Under the Atacama night sky
The driest desert on Earth has the clearest skies I've ever seen, and sleeping under them is worth every cold hour before dawn.
The Atacama is so dry that the landscape looks unfinished: salt flats, red rock, volcanoes standing on the horizon like a row of cones. By day it is hot and white. By night it becomes the best planetarium on the planet.
Altitude first
Much of the region sits well above two thousand metres, and some of the famous viewpoints are far higher. I spent the first two days doing very little on purpose:
- Drink more water than seems reasonable.
- Skip the high geysers until day three or four.
- Walk slowly. Then walk more slowly.
The sky
On a moonless night the Milky Way doesn't look like a smudge here; it looks like a structure, with dark lanes of dust and bright clouds of stars. Our guide pointed out the two Magellanic Clouds, small galaxies visible to the naked eye, and I spent the rest of the night checking they were still there.
I'd always thought of the sky as a ceiling. In the Atacama it felt like a window.
Bring your warmest layers. The desert gives back its heat to the sky very quickly, and by four in the morning the stars were the only warm-looking thing around.