Day 8: Valle de la Luna

I've always wanted to go to the moon, but without 20/20 vision and with less than 1,000 hours of jet pilot experience, it seems unlikely. Luckily, we visited the Atacama desert this weekend in the north of Chile and got the chance to step foot on the beautiful Valley of the Moon (perhaps the closest I'll ever get to the real thing).

Valle de la Luna is a valley in Los Flamencos National Reserve in the Atacama desert. It’s known for its moon-like landscape of sand dunes, rugged mountains, and distinctive rock formations. Our 6-hour tour was comprised of a hike up a tall sand dune (where the sand was actually black), a visit to the Three Maries rock formations, a walk through a cavern, and a sunset-watch off a cliff. Pictured below are some shots from the excursion with our tour guide, Felipe.

There's something really special about being immersed 360 degrees by nature. In Valle de la Luna, the land seemed to go on forever in all directions, and it was hard to register that everything around me was created predominantly by nature. I felt really at peace, and I could have sat on the dune for hours just observing everything around me. While I'm not quite the outdoors person, I do have an appreciation for the simplicity that it brings when I'm immersed in it, and for that, I am forever thankful for this experience and others of the like.

For more than a semester, our floor in Maseeh puts up a question of the day on our whiteboard for residents to answer as they please when passing by. Questions range from "What's your favorite soup?" to "What's your Myers-Briggs personality type?" to "If you were a store, what store would you be?" One day, the question was "Where did you see your favorite sunrise/sunset?". My original answer was a beautiful sunset I saw in Perth, Australia a couple years ago, but the one we saw off a cliff in the Atacama desert this past weekend may take the place as my favorite.