6TH - 9TH MARCH

It was indeed a long drive North on this day, and the scenery gradually turned more and more barren as we entered the driest part of the Atacama desert, one of the driest places in the world. There are weather stations here which have not registered a drop of rain in over fifty years!! There is no apparent life here at all, just rocky sand and dirt. We eventually stopped at a fuel station / café for some very basic food, and a little welcome relief from the blazing sun!!

In the afternoon we had a couple of stops to break the journey. The Atacama desert was found to be very rich in nitrates, and we visited an old mine. The nitrate mines went out of business virtually overnight near the beginning of the 20th century when an artificial equivalent was found for use in fertilizers, and Northern Chile lost it’s main export. Needless to say the miners worked in terrible

conditions and generally died very young and we visited a cemetery for them. It was a very eerie place just out on it’s own in the middle of all this nothingness, unfortunately a lot of the wooden crosses used to mark the graves had been looted as they were made of valuable wood. !! Next stop was the Mano del Desierto, a huge hand sculpture similar to the one we’d seen in Puerto Natales, in fact I think it was done by the same sculptor. Jorge explained what it was supposed to represent, which was really cool as it’s message was basically about giving back to the Pachamama, or Mother Earth. Unfortunately the morons who regularly graffiti it don’t seem to quite get the message!!

After another long drive we arrived at the Portada Cliffs just North of Antofagasta, which were pretty impressive, and very much like the cliff formations on the Great Ocean Road in Australia. It was at this point