TravelStream™ news feed for member arichardson on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/arichardson en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Sun, 13 Aug 2006 15:25:42 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1155496860/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1155496860/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1155496860/tpod.html Sun, 13 Aug 2006 15:25:42 -0400 Way south of the border

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Durango, Colorado, United States

Coming back to America didn't start well for me. It was 19 hours in a plane, and 40-some hours total from Easter Island to Durango, with plane changes in Santiago, Atlanta and Denver. I cannot sleep on planes. Half of Dad's and my checked bags didn't make it past Atlanta, and the shuttle driver who took us home overcharged us and refused to help us with our heavy, overloaded luggage.

It was noon. I took a three hour nap and tried to make a little of the day. But it was hard to get moving, and I couldn't get a hold of a friend in town to hang out. When I did, conversation was difficult. Dad had also just moved into a new place while I was gone, but the loft was nice enough, in town, and comfortable. I was happy to be out of the woods.

I wouldn't even say I was suffering from terrible reverse culture shock. My euphoria at returning was simply dampened by physical exhaustion. All I really wanted to do was stare at the hills and accept that, finally, I was home

But even that wouldn't have been enough. What I longed for, I guess, was to get some kind of grip on what had changed about me in those five months. Attempting to keep track of it while it was happening would have been like watching grass grow. And in no way did I, or do I currently, expect to see the big picture, or to capture the subtle shifts in my perspective.

In the weeks before, when asked to summarize my trip, I'd often made the sarcastic, callous remark that "it was a long lesson in overcoming obstacles." After all, I'd been a walking disease for over half of the time, and my host family often seemed to care less about making me feel "comfortable" than they did about making sure I wasn't "uncomfortable" (...while turning a profit).

But focusing on the difficulties of my life in Chile would have been to ignore half of the picture. After all, I'd traveled extensively, set eyes on new lands, observed a novel people and absorbed new manners of interpreting aspects of daily life and culture. At least that's the brochure's version of my experiences.

But, without using terms that sound like catchphrases, how could I possibly sum up what I got out of five months away from home? Had enough time passed for me to actually process it? Now, days afterward, even putting down an open-ended conclusion feels a tall task.

But coincidence helped me out. A man who'd been writing a travelogue in the local paper published his "coming home" article the day before I got home, August 6th, and that issue was waiting on the counter at the loft. He'd driven his BMW motorcycle from the northern reaches of Alaska, to the southern tip of South America and back up to Brazil in 10 months. You can find copies of the articles at his website: http://mytripjournal.com/jeremiahsjourney

On paper, it's a journey anyone would be envious of, but I'd read several of his previous articles and they'd enraged me. Jeremiah had made factual errors: he claimed once to have ridden into Lima, Perú from the north and through the Atacama Desert, which actually sits several hundred miles to the south of Lima on the border with Chile.

He'd also made statements that were culturally ignorant and insulting. Describing a plane flight from Panama to Colombia a few months ago, he wrote this:

"I drew the middle seat. To my left was an 800-pound gorilla wearing dark sunglasses and a cheap suit, clutching a briefcase as though his life depended on it. Maybe it did. The flight attendant asked him several times to stow it in the overhead compartment-he simply stared straight ahead, sweating profusely. To my right was a 65-year-old woman trying desperately to look 55, kissing her rosary while making the sign of the cross .... We sailed over snow-capped peaks barely breaking above the clouds and tropical forests so dense the light never hit the ground. From this altitude you couldn't see the narco-traffickers, the paramilitaries, the FARC guerillas, the corrupt police, or the muggers and thieves that everyone was so worried about. The infamous coca fields were simply part of the blue-green patchwork of color that looked more inviting than threatening. I couldn't wait to touch down ..." ("Into the Belly of the Beast," 12/5/2005).

He went on to say some very kind things about Colombia, and to denote some positive experiences in the towns he traveled through. But the previous passage was unforgivable to me. To the best of my knowledge, in today's Colombia, most of the drug operations are run out of the country's jungles and, yes, are tied to the guerilla movements that operate in those areas. But those areas are mostly in the south of Colombia. One would not fly over them coming from Panama City. Perhaps the more obvious thing to point out is that not every Colombian who can afford a plane ticket is tied to the drug trade. Not every man in a suit who refuses to give up his suitcase is a thug carrying dirty money. Every plane flight I took in Latin America was just a mess; no one, no one, followed regulations or listened to the flight attendants. Besides, some people just dislike airplanes.

