From the Earth. San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

Our trip to Chile was almost in the end. A few days later and we will be starting our long way home. At 5 o’clock am, dark night, we star our journey. We left our comfortable hotel at San Pedro de Atacama and we jumped in to the frizzing “desert of the dead”. We skip in to the all road vehicle for the unknown tracks, but with a clear destination: the Geysers of El Tatio, a place located at 90km from San Pedro de Atacama, not fare from the Bolivian border. When we get in to the car, we had no idea what to find. The trip was long and rough, but we trusted our guide. El Tatio should be one of the most enchanting landscapes of Region, and why not of the north of the country. When we were arriving it was still dark and the place looked quite and unmoving. At that moment, it looked just a big plane with some frizzed water. We stopped the car, and we were advised not to touched the water because it will be very hot and danger. I was curious! In fact, at the moment of the sun rising, the unexpected happened. A strong noise came from the deep of the earth and strong Geysers and fumaroles emerge to the surface through fissures of the terrestrial bark, reaching a temperature of 85º C and about ten meters of height. This magnificent spectacle achieves its maximum expression during the first hours of the morning, between 6 and 7 o’clock in the morning hours, with temperatures below zero. After such a big trip, we were not expecting such an emotion. We had an extraordinary picnic breakfast on the spot after a big number of photos. These extremely low temperatures in addition to the large number of tourists, who arrived year after year to the zone, encouraged native people of the sector and authorities to count on a fully equipped tourism complex to properly receive thousands of national and foreign visitors that should be working today. We went back to the hotel in a different perspective, at day light, crossing fields of wild cactus and a volcano into the horizon. The temperature was warming up, and we started taking some lairs of clothes and filling the desert sun in our bodies.

Historic and technologic. Abu Simbel, Egypt.

Abu Simbel is a remarkable place. Not only because the two temples at Abu Simbel are among the most magnificent monuments in the world, but their removal and reconstruction was an historic event in itself. Abu Simbel was first reported by J. L. Burckhardt in 1813, when he came over the mountain and only saw the facade of the great temple as he was preparing to leave that area via the Nile. The two temples, that of Ramesses II primarily dedicated to Re-Harakhte, and that of his wife, Nefertari dedicated to Hathor, became a must see for Victorians visiting Egypt, even though it required a trip up the Nile, and often they were covered deeply in sand, as they were when Burckhardt found them. The temples are fare from the touristic routes. I went by bus, and start my trip at 4 o’clock in the morning with my hotel pillow beside me to assure a comfortable trip. We stopped when the day was rising in the middle of the Egyptian desert: even if the temples would disappoint me, my day was done by this first moment in the desert. When I first heard about the removal of the original temple, I was perplexed. When the temples (280 km from Aswan) were threatened by submersion in Lake Nasser, due to the construction of the High Dam, the Egyptian Government secured the support of UNESCO and launched a world wide appeal. During the salvage operation which began in 1964 and continued until 1968, the two temples were dismantled and raised over 60 meters up the sandstone cliff where they had been built more than 3,000 years before. Here they were reassembled, in the exact same relationship to each other and the sun, and covered with an artificial mountain. Most of the joins in the stone have now been filled by antiquity experts, but inside the temples it is still possible to see where the blocks were cut. Besides my skepticism, I was very glad to visit this place and I enjoy it a lot. I also went inside the man made dome to see an exhibition of photographs showing the different stages of the massive removal project. Both things are amazing: the site and the removal.