Kind of dry

Hi, in this post I am gonna talk about a very magic place for me, because it is a very dry place in a very dry desert, the Huasco salar.

This place is in Tarapaca region, near to Iquique, my hometown. Iquique is just beach and sand, nothing else, so if you go to the Los Andes hills, there are lots and lots of little towns. One of them is Pica, where you can find the "Pica lemon". If you leave Pica into the hills direction, there are lots of miles of dry desert. Finally you get to this place that is very high and very hidden, called Huasco salar (Salar del Huasco in spanish).

This place used to be a lake, there were lots of plants and animals, and I actually went there for the first time when I was 8, so I can say that I knew the lake like it was before. Now, it is just a salar, with very little water, because there are some Mining companies that had taken the water from the underground in the north so there are lots of places like this that had lost their water, even some Aymarás towns got dry because of this companies. It's aweful.

There are very little grass and the animals are not so many now. There are lots of flamingos, llamas, wild ostriches running everywhere, but there used to be more of them.

This place has a different weather than everywhere else, because it is part of the north Plateau (or Altiplano), and if in Iquique is winter, in the salar is very sunny and hot, but in the regular summer, the salar has rains and snow, and the lake used to freeze in that season, so there is people who says that the flamingos used to stay in the frozen lake waiting until the "Bolivian winter" ended, so they could go and get food and move. I think it is a nice story but I do not know if it is true.

Well, this picture was taken on the end of the summer of last year, when I went there with my boyfriend, because he had never been to the north of chile. We had lots of troubles to get there because we got a flat tire in te way to the salar, we were like in T shirts and shorts but the place was like 9 degrees or something so we could not stay that much. But the view was awesome, and it was so peaceful and quiet that made me feel like heaven.

I think that this place is not that beautiful for everyone, because here in Chile everybody likes better the South than the North of Chile. Of course I love South, and the fresh of the green and cold. But when you live so many years in the desert you learn to love it, and to me it has more magic than anyother place that I have ever visited.

I hope you go there sometime, before it disappears.

Cya