High in the Andes, the deep blue skies can be deceptive. This was mid-morning and the lake in front of me was frozen. At night, the temperature regularly dropped to -20 Celsius. It was also breathless here as I was standing at over 4,200m altitude.
If you like desolate, abandoned places, the Atacama Desert is the place for you.
High on the altiplano between Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, the sky is an impossibly deep blue. The car pulling up was my driver, who played a prank and drove off when I was talking too many photos. It gave the scene a sense of scale, which was perfect. I ended up asking him to do this a few times over the 4 day trip, much to his bemusement.
High up in the altiplano plateau, within the Salar de Uyuni, there is a train graveyard. Rather than methodically removing locomotives and wagons, the local rail service instead runs them off the end of the line and leave them to rot in the salty desert.
The first time I visited this place, there was a simple yet eerie sense of otherworldliness. However, upon my return, all the trains had been graffitied and the whole area had become a huge rubbish dump, which was a real shame.
Strange shapes in the desert. Whilst crossing the Atacama desert in Bolivia, I passed through the Salar de Uyuni salt flats. In the vastness of the white desert, strange shapes were cut into the floor. Blocks of salt were extracted and left in the sun to dry before being removed and sold. The remaining angular shapes were gradually filled with the water that lingered beneath the surface.
In the wet season, the floor of the salt flats becomes flooded and the looks like an impossibly huge mirror, making it hard to know which is heaven and earth.
I was almost at the hotel after a long drive to Death Valley from Los Angeles,when I spotted this scene. It was insanely hot, well over 40 degrees Celsius but Death Valley is such a fascinating place, I had to stop and grab a couple of shots before sunset.
The shot above was moments before the sun dropped behind a cloud. The one below was a little later, as the sky was lit up with the afterglow.
I heartily recommend a trip to Death Valley to anyone. Just a word of warning. Make sure you have a car with air conditioning and that you can handle temperatures of over 50 degrees Celsius as it hit 125 degrees Fahrenheit (51.7 degrees Celsius the following day).
Moon Valley in Chile, close to San Pedro de Atacama, very much lives up to its name. Trekking in the heat of the day at 4000m altitude, in the altiplano, literally took one’s breath away.
I took this shot in the mid afternoon, as the shadows of the canyon cast increasingly longer trails across the exposed spikes of the rock outcrops, akin to the vertebrae of the valley jutting out of the ground.
Back in 2011, I was on assignment for Lonely Planet in South America, gathering some new shots for their online library. This was taken in the middle of nowhere in southern Bolivia, less than 100 miles form the Chilean and Argentinian borders, close to the Salar de Uyuni. It was late afternoon and the heat of the day in the altiplano desert was rapidly evapourating as the steely grip of night gathered traction.
Temperatures regularly drop to -20 degrees Celsius. That night was no exception.
For the final few weeks of 2010, as the UK was freezing in the mid-winter snow, I was in sunny Argentina, shooting for various image libraries. I have included a few of these images from the various places I visited in late November and early to mid December.
As luck would have it, my flight was one of the very first to make it back into Heathrow, once they were finally able to clear the runway, which was very jammy indeed!
Sailing across the Beagle Channel close to Ushuaia, moment s after a snow blizzard
Walking around the edge of Lago Colorado in the Bolivian Atacama desert
Leap of faith 4,500m up in the Atacama desert
Train graveyard in the Salar de Uyuni, just south of town
Horse riding gaucho style in the hills surrounding Salta, Argentina
All Terrain Photography 