Travel Adventures in the Atacama Desert: Altiplano Lagoons & Flamingo Reserve

After a whirlwind day of tours the previous day, Audrey and my parents decided to have a chill day back in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile while I ventured off to explore some lagoons, salt flats, flamingo reserves and the altiplano in the Atacama desert. The following is a list of the places I visited: Salar de Atacama (Atacama Salt Flats) Laguna Chaxa (Chaxa Lagoon) Pueblo de Toconao Observación de Flamencos (Flamingo Reserve) Pueblo de Socaire Laguna Miscanti y meñique Travel Adventures in the Atacama Desert: Altiplano Lagoons & Flamingo Reserve Travel Video Transcript: Good morning everyone. Today you ll notice I m not traveling with Audrey or my parents. Yesterday we did a marathon session of 13 hours of tours. So understandably they are back at home resting. But today I m going to go out and show some different areas in and around San Pedro de Atacama. And these are different from what we did before. We re going to be focusing on lagoons and the altiplano and we re also going to be visiting a Salt Flat. So lots of cool stuff planned for today. Something else I ve really enjoyed about the tours here is the fact they ve all left really early in the morning. That s been awesome for photography because of the nice soft light in the morning and also great for spotting wildlife. Ah, estoy llena. Breakfast was awesome. I m totally stuffed. Today we had omelettes and we also had bread and we had Carlitos again so it was a really good meal and now we re ready to move on. On both days of our tour we decided to go with a company called Grado diez - Grado 10. And I thought I d share the thought process behind that. So number one the vehicles are a lot bigger than the typical ones plying these roads. A lot of the vehicles that you ll see on these tours are little minivans and they tend to have problems sometimes on these off-roads. So taking a big truck was really good. And the other reason we decided to go with this company too was because of the awesome windows on this vehicle. This is like a safari truck so you know the tour cost a little bit more and we did get a few extra things. Like we had a really nice breakfast, we had on the first day we had pancakes, we had really nice juice, coffee, bread. And today we had omelets. I ve noticed on other cheaper tours you get a lot more of a simple breakfast. It is just like bread and maybe juice and that is it. So this was a really good choice for us. It cost a little bit more but you know sometimes the extra comfort is worth paying for. Next up is the flamingo reserve. Time to go spot some flamingos. Something about the tour today to really keep in mind is that the elevation does go above 4000 meters above sea level. So that means that altitude sickness can be an issue and also getting a sunburn is very common in this type of weather because you re up so high, so you really really need to slather on that sunscreen. Alright, so that marks the end of the tour. The highlight was definitely the flamingo reserve and the salt flats. This is part of our Travel in Chile series. We re making a series of videos showcasing Chilean culture, Chilean arts, Chilean foods, Chilean religion, Chilean cuisine and Chilean people. Proudly presented by: http://nomadicsamuel.com & http://thatbackpacker.com Music in this video courtesy of Audio Network