9. Swimming in The Desert
Day 151
I have friends in the desert here now. Mike and Leanne are Kiwis travelling 2 up on their Husqvarna. We have met at the customs in Bogotá while picking up our bikes coming from Panama. They got into town yesterday. They’ve got another adventurer with them, Terry from Colorado. Terry is on his BMW HP2. We all went for a dinner last night and had a great time catching up on our travels and experiences. We all agreed that driving in Peru was the worst driving experience for all of us. We are all happy to be riding in a civilized country as far as driving goes.
I found some Lagunas I wanted to visit, so I grabbed Terry next day and off we went early in the morning. These Lagunas are deep in the desert, so you better be there when they open at 9 and you should be out by 11. Otherwise you're gonna get roasted out there. A nice gravel road lead us to the lagoons. It is a park you have to pay and we were early. The gate was still closed, but there was nowhere to go. We just hung around for 45 minutes before they opened. This park has three lagoons, two for viewing only and you can swim in the middle one. They advertise it as flamingo sanctuary, but there were only three flamingoes in one lagoon and two in the third one. Nothing even remotely close to the flamingo lagoon I've been at a few days ago where I could watch thousands of flamingoes literally few metres from me.
To be honest, there was nothing to see in those two lagoons so we just went for a dip in the third one. The water was nice and clean and surprisingly it was nice and cool. The salt content in the Lagoon must be huge because you can't even swim there. You just float. You lie in your on your back like a sea otter. If they would sell drinks over there, you can have one on your tummy and you can easily fall asleep there. You can put both your hands and feet up in the air and you still won’t sink. It was very surreal experience because you are swimming in the cold lake in the middle of the driest place on earth. Absolutely beautiful. The ecosystem is very fragile over there so there is a 30 minute limit on swimming in the lagoon. But it was enough to cool us down and it was time to head out. But not before we took bunch of pictures floating around like a piece of cork.
Quick change and off we go to another set of lagoons, which are further 10 km into the desert. At this place, there are two lagoons at the entrance to the park. When I say park, I mean 2 lagoons each about 20 m in a diameter in the middle of the desert. These lagoons are sweetwater lagoons. For the most of the times. They are fed from underground from the mountains, which are about 60 km away. Depending on the amount of for water getting in them, they change from salty to sweet. There's no life in the water, no fish, no frogs no microbes, nothing. And you cannot swim there. Both Lagunas make nice setting for pictures.
Another few kilometres further there are more lagoons. Well, they are lagoons when they have water in them. This time it was just a huge dry salt bed. The soil around those lakes is completely baked. It is hard as a rock. You can see few tracks around going through it when it was softer. But it can imagine when you have just a little bit of rain he turns into mud pits, should be very hard to get out of. there are a few bottles of water left at the edge of the salt flat but the content must be so high. There is no life around whatsoever. No birds, no lizards, no grass, nothing. The entire landscape around here is totally foreign to any living organism. Interestingly enough the temperature is not that high around here. Don’t get me wrong it's pretty high, it is in low 30s but I would expect something at least 10° higher. But because of the high altitude and clean air, the sun is unbelievably strong here. Humidity here, if you can call it that way, is almost non-existent during the day. Yesterday in the afternoon it was 2%. It was even lower than the driest place on earth, Antarctica, with 3% of humidity. It is hard to explain how it feels. It is like sticking your head in hot oven and try to breathe. Your mouth and throat is instantly dry two seconds after you take a sip water. My throat and my nose is sore and irritated because of the dryness and the dust. Bad combination.
Anyway, we took more pictures and got out of there before we had a chance to evaporate over there. We got together with Mike and Leanne for dinner in San Pedro and we had a good time.