Thursday, April 9

Our day started at 5:30 am with a 1.5 hour drive to El Tatio (the grandfather) to view the geysers at sunrise when the steam is most impressive.

The road to El Tatio was interesting – at times not even a road.

Sunrise over the Andes was spectacular.

The geysers were interesting, I guess this is the third largest geothermal field in the world. I think Old Faithful is more impressive…but it was good to see in the high desert. El Tatio is at about 4,400 meters. It was also -4 degrees C when we passed through a village on the way up, but once the sun was up, it warmed up pretty quickly.

Once the sun rose and the steam lessened, the colors were more vibrant (and more appealing to me). The cone-shaped geyser below showed different colors as the sun reflected in the background. You might see a bit of red on the left side.

Following our visit to El Tatio, we stopped for a roadside breakfast “prepared” by our guide, Percy and driver, Alexis.

While waiting for breakfast, we walked around the wetlands (yes, they have wetlands in the desert). A couple of some kind of breasted duck (LOL).

The puma is the top of the food chain here and it appears that there has recently been one in the area and that it enjoyed a decent meal – and a condor must have been by to bat clean-up.

This guy was checking out the neighborhood before his wife and child took the path down the hill ahead of him. I guess we were not a threat.

The picture below shows the crater of Lascar Volcano. It is an active volcano that last erupted Dec 10, 2022.

A few other birds seen along the way back to San Pedro.

A young James Flamingo – not yet pink. The older the flamingos get, the pinker they become from their food source.

A sleeping flamingo with one leg up and its head tucked in.

I am unsure what to call this…

On the way back to San Pedro, we crossed a cactus field…

This is apparently the grandfather of them all in this area. The cactus looks like a saguaro, but is called a Cardon.

And we saw some Incan caves (at least I think they were from the Incans).

We spent the afternoon in San Pedro before we had an evening pick-up to go stargazing. That was an amazing experience. It gave us a new perspective of the meaning of God’s promise to Abraham that his descendants would be more numerous than all the stars in the sky. We were able to view a few of the constellations and Jupiter through a telescope and also spent a few minutes on our backs looking at the night sky before the guides took time lapse photos. I wasn’t able to take photos, but I have a night sky app and was able to screenshot what we could see. The shot below shows the southern cross and the green symbol is actually a satellite (or maybe the space station) crossing the path of the photo.

The pictures below didn’t turn out quite as expected. I think they had us looking too far to the left, but you can still see lots of stars. IOCrux is the name of the company that runs the night sky experience.