Atacama
ATACAMA
In 2012 I visited the Atacama Desert, where I traveled in parts of Bolivia, Chile and Peru on the Pacific Coast of South America, west of the Andes mountains. It is one of the driest places in the world, and features bizarre and surreal landscapes of lava fields, colorful mountains rich in minerals, salt flats, sand dunes, and brine lakes filled with flamingoes. The terrain has been compared to that of Mars, and the landscape varies from the large, barren salt lake called the Salar de Uyuni, to the red sandstone pinnacles of the Valley of the Moon.