Geezers gazing at geysers

One of the most popular tours from San Pedro is the El Tatio geysers tour. This despite the fact that you have to be outside your hotel by 4am, dressed for below-zero weather (it's nippy at 4am in San Pedro, and nippier in the middle of the desert. I had on a shirt, fleece jacket, hoodie, and gore-tex jacket. Foolishly, I forgot to wear the gloves that I had packed just for occasions like this.

I had booked my tour with Cosmo Andino Expeditions, for which I had received recommendations from a couple of sources. I'll add my own to that, even though the first thing they did was a screw-up--the driver slept in so we spent an extra half-hour in the cold. The tour cost 25,000 pesos ($50) and lasts from your 4am pick-up until you are dropped off back in San Pedro around noon. I was joined on the tour by a couple from Hong Kong who were staying at the same hotel--probably the first HK travellers I've ever met in Latin America.

Anyway the van arrived and apologies were made. Our guide was a very affable and knowledgeable fellow named Oscar who spoke excellent English with a perfect British accent (not the Queen's English--think Coronation Street instead). It turns out there is a good reason for this: he was born in England after his parents moved there to escape the Pinochet dictatorship. He lived there into adulthood, came to Chile to travel for a while, met a Chilean girl, and stayed and became a tour guide.

The route to the geysers is not a smooth one. The road is unpaved and very rutted, not conducive to manufacturing a few lost Zs. Along the way my arse fell off and one kidney may be permanently misplaced. In case you're wondering why all this has to be done at or before daybreak, no, they don't turn off the geysers at 8am or anything, they just look better when the air is colder.

So we--and perhaps a dozen other tour groups--get to Geyser Central, pay our admission (I think it was 5000 pesos--$10) and the first order of business is breakfast, supplied by Cosmo Andino and included in the price. My fears of not getting a cup of coffee ended.

Then we went to the geyser field. If I had read the Wikipedia article on El Tatio that I linked above, I perhaps wouldn't have felt the teensiest bit let down that the geysers were, it has to be said, a bit puny. I guess I was expecting Old Faithful. But, as the old line about boarding house food goes, at least there's lots of it. I shouldn't be too negative here--they are a significant natural phenomenon, just not quite what I expected.

So basically there are a bunch of holes in the ground, up from which comes bubbling boiling water, creating a vapour cloud. The field is about 4200m above sea level, so water boils at somewhat under 100C there. Some clouds are higher than others, as you'll see from the pictures. Some geysers "erupt" on a regular schedule, which of course the guides have knowledge of so that they can wow us when their predictions come true.






After the geysers a hot spring to swim, or "bathe" really, for those who had brought bathing suits and were comfortable in their semi-nakedness. The rest of us took pictures, not so much of the bathers, but of flora, fauna, and geological phenomena in the area. I did take a picture of some bathers, but the Spanish woman I had been hanging around with seems to have deleted it from my camera, on the grounds that she was in it. Oh well. One body's much like another, but it's not everywhere you can find green rocks. Some plant coats them, creating the effect. Our guide said that it was a very good source of fuel.


This one was probably put there by aliens:



The fauna consisted of these bunny-like creatures (but really a kind of rodent) called vizcachas. Somehow they missed having their tails bobbed.


The water bubbling dpown the hill into the swimming hole produced some neat fire-and-brimstone effects. I think you can see the devil's face in this picture.


Our next stop was to see more fauna, with clothes on (us, not the fauna). There were some birds (yawn) but most important, vicuñas. These animals were previously hunted for fur (they only produce about 250g of fur, but it's supposed to be almost as soft as silk) and longer ago for meat. Now they're a protected species.


Our last stop, and for me the best part of the tour, was to see giant (though, it must be said, not gigantic) cacti. So I was a bit put out when my camera battery died just after we got there. This is also a protected species, since it was being used for its wood. The protection afforded is not as strong as it could be, since it's illegal to cut down cacti, but legal to use cacti that have fallen down. And who's to say that cactus wood that someone brings home wasn't from a fallen soldier?