Welcome to #throwbackthursday at Pete Walker Photography, the Covis situation has put paid to travel at the minute so I’m revisiting images that are lurking in my Lightroom library.
Back in 2015, I went to one of the most beautiful places I have ever been, San Pedro de Atacama in Northern Chile close to its border with Bolivia and one evening I went to El Valle de La Luna.
El Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) is located about 10km west of San Pedro de Atacama, to the north of Chile in the Cordillera de la Sal, in the Atacama desert. It has various stone and sand formations which have been carved by wind and water looking somewhat similar to the surface of the moon, hence its name. There are also dry lakes where the composition of salt makes a white covering layer of the area. It presents diverse saline outcrops which appear like man-made sculptures. There are also a great variety of caverns. When the sun sinks it defines the landscape while the wind blows among the rocks and the sky passes from a pink colour to purple and finally black. A prototype for a Mars rover was tested there by scientists because of the valley’s dry and forbidding terrains.
However most of that is lost impossible to capture in a single evening visit, I learnt many years ago, not to let photography enjoy my enjoyment of somewhere I have never been before. These images capture a little bit of what I saw there but cannot capture the full beauty of the valley.
One of the photos is people queuing to take a selfie of themselves in the designated selfie spot at the cliff edge – I find this fascinating many of the people did not at the other than queue for the photo-op and hop straight back to the bus.
