San Pedro de Atacama

Moon valley and it's surroundings

Second last day of a wonderful trip. The tour was to The Moon Valley in Atacama desert. This consists of sand dunes, sequences of layered peaks, dry rivers and lakes.
Moon Valley, Amphitheater, Dead Valley, Three Marias and finally the sunset were in the plan. These names were given by a Belgian priest who had studied geology. He had said that the surface of the valley looks similar to that of the moon. The death valley was called Mars valley initially. Upon translation of his book about this area it was translated into dead valley.
Moon valley was a lake that had dried out over a millions of years. The peaks still show different layers of sedimentation that had occured.
These peaks had started to erode due to:
1. Water
2. Wind and sand working together and
3. Dissolving and drying salt
There are underground salt deposits. Due to high amounts of rain since 2010, salt from underground had dissolved and had deposited on the surface making scattered white patches.
Amphitheater was formed due to the movement of the earth's crust and it looks like an amphitheater...
Three Marias with Jesus is an eroded structure made out of salt and gypsum about a million years old. Well, one has to have heaps of coca tea or alcohol to figure out the description the tour guide gave on this. According to him the Maria on the left to the praying Jesus is broken down due to someone tryibg to climb on it.
I prefer the story by the locals. The three ladies are the widows of the miners. On the left to this structure, the entrance to the living quarters of the miners can be seen. To the right of it is another structure that they call a mirror and I didn't really get the reason behind it unfortunately.
The sunset I have seen today was the most boring but the way the Andies range changed the colour was more interesting than the sunset.
I love my Bolivian sunset with "Mark Anthony". Heaps better. The fact that Bolivia is on the other side of the Andian range made me realise how much "my Serena" misses Bolivia....