Later that afternoon we embarked on a second excursion into the desert. This time we bumped our way for about two hours towards Lagoa Cejas, a beautiful salt lake with shimmering reflections of the surrounding peaks. After the stuffy bus we fell out onto the cracked mud and practically sprinted towards the shore. I´ve never swam in such heavily salinated water..it was amazing. The top layer was quite warm but within a few feet it got very cold. It was impossible to dive down more than 7 or 8 feet, and it was freezing so I gave up on that fairly quickly and just floated around. We couldn´t even swim properly because our legs were sticking up out of the water..it was bliss! After a quick wash in freshwater we had brought along with us to scrub off the salt we were back in the bus and heading towards our second stop of the evening..the ¨eyës of the desert¨.
These are two circular freshwater oases out in the middle of the nothingness. They only appear on the horizon from a few hundred metres away and are a truly bizarre natural phenomena given their proximity to each other and almost identical size and shape. They are about 12 metres in diameter and the water level rises to about 5 feet from ground level. They are perfect for jumping in and out of..which we did like big 3 year olds for about 20 minutes before tiring ourselves out.
The last stop of the evening where we watched the sun going down while sipping pisco sours (national drink) was another huge salt lake with lumps of crystals all along the shoreline. It was like snow. We took some amazing photographs of the lake and surrounds as the colours of the mountains changed in the receding light. Just after sunset we packed up and rattled our way back to town, absolutely knackered but satisfied with our day.
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