Atacama – pt. 1: Rainbow Valley and petroglyphs.

Ola folks!

Getting to Atacama – sweet. Staying the night in Atacama – neat! Next up – Atacama proper…

Our to-do list had a full nine items:

1) Rainbow Valley
2) petroglyphs at a place called Yerbas Buenas (which turned out meh)
3) Devil’s Throat Gorge (curiously, there’s a Devil’s Throat at Iguazu Falls – though it’s not a gorge but a waterfall)
4) Moon Valley
5) Death Valley
6) Lake Chaxa (with flamingos)
7) the stunning Miscanti and Miñiques lagoons
8) the El Tatio geyser field
9) stargazing through telescopes

Off we go!…

First up: Rainbow Valley (Valle del Arcoiris). And the views are just unreal:

It’s somewhere around here on the map:

One downside: drone flying is banned here for some reason. Why? No clue. But if you wander just outside the rainbow zone, you’re good to go: fly to your heart’s content. Eh?! And from up there, you can really see the full scope of things:

Oh, Mother Nature! Such colorful wizardry you conjure up…

We arrive and set off on foot…

What happened here in ancient geological times and how all this was formed – beats me. But here’s the result:

Some of it was shaped by volcanoes, some by later erosion. Now it’s a tourist destination :)

A fantastic stroll!

And then lunch – right on schedule :)

Next on the itinerary: the nearby petroglyphs (rock carvings) at Yerbas Buenas. Full disclosure – ancient graffiti has never really done it for me, but for the sake of completeness, here you go…

In the middle of the desert there are these rocky outcrops:

Ancients scratched all kinds of pictures onto them. Llamas, alpacas, dogs (or maybe jackals), and plenty more. Hard to see, but you can just about make them out:

Surprise! A monkey! So did monkeys once live here? ->

Now that is curious! If Homo sapiens reached the far south of this continent around 5–10 thousand years ago (as they did, at least, according to the internet), could the climate here have been totally different back then? Who knows. Still got my curiosity-meter working overtime…

And with that, the first leg of our Atacama visit wrapped up. More chapters on the world’s driest desert still to come!…

The best photos from LatAm-2026 are in high resolution are here.