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Morning arrived. Then afternoon. The metro. A cab. Sitting in the airport is followed by sitting on a plane. Near dusk, we walk down the ladder onto the runway of the Calama airport. Around us, the soft blurred reddish magenta tones of sunset color the smooth dunes of the Atacama Desert. Night comes quickly and a blanket of star-pierced black is pulled up and around us as we taxi south toward the little city of San Pedro de Atacama. San Pedro is a tiny town of low adobe buildings whose narrow dirt streets are filled with tourists. The reason has less to do with San Pedro, and more with what surrounds San Pedro: the Atacama Desert and a whole host of geological weirdness. Driven by the unquestionable touron imperative, we get out of the taxi, book tours for the following day, and then wander out into the night looking for our hotel. The problem with booking a hotel online is that you have to find it. When it is not in town, this may prove challenging. Local advice was less useful than dumb luck, and we eventually stumbled upon it.
At 3:45 the next morning, we were waiting on the
side of the road for the tour bus to pick us up. Slipping through the quiet streets, our bus soon joined a tremendous caravan of other tour buses groaning and slowly climbing two hours up into the Andes. The road ends at the The Tatio Geyser Field. It is the largest concentration of geysers in the southern hemisphere, and at 4200 meters above sea level, the highest. My guess is also the coldest. Near dawn, the caravan stopped and disgorged the throngs of tourists into the chilly pre dawn. Our wild haired guide led his gaggle of true believing camera carriers amongst the spitting, sputtering, geysers explaining the whys and hows of geological activity with the enthusiasm and superficiality of the nouveaux geologist. The explanations were peppered with enough sensible sounding factoids to suggest it wasn’t entirely made up. Other claims such as ‘the geyser activity is only at dawn because the sun warms something’ seemed like they might be nonsense. However, I am no geologist. Dawn may be the best time for viewing because of the non-geological fact that there are more tours in the day if you can get the paying customers out of bed before 4 am.
Who knows? Amongst the geysers was a not very warm thermal pool. Despite it being freezing at 4200 meters and 6 in the morning, we got in like we were supposed to. Occasional vents of ‘bowels of the earth’ scalding water raised the overall temperature to barely tepid. However, once in, the thought of getting out was much worse. The exit involved a lot of shivering, jumping around, and trying to redress covered by a tea towel while the didn’t-get-in crowd watched amusedly. Fun over, everyone returned to their respective buses to bounce, jar, and jiggle down the mountain. Brief stops included an ‘authentic-indigenous-no-one-there-but-the-guy-selling-$3-llama-kabobs’ village and a very confusing green coral-like plant growing on a rock. It smelled like juniper, and was, we were informed, the evolutionary antecedent of pine trees. Unlike earlier geological skepticism, I decided evolutionary biology blind faith was the best policy. Aside from the primordial green rock, flora mostly consisted of rocks, dust, and tufts of yellow bristly grass. This somehow sustained the llama’s cousins, the guanaco and the vacuna, and the ostrich-like nandu that dully watched us jostling by.
Around noon, we arrived back in San Pedro. Unfortunately, the life of a touron is
without rest and we were scheduled and paid for the 3:00 tour. Another bus. This time a French lady telling us about zee ancient seas and zee tectonic plates, and zee evaporation and ‘voila’ you have zee huge salt flat and places called zee valley of zee sleeping dinosaurs, zee valley of zee moon, and zee valley of death: valleys of sand, dunes and jagged, spiny, scaley, shingley rock formations that look like choppy water or crests of frosting on a cake. We were mercifully let off the bus and led on a short hike through a salt rock canyon. The steep walls creaked, cracked, and groaned as the sun set. Disturbing, but apparently what salt rock walls do. We were reassured that they do not fall on unsuspecting tourons’ heads. Finally, near dusk, the great wildebeest herd of tour buses converged, and with our closest 200 or more friends, we climbed up a ridge overlooking the Valle de la Luna. The sun sparkled on the white salt flats while volcanoes and mountain in the distance glowed golden. The gathered masses dutifully took pictures, turned around, and returned to their buses for the trip back to San Pedro.
Keeping
up the grueling schedule, we awoke and wandered into town to celebrate Easter in the Museo Gustavo Le Paige. The guide book said that “even if museums aren’t your thing, make an exception for this one.” Amongst other things, it promised mummies. One of, or perhaps the only, advantage of being the driest place on earth is that stuff doesn’t deteriorate. This goes for fiber baskets, glazed pottery, and small children ceremonially buried on top of mountains to appease Incan gods. Unfortunately, the indigenous descendants of the mummies seem to think that their ancestors are being done some great disservice by being put into climate controlled boxes in a museum and used to educate the tourons and the locals about their ancient, no doubt sophisticated, culture. The end result is the mummies don’t get displayed and guide book writers become liars. (I should add that my absolute lack of respect for the dead extends to myself. I have always favored the Tibetan tradition of throwing the corpse on the mountaintop for bird food, but If I am somehow lucky enough to get mummified and buried on top of the mountaintop, I very much would like to be discovered and exploited
by a museum). The museum contained the normal assortment of arrow heads, pottery shards, and detailed explanations of animal husbandry, agricultural domestication, and related banality. Lots of obligatory reading that will never be remembered. However, one aspect of ancient Atacama culture was fascinating; they liked the drugs. One room was filled with ornate sniffing trays and tubes of the pre-Colombian crazy train. Of course, the Catholic missionaries arrived and put an abrupt end to all that. No seeing god through plants. Only ritualized cannibalism and zombie Jesus for that. Underwhelmed, we left the museum. Outside the mummies’ descendants and catch-the-cultural-moment tourists were celebrating cultural capitulation by parading a properly regal white skinned Jesus through the town plaza toward the church. The priest splashed the masses with non-gas bottled holy water and tossed candies. What would the mummies think?
