Mars on Earth — Ruby crosses El Desierto del Diablo
The cone was our second-to-last stop on our journey through the remote Puna. Leaving the following morning, we drove past the track running nearest to its base, giving us one final opportunity for some insane drone shots.
The road leaves the cone behind and continues across the salt flat. It’s a lumpy, hard-packed mud track, and while any vehicle could technically drive it, progress is painfully slow — unless, that is, you work for the local mine, in which case you couldn't care less about your vehicle's suspension as you blast over the corrugations at 80km/h. As we pointed Ruby towards the mountains on the far side, we passed very few cars, their activity mostly centred around the mining facility we’d left behind.
Today we were headed towards our final stop in this epic desert: El Desierto del Diablo (The Devil's Desert). We already had a taste of what lay ahead as we reached the edge of the salt flat and were surrounded by oddly shaped mounds of dirt marking the outskirts of the next village, Tolar Grande.
We decided to try putting the very last of our physical cash into the fuel tank. While we probably had just enough to reach San Antonio de los Cobres, the road ahead was slow, mountainous, and unpredictable—better safe than sorry. First off, we stopped outside the village church to make use of a water tap and some spacious recycling bins. This was yet another town that seemed entirely abandoned; we had yet to see another person or moving car. In fact, as we continued towards the fuel shop, we barely saw a soul and began to wonder if we’d even manage to buy anything.
Access to the tiny shop that sells fuel involves driving through the abandoned station building of an old railway line before crossing the tracks themselves. Much to our surprise, on the other side sat a bright blue building with 'nafta' and 'gasoil' painted on the wall. Two efficient local women measured out the petrol and filled our tank using an actual funnel rather than the top half of a traffic cone. This resulted in significantly more fuel actually making it into the tank, and we handed over the last of our pesos, relieved that we wouldn't have to worry about running dry or getting stranded out in the wilderness.
Just outside the village lies a small roadside stop worth a brief visit: the Ojos del Mar and a nearby red lake.
For some reason, despite having built a large, pristine wooden walkway down to the red lake, a sign declared it closed. There was no visible damage to the walkway nor any clear reason why it was out of use. Ignoring the signs, we ambled down to the bright red waters set against the harsh white of the salt crust in the foreground and the snow-capped peaks in the distance.
Then, in the rapidly building midday wind, we walked over on a small footpath through the desert and vicunas, to take a look at the "Eyes of the Sea".
These small pools are not only pretty — boasting a surprising range of distinct colours — but they also hold significant scientific importance. Although quite compact, they are remarkably deep, with some plunging down to eight metres. This is best appreciated from above with the drone, which just about managed to stay airborne in the gale that had now arrived.
From a scientific standpoint, these pools are special because they harbour living stromatolites—ancient cyanobacterial colonies and extremophile microorganisms that offer a direct window into Earth's earliest life forms and oxygen-producing history. Living stromatolites are extraordinarily rare, as their growth is usually destroyed by small grazing organisms (like snails) before they can properly form. Consequently, they survive only in extreme environments such as hypersaline lakes, deep marine trenches, and a few specific high-altitude pools. Funnily enough, two of the other rare sites on Earth are places we've also visited way back in Mexico: Bacalar and Laguna Alchichica—not that we knew anything about stromatolites back then!
Science lesson complete, we returned to Ruby to continue our journey onwards to the Devil’s Desert. With the tracks out here being as slow as they were, we weren't going to make it all the way there that night. With the wind picking up, it would have been a crime to drive through without being able to launch the drone. Tomorrow was forecast to be the final morning of calm weather, so we decided to camp just before the desert at an abandoned railway station. It would be our highest campsite of the entire trip at just over 4,000 metres, but luckily, we had been acclimatising for over a week.
The station sits on a bleak, windswept plateau overlooking mountains in every direction. Small adobe buildings sit on one side of the site, while corroded tracks still hold a single decaying train carriage. We made clever use of the ruined buildings to shelter from the wind before going for a wander. This tiny settlement once housed the labourers who built this incredible high-altitude railway line back in the early 1900s. Laying tracks at this elevation required an immense amount of manual effort, executed entirely by hand without heavy machinery. Workers laboured in temperatures dropping to -20C and had to carry out emergency repairs on stressed metal tracks subjected to wild daily temperature swings. Without the railway, life out here was impossible, so these small outposts were established every few kilometres out of sheer necessity.
