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Published: June 21st 2006
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So our second stop in Chile took us only 1-hour from San Pedro, still within the bounds of the "El Loa" region, to the small city of Calama: famed mainly as a jumping-off point for trips to the huge (in fact the largest in the world) open-pit copper mine in nearby Chuquicamata (or just Chuqui, pronounced "Chucky", to the locals). Our first bus journey in Chile gave us a taste of the good things to come - smart, clean and well looked after buses, courteous and helpful staff, smooth asphalt roads - yes it´s fair to say it´s a much more pleasant experience than the bone-rattling, knee-jerking rides experienced in Bolivia. Unfortunately it comes with an inflated price tag and our Bolivia budgets have had to be adjusted to Chile levels which we´re finding means "damn expensive", in fact, almost as expensive as the UK!!!
As per usual, our arrival timing was impeccable - for the second time in two weeks we arrived into a minng town on a Sunday and after extensively questioning locals in poor Gringo Spanish, we finally established that visits were not possible and we´d have to hold out until Monday. Calama is large, fairly brash
and held no real appeal to us. It sems to be the way with mining towns that we´ve visited so far (well only two) that we don´t seem to connect with them. This one was more modern than the last, Potosí and it was fairly clean but there wasn´t much to do within the town - no decent green spaces and everything seemed to be closed when you didn´t want it to be - probably just poor timing on our part but we´ll still hold it against the place!
One striking difference between this particular town and Potosí, is the level of wealth displayed in both the people on the street and through obvious surrounding elements such as the number of banks, consumer goods stores and large flashing neon lights directing you to another purchase - it seems Chile has a far more European feel to it in our opinion, even the people look more European. One thing we haven´t found so far, despite repeated suggestions and warnings to the opposite, are that the people here are not so friendly. So far we´ve found them perfectly hospitable and very willing to help, trying out their best English to boot
and generally shaming our Spanish (not hard)! As it turns out, this gesture is well received since the Chilean Spanish dialect is damn hard to understand - it´s extremely slurred and certain letters seem to be perpetually dropped, particularly the letter "s". When your Spanish is very much in the "beginner´s" stage, it makes life doubly hard!
When Monday came, we finally got to do what we´d come for, a mine tour around the largest open-pit copper mine in the world. As we soon found out, the tour is all about astounding facts and figures; "the hole in the ground" (so to speak) is 4.3km long, 3km wide and 850m deep, every year the mine produces 600,000 tonnes of copper (as well as large quantities of molybdenum) and processing never stops. The large "Tonka-type" trucks that transport the ore out of the mine can carry up to 330 tonnes each, they use the same amount of diesel a normal car uses in two years, in just two and a half days (environmentalists will be hyper-ventilating at that thought) and each of the 3m high tires they ride on costs $12,000. The diggers that smash the rock cost $12million each,
Traffic Lights
With a distinctly British feel to them. the original version was 25m high and required 12 people to drive them (see photo), the newer ones are slighly smaller and are one-man beasts but are still as equally impressive. Yes, it´s fair to say the place really does dwarf the human-scale!!! Unfortunately it comes at a price beyond all of the obvious environmental issues - the town of Chuquicamata after which the mine is named, is getting in the way and because of dangers to health and the fact that GDP comes before a handful of houses and their occupiers, the town will be bulldozered within a year and all occupants moved to Calama. Already much of it is deserted and it feels like a ghost-town awaiting its fate. Whether the tours will continue who knows, myself and Laura both agree that they serve both ends equally - we see our mine and they spread good PR around a very murky operation indeed. Still, the world needs its plumbing and wiring and Chuqui certainly supplies those high demands.
Check out Chuqui from above using this
Google map.
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Iso
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The miner...
The effigy of the miner... in my blurry thursday morning vision - i actually thought was another catalogue-shot of tommy... glad you guys are having such a good time. all's good here. miss you! iso. x