Last year, I celebrated St Valentine’s Day by presenting Ros with sixty thousand breeding pairs of Magellenic penguins. Not literally, you understand, because whilst they’re cute, they do smell a bit, and the cottage is really too small for sixty pairs, let alone a thousand times as many. But you get the drift.
And so, my task this year was to find something similarly unusual. So, why not flamingos? In the middle of a desert...
Luckily, flamingos like saltwater, and the Atacama is famous for its salt flats, in which can be found three of the six varieties of flamingo - the Andean and Chilean, plus the James’s version, a winter visitor.
But first, we had a gentle warmup, with a visit to the Valley of the Moon, so called because, well, it looks quite a lot like the moon, and it’s such a forbidding environment that NASA tested out a Mars rover there. It’s not far from town, and we had a guide, Gustavo, who would be taking care of us for the rest of our stay, organised by the hotel.
And it is pretty daunting. The recent rain had caused salt to appear on the surface, looking at first glance as though there had been a light frost. We gingerly made our way across the barren terrain, because you don’t really want to fall over onto the jagged rocks.
Our next stop was an abandoned salt mine. It seems that the miners would drill holes into the rock, insert dynamite and stand well back. If a lode of salt was found, they would dig it out and then repeat the process. It is a bleak spot, with no water other than that you could carry there, and no shade either. Perhaps it was no surprise that they abandoned the mine.
After a break for lunch, it was time to head for the salt flats. The Salar de Atacama is the third largest salt flat in the world (the two bigger ones are across the Andes in Argentina and Bolivia) and it holds about 30% of the world’s known lithium reserves. This appears not to concern the flamingos, which is fortunate, who eat the brine shrimps to be found in the sinkhole lakes that occur here and there.
Laguna Cejar is the nearest of these lakes, and is an obvious place to visit if you want flamingos. They very kindly provide some useful information to read as you follow a path through the reserve, albeit entirely in Spanish, and you get to find out how the whole thing works. And then, you get to watch the flamingos as they go about their business, dabbling the shallow water to stir up the tiny brine shrimps which somehow give them their pink colour. Don’t ask me to explain how this works, as the brine shrimps aren’t pink, but there is science involved.
I was quite excited to find a lizard, which patiently stood still whilst I photographed it, but the flamingos were undoubtedly the stars of the show, gracefully making their way across the shallow water. Generally, we see them in zoos or parks, against a green backdrop, and whilst they look pretty, they seem vaguely uninteresting. But, against a background of crystalline salt, they look somehow more real and slightly less garishly pink, as though painted onto the landscape. Helpfully, Andean flamingos are paler than their Chilean counterparts, which allows you to tell them apart.
But it was time to head back, we had a dinner to eat and sleep to get before the next adventures...
