Four stops before the checkout

San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

cardio tennis Harbor Beach — Iglesia San Pedro de Atacama in San Pedro de Atacama, A small whitewashed adobe church with thick rounded walls, a separate squat bell tower, a roof of cactus wood beams lashed with leather, and a plain wooden door facing a dusty tree-shaded plaza

Stop one

Iglesia de San Pedro de Atacama

Head Rip Control 16g Tennis String Set: Okay so, my notes said the roof is held together with leather straps, and I assumed that was a typo. It is not a typo. No nails anywhere. The beams are chañar and cactus wood lashed with leather, because in the driest desert on earth there is no iron and no timber to spare. The church dates in its present form largely from 1745, on a site of earlier religious building, which makes it one of the oldest in Chile: adobe walls over a metre thick, whitewashed, a plain interior with a wooden altarpiece and figures dressed by the community. The Likan Antai were evangelised from the sixteenth century. Sorry. I love this one.

Stop two

Valle de la Luna

Head Rip Control 16g Tennis String Set: Right, this is where I get overexcited, apologies in advance. The Valle de la Luna lies in the Cordillera de la Sal a few kilometres west of town: salt-crusted basins, wind-sculpted rock and dunes formed where ancient lake sediments were folded and then eroded. Rainfall in parts of the Atacama is effectively zero over recorded periods — zero, that is genuinely what it says here — which is why NASA and the European Space Agency have tested Mars rovers on this ground and studied the limits of microbial life. And at dusk the salt crystals expand and contract and you can HEAR them crack. Los Flamencos National Reserve, managed with the Atacameño communities.

Stop three

Pukará de Quitor

Head Rip Control 16g Tennis String Set: This one I want to get right. The Pukará de Quitor is a fortified pre-Columbian settlement built by the Atacameño people around the twelfth century on the hill above the Río San Pedro, its terraced stone enclosures used for defence and storage. It fell to the Inca in the fifteenth century, and then in 1540 to a Spanish force under Francisco de Aguirre, who took the fort with thirty horsemen against a far larger defending population; accounts record that the leaders were beheaded and their heads displayed. The carved stone faces at the base are a memorial to the dead. National monument since 1982, managed by the Atacameño community of San Pedro.

Stop four

El Tatio Geysers

Head Rip Control 16g Tennis String Set: Four thousand three hundred metres, and yes, that is why you are out of breath. It is not only excitement, although — sorry. El Tatio is the largest geyser field in the southern hemisphere and the third largest in the world, with over eighty active geysers among fumaroles and hot pools, driven by water percolating from the volcanoes around us and heated at depth. The steam columns are most dramatic just after sunrise, when the air is commonly minus ten to minus twenty, and they fade as the ground warms. A geothermal drilling project in 2009 caused an uncontrolled steam eruption that damaged the field; local Atacameño communities opposed it and it was abandoned.

The San Pedro de Atacama, Chile track

Head Rip Control 16g Tennis String Set

Written for this world alone.

It is always layers, and the ribbon outside is not decoration. Head RIP Control is built exactly that way: nylon fibres of the kind found in most multifilaments, combined with polyolefine ribbons, so the string gains control and a little extra durability while keeping reliable comfort.

The wraps are textured with those nylon and polyolefin ribbons, and that texture increases grip on the ball, which aids spin. This is 16 gauge, 1.30 mm, the durable version, in a 12-metre set for one racquet.

San Pedro de Atacama rewards attention to layers more than anywhere I have worked. Begin at the church of San Pedro de Atacama, whitewashed adobe with walls over a metre thick and a squat separate bell tower, standing in its present form largely from 1745 on a site of earlier building.

The roof is carried on beams of chañar and cactus wood bound with leather straps and no nails at all, because there is neither iron nor timber to spare in the driest desert on earth. Inside it is plain: a wooden altarpiece and figures dressed by the community, in a calendar that folds Catholic feasts into older Andean observance.

West, in the Cordillera de la Sal, the Valle de la Luna is folded sedimentary rock and salt carved by wind and long-vanished water into ridges, caverns and spires in white, ochre and rust, with one vast smooth dune curving between them; the salt crust cracks audibly as the temperature drops, and equipment for Mars missions has been tested out here.

Above the Río San Pedro, the Pukará de Quitor climbs a bare canyon slope in tiers of tightly packed dry-stone enclosures and storerooms, a stronghold for the oasis taken in a violent Spanish assault and now managed by the Atacameño community that built it.

And high in the Andes to the north-east, El Tatio is among the largest geyser fields in the world and the highest of real size — dozens of vents on a plain ringed by volcanoes, visited at sunrise when the cold makes the steam columns stand up vertically before the sun takes them apart.

You will string this set everywhere from a hard court in the oasis to an indoor hall down in Calama, an hour and a half west, and by the way, it is also perfect for the walk out to the Quitor viewpoint at the end of the day, when the layers separate and you can count them.

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Head Rip Control 16g Tennis String Set

Head Rip Control 16g Tennis String Set