10 am, 36°C. The temperature won‘t change too much anymore until the sun will set. It‘s boiling hot, there‘s no shade. You walk a few steps at normal speed and instantly realise that this isn‘t working here. A quarter of default speed seems better.
You are excited, don‘t know what‘s awaiting you, and you already miss the AC of the bus that brought you here. The Guide tells you about safety, you barely listen as you think you already know what he‘s saying and because you just want to get going and explore.
Finally, you start with what they told you will be one of the best view points. How cool can a landscape be without trees, mountains, plants, water? You don‘t expect too much. You‘ve seen a few mars like landscapes, and they were cool, but you just prefer mountains and forests…
20 m on your non-existent ideas were crashed - you see this never ending landscape, filled with mountains carved into the clay soil, layer after layer, brightly lit in different reds and oranges.
There’s cactai - cactuses? - spread all over the area, small ones, large ones, some with fuzz and others with spikes like knitting needles, some have flowers and others fruit.
Wow. Suddenly the heat is bearable, no longer as bad, and you‘re armed with SPF 50 and a liter of cold water, fresh from the fridge. Of course you‘re one of the people that want to go the big circuit.
Every few steps you see the landscape from another angle and it seems completely different, even more spectacular than before. You take too many pictures, are crazy happy, hopping from one foot to the other in excitement. You love everything the guide shows you - another kind of cactus, fossils of shit, teeth, logs of trees. You ignore the heat warning of your phone as well as the one from your body. The water in your bottle is now warm, and you‘re only a third of the way done.
Suddenly it‘s no longer nice. Your head starts spinning, you drink some more - the bottle is almost empty, and the liquids move in your belly with every step you take. The last steps - shit, uphill. Step by step, slowly. Your heart is pounding, you feel strange, take a break. You‘re hot, then cold, then hot again. Please not a heat stroke… you still have so many things to do today!
Finally, you made it. You find a bench in the shade and lay on it. A kind person from the tour puts your backpack underneath your feet to get your circulation going again. But, wait… you know this feeling! Beating heart, heat and cold feelings, sweating, dizziness… this ist just a panic attack! On we go.
Lunch. Uff, in this heat you can barely think of food, but you still need to eat. The best part was surely the fruit as dessert and the sugar cane lemonade.
After a break in the pool the worst of the heat was over, and you start the second part: The grey desert. You thought, this wasn‘t spectacular at all, just stones and a few hills and cactai. But no - you walk through canyons, discover underground rivers, more fossils and a dead cow that fell off a cliff 2 weeks ago. There was only the bones left, the rest was food for the vultures.
I have to say, that even though I am vegetarian, this didn‘t do much to me, it‘s life. But the Brits were shocked, how sad this is - the same girls that ate beef soup and chicken thighs 2 hours earlier.
The sunset in the desert was one of the best I have ever seen - the sky was lit in bright orange and red tones, amazing! Of course it doesn‘t pick up on the pictures.
Last stop: Star gazing. Here is one of the best places to do that, there‘s barely any light pollution. We were in an open air observatory, where a man with a crazy strong laser pointed out the constellations and planets and told us about them. In Spanish, but I understood quite a bit!
We could then watch some stars through telescopes. Venus is actually shaped like the moon, when another planet is in front of it, did you know that?
Best travel tip of all time: A night bus at 1 am is on the night of your tour. Book it a day LATER, to not have to be on a bus after a 14 hour day tour… well it was hard, but i survived. And it gave me one more day in my next destination - the world salsa capital. You know where that is? :)
