24th November 2015. Atacama Desert, Northern Chile.

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This afternoon, we headed off towards Laguna Cejar.  You’ll see that in the next post.  This post comprises images from the journey there.

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Here we have two vicuñas near the side of the road, from the bus window.

Vicuñas were protected under the Incas but after then, hunting reduced the population to 6,000.  Now they’re protected again and the population is up to 350,000.  Their wool is even more valuable than that of alpacas, so to discourage poaching they are caught each year, shorn and released again.  Vicuñas are coloured as you see whereas guanacos (the other wild South American camelid) are variable in colour and have larger rounded ears rather than small pointed ones.

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The colours would be enhanced at sunrise and sunset, but the Atacama Desert landscapes are still majestic.

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We stopped at a village and this is a llama belonging to one of the villagers.

You can tell it’s not a wild vicuña or guanaco because they’re not very skilled at tying ribbons.  Alpacas are about half the size of the llama and have much finer wool.  They are all camelids and evolved in North America, leaving about two or three million years ago at about the same time as the ancestors of the dromedary and bactrian camels, who went east rather than south.  North American camelids became extinct quite recently (geologically speaking) due to either ice ages or humans or both.

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Here is the village.

While it is a “tourist village”, it is also a traditional village where people live.

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We later stopped to explore a canyon lined by cacti.

This is not a known tourist destination but you can easily find it by driving along all the roads in the Atacama Desert and stopping to explore every hundred metres or so.  Probably shouldn’t take more than a few months.

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Members of our group heading down the canyon.

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Heading back now.

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And as we depart, some of the cacti wave goodbye.

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