The Atacama Desert's Valle de la Luna (Chile) is known to westerners as The Valley of the Moon. Journey there, and you'll feel like you have ventured into real lunar territory!

One of the weirdest places I have ever been was the moon - the Valley of the Moon, that is, in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. It is the driest desert in the world - drier even than the Sahara!

Leaving our hostel in the early afternoon, we subjected ourselves to blazing heat and glare in the worst part of the day. The plan was to arrive at the Valle de la Luna at the best possible time – sunset - to be followed by a night under a million stars and the full moon.

The walk was tough, both mentally and physically. The vast, pebbly plain made my feet blister. I tried to distract myself from the thought of drinking water with the amazing 360-degree view, which was straight out of one of those old museum dioramas, complete with volcanoes. I thought I had entered the Twilight Zone when we came to a gate in the middle of nowhere; it led to nothing, and was not even joined to a fence! Things got weirder when we crossed paths with an old man. He might have been conjured from the shimmering waves of heat. He walked slowly towards us…with a wicker laundry basket over his head. We tried to check our directions with him in our faltering Spanish, at which he launched into a loud, gesticulation-ridden outburst. What little we made of it was that he had lived in the desert for decades but had never seen the Valley of the Moon. He was sure it didn’t exist. We thanked him and left before he pulled out a knife or choked on his spit. We walked on...and on. It was so quiet, we could hear the flies approaching like miniature racing cars from a mile away, their pitch dropping as they sped past.

We shuffled on for the whole afternoon. When the sun-baked track finally ended at an immense sand dune I was almost overwhelmed by exhaustion. But the sun was just starting to set and, as that was what all our hard work had been for, we forced ourselves up the steep incline in one last desperate, gasping effort. We arrived at the top just in time for the show. The white-hot glare had softened to a pastel-pink glow, and the vast plain below us was transformed into a ghostly pink lunar landscape. The sky behind us was a wonderful deep blue, complete with a huge full moon rising. We watched in awe.

When the colors had calmed down to something approaching normality, we ate our frugal meal of dry biscuits and yogurt, stretched out our sleeping bags on the sand and gazed at the sea of stars as we drifted off to a well-earned sleep.

© Julie Murphy, 1997