In the afternoon, we were again touring. This time we’d signed up for the salty lake, sink hole, and salt lake tour. The first and the last differ in water content: the salty lakes are mostly lake, whereas the salt lake is mostly salt. Clearly. The first stop was the salty lake, which under normal conditions would be fantastically refreshing, but
it had clouded over and begun unbelievably, to sprinkle. I surmise this means we were not technically in the hasn’t-rained-for-400-years part of the Atacama, but the guide did assure us it was the crappiest weather he’d seen in 10 years of guiding. Despite the cold, we made the questionable decision to get in. It was floaty. And really damn cold. We took the obligatory ‘look mom I’m floating’ photos and got back in the bus. The bouncing across the sand commenced and continued until we reached the next stop: sink holes. This was another watering hole for tour buses, and a few intrepid tourists that hadn’t had enough of being cold and wet jumped into the lakes. We did not. Our latest tour guide had given up any pretense for knowing what the hell was out here and / or why. He assured carly the OVNI’s (i.e. UFOs) had created the sink holes. I suppose two perfectly cylindrical holes full of water surrounded by miles of nothing but salt encrusted dirt suggests UFOs as much as anything else. Also, there is a strong Chilean inclination toward OVNIs as the most logical explanation for myriad things. The final stop was the
salt flat. Here people the world over engage in perspective photography and trying to take artistic shots of color contrast: white salt on brown nothingness. The only advantage of being there when the sun was not its normal sear-your-eyes-out blinding is that the light was pretty fantastic. Then the jarring jostling bus ride back across the sand. I spent the return trip intensely focused on my bladder. Toine somehow seemed to be sleeping, which I resented tremendously. Carly meanwhile had joined a few others in the bus in an enthusiastic radio accompanied sing along of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. Hellish.
Alas, out of time, we could no longer spend the hours of desert 'road' bus travel necessary to visit the altiplano lakes, archeological ruins of inconsequential civilizations, or tourist engorged hot springs. However, our flight was not until 8 pm so with luck, we were able to get one more bus tour scheduled. This one required getting back to the big town of Calama and a local taxi with a driver that looked shockingly like Richard Petty. The town of Calama may have some other reason for being, but its primary one is servicing Chuquicamata. Luckily, this also
means that the road connecting the two is smooth blacktop. Though the name sounds like it may be related to fruit production, Chuqui is actually a ginormous terraced hole. This hole is the biggest open pit mine in the world and where much of the world gets its copper. Though the Balrog may soon be in Chuqui’s future, the hole is 5 km long, 3 km across, 1 km deep and growing. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week trucks the size of houses crawl up and down its terraced sides. Meanwhile, down in the bottom, people (presumably) carry out dynamiting, rock scooping and dust cloud making. Then the trucks crawl up out of the mine to take the stuff to the smelter. The copper in the rock ends up in China, and the slag heaped into literal mountains around the mine. The history of Chuqui follows a familiar pattern: local small scale probably inefficient copper mining gets replaced by North American industrial mining, someone other than the locals - people named Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Rothschild etc.- gets ridiculously rich, after a century someone gets properly outraged, the mine is nationalized and the gringos kicked out. Even in the post
coup rush to privatize everything, Pinochet had enough sense to hold on to the copper cows which continue to enrich Chile (though he did give the Anaconda mining company $250,000,000 in compensation). Sometime in the illustrious colonial history of the mine, the Anaconda Company ran a town for the workers. Our guide cheerfully told us of the idyllic life of Chuqui miners in the company town: buying from the company store, going to the company movie theater, getting the company newspaper, going to the company doctor, and generally living the best darn company life one can imagine. Undoubtedly, in the olden days, there was a yellow brick road running right out of the desert into that oasis of gratitude and happiness. I am just as certain that any miners attempting to unionize workers to address workers versus company needs were quickly escorted with their families to the city limits and told to try their luck in the desert. Sadly, the copper brick road no longer leads to Chuqui town. Despite its magical heyday, the town built on top of a mine and next to its smelter had to be abandoned due to health and environmental problems. Today, it is a
ghost town, and most of it will soon be buried under slag heaps.
We returned to Santiago and spent the last few days of Antoine’s visit doing nothing. Carly went to work. I taught a couple of classes. Toine went to the the pre-Colombian museum. After the touronic demands of the north, a few days doing mostly nothing seemed to be in order. Then Antoine had to go back to professing and parenting, and Carly and I returned to the business of figuring how to live in Chile.
Thanks again Tia and Toine.
Good luck to Danae if you're reading this from your bunker in Kabul
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joel
non-member comment
awesome
I wish I was there. Or at least for the part where there was some singing of Total Eclipse Of the Heart.