In the morning the Germans had obviously headed out for the day, presumably to the hot springs as you had to leave at some unearthly hour in the morning to get to the geysers in time to watch them erupt at sunrise.\u00a0 This meant that we were greeted by a very bleary eyed Louis whose sleep had twice been interrupted, once by the Germans half-way through the night and once by us in the morning.<\/p>\n
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We headed down one of the smaller roads out of town towards the salt flats.\u00a0 The salt flats in Chile are vast and apparently two thirds of the World\u00b4s lithium is derived from the area.\u00a0 At one of the reserves we went for a walk over the salt flats where there was abundant birdlife.\u00a0 Amongst the avocets and various other interesting birds were flocks of flamingos.\u00a0 It was truly beautiful to see all the flamingos amongst the saltflats with the mountains in the distance.<\/p>\n
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From the reserve we headed out across mile upon mile of salt flats.\u00a0 For such a barren landscape it\u00b4s amazing to think how much wildlife actually manages to live there.\u00a0 After the most amazing drive we decided to stop and camp in the desert overnight.\u00a0 We found a spot relatively close to the road but with small sand, cliff structures affording some shade and shelter.\u00a0 We parked up and got out of the van and Dad discovered some cat footprints which had evidently been left behind the last time there was water in the area.\u00a0 Having examined the footprints and consulted our wildlife guidebook,\u00a0we decided that the only possible animal which could have left them was a puma.<\/p>\n
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It was slightly more difficult to set my tent up than at Louis\u00b4campsite due to the wind but it was fine.\u00a0 It was lovely to be out in the desert and the stars were amazing.\u00a0 The only thing we hadn\u00b4t really counted on was that, what we thought was a small road turned out to be a road used by copious numbers of lorries presumably transporting mining supplies!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the morning the Germans had obviously headed out for the day, presumably to the hot springs as you had to leave at some unearthly hour in the morning to get to the geysers in time to watch them erupt at sunrise.\u00a0 This meant that we were greeted by a very bleary eyed Louis whose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}