to watch the sky at night with a professional astronomer at a private observatory. It's a shame we couldn't take any photos of what we've seen on those telescopes, but we can certainly tell you it was an experience we will never forget. We watched  open and globular star clusters, nebulae (including Orion's nebula), planets Mars and Saturn (with its majestic rings), star constellations and very far away galaxies. Absolutely wonderful!

But this was when we started to feel funny, just overly tired for no apparent reason and suddenly short of breath. But we kept going.
And from the driest desert on Earth we went to the largest salt flat on Earth: the Salar de Uyuni, in Bolivia. We crossed the border Chile-Bolivia at the most remote place one could imagine, and this is actually pretty cool, it tastes very different crossing borders on land rather than in an airport. So we got to visit this gorgeous 11,000 square kilometres salt desert that sits 3,656m above sea level. A landscape of bright-white salt, rock formations and cacti-studded islands, which once (in prehistoric times) was a lake. We took the opportunity to play with the perspective and dimensions and take some cliché (but super funny) photos. At the end of this day we had to admit: we were taking our bodies to very tough limits, due to the high altitudes and the pace we were going. So Joana started feeling headaches, sickness and Diogo was extremely tired. But, we still had to spend a night on a bus, as we had bought it beforehand: from Uyuni to La Paz, and from there to Copacabana, at the shores of the mystic Lake Titicaca, the world's highest lake, 3810m above sea level.
And here we are now, recharging our batteries for what there is to come and with our souls deeply grateful for everything we've experienced this week.
Thanks a million for reading! :-)
Love,
Joana and Diogo

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