Flight:






Many years ago, I was traveling in the Atacama and with the new, exellent scenery for condor, I thought I´d make a fictional glider travel. "Wandersegelflug"-style with a simple plane, no GPS, no hurry and just hopping from airfield to airfield. Offcourse, some of these airfields are rather fictional, but the places are real and you could probably land an old wood&canvas glider there without any troubles...



So in the first episode, we take off by aertow out of San Pedro de Atacama. A little oasis and today tourist town in one of the dryest places of earth.. travelers and backpackers roam the little adobe streets and backpack travel has become the economic mainstay of the town.

Close to it lies the "Valle de la Luna" a protected area of a bizare desert salt structures and moon-like landscapes along with impressive and quite salty dunes.



famous parts are the church and the museum.. which features typical mummies. if you want to know some weird science facts, look up the "atacama alien"



anyway, after a quick tour of the town, we take off at 12:00 midday and profit from a strong wind blowing up the andes, to make our way over the ridges of the "valle de la luna" up the andes and from there into Bolivia...

So we have actually landed in the "Reserva Nacional de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa" near to the Laguna Verde... but after a day there, we take off by winchlaunch in the early morning hours at daybreak... A somewhat wierd yellowish sunrise on a cloudless day, but we can, again, take advantage of strong winds.

the dubious looking towline holds together and off we go, with just very few slope soaring stops...

first we pass the green laguna, the Laguna Verde, which indeed is crazy colorfull:



heading out against the strong wind, we quickly fly over to the Juriques volcano, then the oddly syemtrical Licancabur with steep 30° slopes, an active stratovulcan, that holds a special surprise: in the very small summit lies the world highest lake... at 5913m, in one of the worlds dryest regions. Archeological sites have been found on the crater rim and the lake is know to be constant for at least 500 years and through geothermal activity holds a steady 6°C.. and there is life in it!

we allready know this odd sight from our starting point, as the vulcan marks the border and is the dominant geographical feature:



but soon we leave it, and the altitude it provided to head directly over to Tatio.. a site where you can sit in hot thermal springs and watch the sunrise.. something we didn´t quite got done today, as I arive late, but that is VFR regulations..

Another day, another flight.. the strong south westernly winds prevail and make it easy to follow the andean lines... but low clouds start to form.

Our flight takes us from El Tatio along side the border to Cerro Araral and to the volcano Ollagüe, from which we descent by spinning away the excess altitude to the small railroad town of Ollagüe in the altiplano. The railroad goes from Antofagasta in Chile to Avaroa in Bolivia (probably a nice one for the train sim guys... just as idea)



and we see more wild colored minerals in the desert along the way:

Nice ! I also fly Condor but haven't tried the south american sceneries yet although they are on my disk. Will definetely have to give it a go !
A good idea doing it with the old brick ASK 13 !

Excellent reports!