What was once a tight-knit community didn't last, however. As steam engines gave way to diesel locomotives requiring far less maintenance, these small outposts began to decline. Then, in the 1990s, Argentina's railway network was largely privatised, and regular train services along these remote tracks ground to a halt. Losing the regular trains that supplied basic necessities like food, water, and mail meant life in these outposts was no longer viable. By the late 20th century, the inhabitants had migrated towards Tolar Grande or San Antonio de los Cobres.
While the tracks were never officially decommissioned, you won't see a train running along them today; the site remains an open-air museum frozen in time.
We spent a freezing, howling night by the abandoned tracks, and the next morning we set off early to ensure we reached the red rock formations before the afternoon winds kicked up.
It’s often said that driving through the Devil's Desert feels like navigating the surface of Mars, and in fact, the local geology closely mimics the Red Planet. The deep crimson colour is the result of iron oxidation within the rock, accelerated by an environment of near-zero humidity and intense solar radiation. As we entered the labyrinth of red rock, we truly felt as though we had left planet Earth behind.
Ruby wound her way down the pass known as Siete Curvas (The Seven Curves). As we twisted downhill, an incredible panorama stretched out before us. It wasn't just the colour of the landscape that held our attention, but the strange, sculpted shapes of the hills themselves. These were ancient sand dunes that, over the past 10 to 20 million years, had fossilised into solid rock. Layers of white salt were still visible within the strata — the dried-up remnants of prehistoric lakes that evaporated millennia ago.
Even without the geological history, the place is utterly spellbinding. We stopped for dozens — if not hundreds — of photos. Unlike most deserts that harbor at least a lone cactus or a scrubby bush, we were truly the only living things in sight.
The Devil's Desert was an incredible high note on which to conclude our Puna expedition. We needed a full week just to sit down and sort through the mountains of photos we'd taken!
Time and weather, however, were not on our side, and we had to keep moving. We needed to reach San Antonio de los Cobres that night: a storm was rolling in, and we required proper shelter that the open desert couldn't offer.
Having ignored the recent road condition reports on the assumption that the worst was behind us, we hadn't realised just how bad the final leg would be. Things started out manageable enough — rough, but doable — until we passed the Salar de Pocitos and hit Ruta 51. Turning left onto Ruta 51 puts you on the direct highway to the Chilean border. You might assume that a major international border route would be paved or well-maintained, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The heavy commercial traffic — constantly churned up by heavy lorries and mining trucks — had turned the rough gravel into a brutal, endless washboard.
We had assumed that joining Ruta 51 would allow us to speed up; in reality, it slowed us to a crawl. Having already driven 100km of slow dirt track, we now had to endure another 70km of violent corrugations where we were lucky to manage 20km/h.
As if the bone-shaking road surface wasn't tedious enough, the scenery deteriorated into monotonous, dusty gray hills. We bounced along with the windows clamped shut against the choking dust, though even that was preferable to the full-blown sandstorms we encountered further along. Twice, I was forced to come to a complete stop in the middle of the track due to zero visibility: once when the tailwind blew our own massive dust cloud back over the windscreen, and once in a bout of pure driven sand. The wind whipped sand across the road with such ferocity that the track vanished beneath rapidly forming drifts. The sand blasted against our side windows with a deafening rattle — giving Ruby an aggressive, unprompted sandblasting treatment. I slowed to a crawl, peering through the windscreen to pick out the edge of the track while trying to maintain enough momentum not to get bogged down in the drifts.
By the time we finally rolled into San Antonio de los Cobres in the early evening, I was completely knackered after seven continuous hours behind the wheel. But we had made it! No breakdowns, no mechanical disasters, and we had found a sheltered spot for the night tucked behind a building in the visitor centre car park.
It had been a truly spectacular, once-in-a-lifetime journey. I was so glad we had waited out the weather for our perfect window: clear blue skies, breathtaking landscapes, and photos I’ll look back on with pride for the rest of my life as I wave them in front of anyone who will listen and proclaim, "Look where my 50-year-old camper van went!"
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