This week’s dream: ballooning over the Atacama Desert

Visiting the Atacama Desert in 1832, Charles Darwin marvelled that the sun ever shone on “so useless” a place. But this “vast wind-rippled volcanic upland” between the Andes and the Pacific in northern Chile is haunting in its beauty, says Ian Thomson in the FT. The driest region on Earth (some parts have seen no rain in 400 years), it also has some of the world’s clearest skies: in 2011, the vast ALMA radio telescope was built here, on the Chajnantor plateau, to provide insights into the early universe. Tourists began coming here when the Pinochet dictatorship came to an end in 1990, and the desert is now home to some good spa hotels, including the stylish Tierra Atacama.

The salty air can leave you parched, and altitude sickness is a risk as you step off the plane in Calama, at 2,400m above sea level. Most visitors stay around San Pedro de Atacama, a small settlement, founded by the Spaniards in 1540, about 60 miles away. Flamingos stalk like “pink apparitions” over the vast Salar de Atacama salt flats nearby, feeding on microscopic shrimp and algae in the hard-baked earth, which mineral chlorides have turned a shade of palest grey. Equally awe-inspiring are the geysers of El Tatio – 80 gurgling, steaming jets on a vast stony plateau at 4,300m above sea level. At higher altitudes, “flowing meltwaters and mountain mists” soften the landscape, and chinchilla-like viscacha rodents bound over the rocks.

From a hot air balloon at dawn, the landscape resembles an African savannah, dotted with gorse bushes and llama skeletons picked clean by condors. Inca-built apacheta cairns cast strange shadows across the “hushed” white dunes of the Valle de la Luna. By 8am the sky is “a pure magnesium-blue”, and to the east, the snowy Andes glitter “like a new-honed knife” – one of the most magnificent views on Earth.

Steppes Travel (0843-778 9926, www.steppestravel.co.uk) has a five-night trip, incl. flights and balloon ride, from £4,465pp.