So Christine is now officially recovered from her bout with acute altitude sickness. Well, recoved may still be a strong word, I think she's more like 80% of the way toward acclimatization. However it was still good enough to complete two very nice excursions into the Atacama today. The first, out to see the famed Valle de la Luna, and the other to take a hike along the cornisas of Valle de la Muerte.
And the was sand. Lots and lots of sand. And that is to be well expected, because Christine and I did travel to the desert. However just the sheer volume of the stuff was amazing. And the formations were simply incredible as well. I could describe oodles abut the spectacular and strange formations of the Atacama desert, but I think I will let the picture do the demonstrations.
However we had two very good, and very different, guides providing equally entertaining experiences. First up I'm the morning was Alex, our guide from the previous evening. Nice guy, used to work for Princess Cruises and provided me the quote of the day: "I really like Americans as long as they are not on a cruise ship..." Alex had us hiking all over the place and even took us past the red "peligro" tape to give us a better view of the salt canyons.
Salvador, our guide in the afternoon, was a more quintesentially Chilean outdoorsman. Sal was very polite and somewhat reserved for most of our 3+ mile hike. But upon walking down a sand dune and passing a dog who followed some sandboarders (think snowboarding, but on sand dunes - and imagine throngs of young Brits with names like Seamus on their gap year doing the activity...) I decided to tell the dog in Spanish (after all it was Chilean and probably didn't understand English - Juneau doesn't understand a lick of Tagalog) "Lo siento, perrito. No hay nada para tí", Sal immediately burst out laughing and engaged me in Spanish conversation. It's amazing how a few simple words can loosen people up.
Now Christine and I are waiting to head to dinner. Hopefully there are no misbehaved monster children from Brazil running around interrupting an otherwise sedate meal. If Christine has not yet mentioned, this place is crawling with throngs of misbehaved South American devil children intent on wreaking the maximum amount of havoc possible. Of course I armed myself with a Portuguese translation, using Google translate no less, of "Your children are very misbehaved and should be put in a zoo." Christine is hesitant to use it, but I am locked and loaded...
Atentamente,
El Señor Joe
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