What It’s Like to Visit Mars on Earth

For lovers of superlatives, the Atacama Desert is a destination worth noting: Stretching north to south for more than 1,000 miles west of the Andes in Chile, it is the driest nonpolar desert in the world and the largest fog desert in the world. Given its similarities to the Martian environment, it has been used as a stand-in for Mars expedition simulations for decades.

The desert, though, is also full of life—part of the reason writer Mark Johanson spent three months there, off and on, in 2020 and 2021. Then a Chilean transplant, Johanson, an Afar contributor, set off for the Atacama to better understand the country he now calls home. To mark the release of his new book, Mars on Earth, Afar sat down with Johanson to discuss what fascinates him about deserts and why the Atacama holds so much more than many people realize.

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What was your earliest understanding of the Atacama, and how did it evolve?

The first time I ever came to Chile, I went to the Atacama to look at the stars, which is what a lot of people do. They come to see some of the clearest skies in the world. But what set me off on this journey is the social uprising in Chile in 2019. A month before that happened, I had purchased an apartment, so I was just planting roots in Chile. I realized that I didn’t really understand the country I was living in if I didn’t see this coming, if I didn’t realize why so many people were in the streets. What else did I not know? And so I decided to go to the Atacama, because it’s where the economy of Chile derives from [due to mining]. But it also remains an enigma to most people in the capital. A lot of the social movements actually began up in the desert. So it just felt like a place that I needed to try and understand.

Photo by Mark Johanson

I like the level of serendipity in this book, where you stumble into meetings with people. How much of that changed the arc of the story, and how much of that is the way you travel in general?

As a traveler in this day and age, we try to plan every single moment of our trip. We want to know what we’re going to be doing for lunch, where we’re going to be for dinner, what we’re going to be doing in between. And I think to travel the way we used to before we all had smartphones really opens you up to just meeting people more. If somebody wants to talk to you, you can just sit there and chat for a while, because you don’t have to be at that plan you made for three o’clock. It was really nice for me to be able to sort of liberate myself from that—to just let the story take me where it would.

You spend some time with Indigenous communities in the book. As a traveler, how did you enter into those with care?

I know that to enter into Indigenous communities, you need to have a certain base of understanding of their vision and their desires and their hopes and dreams and to not impose your own point of view. For example, the family that I spend time with . . . I didn’t just swoop in and try and tell their story. I spent three weeks with them, learning from them, sleeping in their home. That was one of the most powerful experiences of the trip because it allowed me to look at certain parts of the Atacama Desert from a different perspective—the stars, for example. They look for not only constellations and series of bright stars but also the dark spots within the Milky Way, and those are their own kind of constellation that can tell you about the fertility of the fields for the next season.

Cover courtesy Rocky Mountain Books

Another aspect of travel is not just considering the effects we have on the people of a place, but the place itself. How did climate change factor into your experience?

You know, lithium is what we have in our laptops. It’s what’s in electric cars. So it’s very vital to this transition from fossil fuels to cleaner energy. But the places that are threatened by that are lithium-rich areas. And the vast majority of lithium comes from the “lithium triangle,” which is between Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, and Chile has the largest proven lithium reserves of any of them.

As you travel across the Atacama, you come across all of these lithium mines. It is great, this idea of transitioning to cleaner energy. But I think most of us who think about that, think about more of the end product and not so much where that comes from and the effect that that’s having on places like the Atacama. Because to take lithium out of the desert involves vast amounts of water from an area that has less of it than most places on earth. So at what cost are we taking that out, and who’s being affected? It’s not only the flamingos and other creatures who rely on the small amounts of water that exist, but also the predominantly Indigenous communities that lived nearby these lithium mines who are losing their water supply to farm, with what little fields they can etch out of the desert.

How would you pitch the Atacama to a traveler—and where would you go?

There’s a misconception that this desert is empty, whereas it has more than a million people. There are some big cities along the coast. There are rivers, and there’s a lot of life up on the altiplano [high plateau]. So if you go up onto the altiplano, because of snow melt, you have wetlands, you have flamingos, you have alpacas and llamas. So it is actually full of life in certain pockets, in the way that all deserts are in their oases. They really just bloom with life.

Most go to San Pedro de Atacama, which is lovely and wonderful, but it’s a very long desert. The Elqui Valley is technically on the edge of the Atacama, but you can go there and learn about the pisco industry. You can actually have some really wild, high-altitude desert wines. You have certain parts of the altiplano that virtually very few tourists go to, unless they are hardcore mountaineers, all the way up to Arica in the north, which is the driest city on earth. And you have the Chinchorro mummies, which are the oldest mummies on earth. So it just has all these superlatives. I mean, the altiplano itself is the second largest high-altitude plateau on earth, after the Tibetan Plateau. So there are so many reasons for lovers of extreme places that you would want to come to the Atacama.

So often, when we come back from trips, people want to know, well, What was it like? Hard question! How do you distill this experience?

Where do I begin? When we’re traveling, it’s the experiences we have in the moment that are great. But when we come back, we think most about the people. I think about, like, Ruth [Moscoso], who I went up on the altiplano with: She’s a chef who cooks with solar ovens. But we just had such a wild, wild few days together, that when it was done, I was like, I can’t believe that. I never expected to go with her to her ancestral homeland. She just intuited something in me and decided to convince me to do that with her, and it ended up being one of my favorite experiences of the book.

Photo by Mark Johanson

What were some others?

Floating in thermal baths is really just funny, because you’re so used to your body doing one thing in water, and it won’t do that. No matter what you do, you just kind of bop back up to the surface. I know there are other places in the world, like the Dead Sea, where you can float, but here you are high up in altitude, and you’re just kind of bobbing there, looking at the radiant sky.

It’s a hard place to hike, so you can’t casually just go off for a big, long hike. But hiking amid the penitentes—these spiky, icy things that you find really high up—they’re just so strange. They look like a pack of ghosts gathered for a rave. There are just some really bizarre landscapes in the Atacama, and you’re often surrounded by things that feel so surreal. There were many times that it really did feel like I was not on earth—like, nothing registered as familiar.

Part of that has to do with the isolation, too, I imagine. Did you enjoy that?

I like to say that a forest calms my mind, but a desert lights it on fire. I think that’s a good thing. I think sometimes you need to sort of light your mind on fire, to let it run and let it stew on things, and open it to big thinking. A forest might calm me down and make me happy and peaceful, but [there I’m] not necessarily capable of going through all the complicated emotions that I go through in this book.

I think that we often shy away from places that we assume might be uncomfortable. And this trip made me realize I’m actually really drawn to these uncomfortable places because they’re so often ones that make you feel something really deep down. They challenge you. You have to be affected. You’re [at] over 4,000 meters. The sun feels closer. Your skin is so dry that you’re itchy. And all those things sound bad, but it makes you feel something different. You know, I think the way people do drugs sometimes is you want to get out of your normal routine, get out of your body, feel something that doesn’t feel like your day-to-day. And that’s what this desert did to me.

What did this journey make you want to learn—or do—more of?

It made me want to keep learning more about Chile. You can only scratch the surface so much on one trip. The original impetus was to understand the country better, and I left with that same desire. When I set off, I had only been living here [in Chile] five years. Now I’ve been living here 10. I think—as any person who moves abroad—you can’t be a passive visitor in the place you live. You really need to engage. I feel like I need to keep on that journey of really trying to understand this place better.