Desert Road

I rented a mountain bike and started riding out of town into the Atacama Desert.

It is the driest - non-polar - desert in the world. It covers 41,000 square miles mostly in northern Chile. I was told I should visit by a Chilean man I met a few months earlier in Cambodia. And so I did.

Being a desert, it is mostly empty and the vastness of the space - nature at its most unforgiving - is what makes it so beautiful. You can look at it for hours and not come close to comprehending its size. Here and there, there are roads and villages, because humans have never met a place they didn’t want to occupy. 

I rode this stretch of highway, toward the Chilean range, for at least an hour and never seemed to get any closer to the small bridge I saw near the horizon that I had set as my goal.

If there is a world beyond the edges of the desert the desert does not know about it. It makes its own rules. Our world is of no concern here.