San Pedro de Atacama (northern Chile)
Up in Chile's far north lies the driest desert on earth, a place so arid that some weather stations have never recorded a drop of rain. The Atacama is a vast, otherworldly expanse of sculpted rock, salt and sand pressed between the Pacific and the high wall of the Andes, and traveling through it feels like crossing a landscape from another planet. The light is enormous, the air is impossibly clear, and at night the sky fills with more stars than you knew existed. For travelers who love wide-open country and scenery on a grand scale, there is nowhere quite like it.
The signature sight is the Valle de la Luna, the Valley of the Moon, a stretch of lunar dunes and salt-crusted ridges just outside town. In the late afternoon you climb to a viewpoint and watch the whole valley turn molten as the sun drops, the sand glowing gold then rose then deep red while the salt seams catch the last of the light. It is one of the great sunsets anywhere, and it is only the beginning. Beyond it spread the high-altitude salt flats, where pink flamingos wade in shallow brine lagoons, and the Altiplanic lagoons up near the Bolivian border, pools of impossible turquoise ringed by snow-dusted volcanoes.
Tying it all together is San Pedro de Atacama, a small adobe village of dusty lanes and low clay walls that serves as the base for every excursion. You settle into a lodge here, head out by day to the dunes, the salt flats and the lagoons, and return each evening to good food and that vast desert sky. We build the days at the right pace, with time to acclimatize to the altitude, so the Atacama unfolds as a series of unforgettable mornings and golden afternoons rather than a rush from one wonder to the next.
