The driest place on earth

The Atacama Desert is supposed to be the "driest place on earth".... except evidently when we are there.  This week the area had more (and stronger) rains than anytime in the recent past.  The host at our hotel (who I'd guess to be in her seventies) was telling me that back when she was a little girl "it rained like this once."

There were huge thunderstorms and hard rains every day we were there.   Although several of the tours we wanted to take were canceled (because of lightning, flash floods in various canyons, or roads too muddy to traverse) there were enough breaks in the weather that we were able to see much of what we hoped to.

We had some fun at our hotel, which was about a kilometer outside of the pueblo...

On Saturday night lightning struck the transformer and blew out the electricity.  We had been standing in the window watching, because it was also in the middle of a huge hailstorm.

We saw the lighting strike close, simultaneous with the huge crack of thunder.  We didn't learn until later that it actually hit the transformer of our hotel.  Unfortunately because the area is so rural, the issue never did get resolved while we were there.  Finally, late on Sunday evening they were able to procure a generator so we could have power again, but we had one night where we were getting ready for bed by the light of our phones/kindles (hoping they wouldn't run down since we had no way to recharge them!)

The skylight in our bathroom was designed with no expectation of precipitation, as during the storm we had full-on rain falling in our bathroom!

Luckily with the use of all the towels provided we were able to keep it from flooding into the room.

Meanwhile, the open area outside our hotel window became a huge pond.

The whole town lost power that night.  Restaurants were cooking and serving by use of gas stoves and candlelight.  There was a large dose of camaraderie, and the sense that we were all Experiencing Something Big Together.  

There were two restaurants in town that had generators and of course were completely mobbed.  We managed to get to one of them and secure a table before it was completely overrun.  As we were warming ourselves around the fire pit waiting for our food to arrive, we met a delightful couple from the UK who are on week six of a 10-week excursion all around South America.  We hit it off and by the end of the evening had moved over to eat our dessert at their table so we could continue chatting.  Although we sadly weren't able to coordinate any tours together we did manage to meet for lunch the following day.  They observed that it was probably raining in the Atacama Desert because they had arrived from the UK, and agreed to accept the blame for the whole thing. :-)

Here's a picture from town in the evening after one of the storms.  By this point a lot of the water had run off and the street was no longer the river of mud it had been the hour before.