12-Jul-2007 -- We visited the Conchi Viejo confluence as an aside to geology field work we were doing in the Atacama Desert.
It is located about a two hour 4x4 trek from Calama, the main city in the region, and about 1 hour from Chuquicamata, the worlds second largest copper mine.
The site is accessable by dirt road just after passing through a deep canyon that exposes some impressive geology!.
We arrived withing 100 meters of the site at sunset the evening before, so we opted to use the remaining dayight to establish a campsite for the night.
In the morning we backtracked along the flat, plantless desert and zeroed in on the confluence near a minor stream bed.
A mark of 3-4 rocks was withing 5 meters of our estimate of the confluence...someone else had apparently visited some years past. We marked the confluence with a new mark and photographed the site and GPS.
We continure on in the Atacama for another week, traveling up to Arica and back to Antofagasta, seeing some impressive desert formation, ghost mines, and a magnificant coast.