Twenty-four suites in adobe and local stone, built low around a long pool and a garden of chañar trees. Every suite has a private terrace facing the Licancabur volcano, an oxygen concentrator on request, and heating for nights that drop below freezing.

The kitchen cooks with quinoa, rica-rica and goat cheese from the villages around the salar. Dinner is served late, by the fire, after the guides have briefed you on tomorrow.

The domes stand in a row on a gravel terrace outside the village, far enough from town for the Milky Way to cast a faint glow. Each has a bed under a glass panel, a wood stove and a deck with a reclining chair for naked-eye stargazing.

The astronomer’s telescope sits at the end of the terrace. On clear nights, which is most of them, sessions run from nine until the guests give up.

Río Grande is a village of forty people and a church, in a canyon where the river keeps a strip of green alive. Our six rooms sit in a restored stone corral above the fields.

Guests stop here for a night between the lodge and the high lakes. It is the gentlest way to sleep a little higher before a big day.

The highest night on any of our journeys. The rooms are small, warm and quiet, each with piped oxygen and a pulse oximeter by the bed, and a guide sleeps on site.

Laguna Colorada turns red from the algae in its water, and three species of flamingo feed on them. Sunset here is short and very cold; the kitchen serves soup at five.

Everything that can be made of salt is: the walls, the bar, the bases of the beds. The blocks are cut from the salar a few kilometres away and replaced as the rain wears them down.

From the terrace the flat runs white to the horizon. In the wet months it turns into a mirror; in the dry months you can drive across it for hours.

The camp sits inside the Pan de Azúcar national park, where the desert runs straight into the sea. The tents have proper beds, hot showers and decks over the sand.

Mornings start in the coastal fog, the camanchaca, that keeps the cactus gardens alive. By noon it burns off and the water turns a clear, cold blue.