Travel Notes: From Chile’s Patagonia to Atacama Desert

In Chile’s scenic Patagonia, we marveled at Magellanic penguins and a mother puma with cub. Guanacos grazed by the roadside, as did vicuñas in Chile’s northern Atacama Desert. Both are wild South American camelids related to domesticated llamas and alpacas.

Chile is an amazing country for both wildlife and spectacular scenery. Geography is the reason: Chile stretches long and narrow nearly 2,700 miles from north to south, averaging just 110 miles wide. Its coastline is actually more than 4,000 miles due to inlets & fjords. The country’s name comes from indigenous language, meaning “where the land ends” as it points toward Antarctica.

My December tour covered a lot of this geography during Chile’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere. We started in the capital city of Santiago in the central part of the country. Its metropolitan area of seven million people represents over a third of Chile’s 20 million population. Then we flew to the Lake District, Patagonia and Atacama Desert. So much of this country is sparsely populated, and 21% of Chile’s land is national parks and preserves.

We saw some of the most spectacular. Aptly named, the Lake District features beautiful lakes, rivers, waterfalls and lush forests against a backdrop of snow-covered Andes volcanoes. Mt. Osorno (8,701 feet high) is a Mt. Fuji look-alike from Puerto Varas, where we stayed. A visit to Vincente Perez Rosales National Park – Chile’s oldest park – provided a closer view of Mt. Osorno from a different side on a boat cruise through Lake Todos los Santos.

From Puerto Varas, we visited Chiloé Island for a very different boat excursion to see Magellanic and Humbolt penguins. This huge coastal island looked more like Patagonia – with rainy weather to match – and indeed, some definitions of Patagonia include it.

At Puñihuil, we boarded large carts on the beach to be wheeled out to waiting boats in the water. Then we cruised close to the protected Puñihuil Penguin Colony, the only place in the world where Magellanic and Humboldt penguins nest side by side. They’re hard to tell apart – only little pink patches near Humbolt penguins’ eyes and beaks distinguish them from their Magellanic relatives.

The penguins arrive at Puñihuil every October to breed, hatch chicks in January and return to live at sea by the end of March. These penguins stand 22 to 30 inches tall, with the Magellanic being slightly taller.

Then we flew to Puerto Natales in the heart of southern Patagonia. Here the scenery dazzles with dramatic mountains, waterfalls, glaciers and fjords. Despite it being summer in Chile, the wind and rain could match our Northwest winter – and then unexpectedly pause as if on cue for photo-taking.

The first highlight was cruising the Ultima Esperanza Fjord to Bernardo O’Higgins National Park, named for the Republic of Chile’s first head of state. We passed a spectacular waterfall, seals resting on rocks and the hanging Balmaceda Glacier. Then we disembarked to hike about a mile to view the impressive Serrano Glacier, which occasionally deposits “bergy bits” into Laguna Serrano.

The next highlight was visiting Torres del Paines National Park, a UNESCO Biosphere Preserve. Here the clouds and rain played peekaboo with the stunning mountains we so wanted to see… but this is often the case in Patagonia. We never quite saw the iconic three granite peaks (the “Towers”), but we did view some of the other Cuernos del Paine (“Paine Horns”) sufficiently to appreciate their 8,500-foot-plus grandeur.

From Patagonia, some of us continued via a post tour to the Atacama Desert in Chile’s far north. The driest nonpolar desert in the world, Atacama has steaming geysers in one area, flamingo salt flats in another, and otherworldly Moon Valley.

This part of the Atacama Desert is also at very high altitudes, ranging from 7,900 feet above sea level in the town of San Pedro de Atacama to over 14,000 feet at the El Tatio Geyser Field. Like many visitors, I took prescription medication to ensure against altitude sickness.

We set off just before dawn to see the El Tatio Geyser Field, which produces its most spectacular eruptions in the early morning desert air. It is the third-largest geyser field in the world, after Yellowstone in the U.S. and Dolina Geyserov in Russia. Here roughly 80 geysers alternately bubble, erupt and explode skyward. The high altitude causes water to boil at a lower temperature, so the eruptions are most impressive in the cold morning air.

Another extreme terrain is the Salar de Atacama, Chile’s largest salt flat. It encompasses about 1,178 square miles, including desert lagoons, salt crusts and Los Flamencos National Reserve. At the Chaxa Lagoon, we watched Chilean and Andean flamingos feeding and occasionally flying past. A third, less-common species there is the James flamingo.

One deep lagoon was open to swimmers, who floated effortlessly in the super salty water. Interestingly, lithium deposits are now extracted via evaporation ponds in the Salar de Atacama, making it a major global source of lithium for batteries.

We crossed the Tropic of Capricorn and visited stark Moon Valley (Valle de la Lune). It indeed looks like a moonscape or Mars – and has been used in Mars expedition simulations. Here bizarre rock formations, craters and sand dunes stand out against a backdrop of desert mountains.

The Atacama Desert’s final treat was star-studded night skies made more brilliant by the dry air, high altitude and very little human light pollution. We marveled even more as we looked through the high-powered telescope of an astronomer guide during a star-glazing session. His identifications were essential because star constellations appeared upside down to us Northerners in the Southern Hemisphere.

Julie Gangler visited Chile on a UW Alumni Tour with AHI Travel. She is a freelance writer who has worked as a media relations consultant for the Snohomish County Tourism Bureau. She began her career as a staff writer at Sunset Magazine and later was the Alaska/Northwest correspondent for Travel Agent Magazine.