In a sense, what I read in that article was an only slightly veiled xenophobia-the kind of xenophobia from those who consider themselves "global citizens" simply because they are well-traveled. It's the worst kind, in my opinion.

I failed to understand how a man could fail to see that a BMW motorcycle was more than just transportation. It was a barrier between him and the people he was meeting. Perhaps, he'd assumed that a vehicle that was open to the elements would somehow bring him more in contact with culture-not just with the wind and rain. Being a westerner makes it difficult enough to relate to another person, but such an obvious display of wealth couldn't have helped. That bicycle likely poisoned the well in every town he stopped in, simply because it would have caused a stir in the community to see him ride in, and the brand name on the bike would have branded him as a wealthy gringo. The locals would have treated him like something more than just another guest; giving him only one look at their lives.

On the flight home, I read a book by a Scotsman who walked across Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban (The Places In Between, by Rory Stewart). That, it seemed to me, was a brilliant way to try and find truth in a foreign people-on foot, dressed in local clothing, speaking the regional dialects. The closer one gets to the ground, the more genuine they become, and the more genuine their interactions are.

One the other side, there was this Durangoan Che impersonator. But seemed to make some progress as the articles went along, I'll admit, and offered glimmers of hope that he wasn't simply another wealthy American with spare cash and too much free time. And for a man who'd lived in Durango for 30 years, the trip couldn't help but be a growing experience. It would have been so for anyone.

But, returning to the point, his closing article disappointed me. Basically, he attempted to underline the differences he saw between the Durango he returned to and the places he'd visited. He was struggling to make sense of all of the change he'd seen in 800-odd words.

First, he criticized the "new" Durango, only 10 months different from when he left, as having "more people, more condos, more cars, more noise, more congestion, more everything ..." He didn't think to consider that, perhaps, his perspective had changed or that he might have idealized his hometown during his absence. Change, of course, is inevitable. And Durango really doesn't seem all that different to me now.

Next, he denoted "three" things about American society that had become "foreign" to him:

--1: "The richness of its soil." A poor pun that he translates into: " This country is awash in cash and all of the material possessions it can buy ... Talk of a downturn in our economy merely means that most Americans can afford only the 40-inch flat-screen TV instead of the 50-inch model."

--2: "Americans enjoy a degree of convenience unparalleled in human history ... we can obtain virtually anything, anytime, and for far less than it would cost the world's average citizen - even if it were available to them, and usually it's not."

--3: "...arguably a product of the former two: our manic lifestyle." ("No Place like Home, 8/6/06)

No, that's not arguable, it's obvious. The fact of the matter is that all three points are really the same one; he's just criticizing American materialism, as if it were entirely unique to us-or, rather, that we took it to a new degree. The points are valid enough, though they are sprinkled with hyperbole. Most Americans cannot afford a flat screen television. Many cannot even afford to drive a car. An astounding proportion cannot even buy health insurance.

But by noticing these things, and only these things, the writer displayed that he, too, is a materialist. He ends by saying he sees America through the eyes of an outsider nowadays, "often great, but needlessly selfish," and recommends that we "plot a new course-as global citizens-wherein we learn to share." But that's all he sees. It's cliché to criticize Americans in terms of consumption; it's something we'd all like to see change, but for the moment it seems to be a given. And it's not unique to us.

Not even a week back in the country, I couldn't possibly name all of the differences I see between Chile and America, nor the similarities. Are Americans the only materialists in the world? Certainly not. I saw my host mother and sister pore over an Avon catalogue for hours every odd week, getting ready to make the next makeup order-which arrived in a box almost too heavy to lift. Many Chileans were purchasing those damned flat-screen Tvs, and racking up such astounding credit card debt that it's surprising anyone would trust them with the little sheets of plastic. A friend of mine saw a Chilean man ask if he could make a $12 pharmacy purchase in three payments on his credit card. I even saw a truck and SUV craze hitting the country, where gas is up around $5 a gallon.

Rising prosperity, it seems, drives people to consume more, even if that means consuming irresponsibly.

What other differences are there? Well, I've noticed that the ritual acts of greeting and parting in Chile, shaking hands and kissing on the cheek, are often saved in the US for instances in which one wants to show respect or special affection. I remember noting the symptoms of a predominantly Catholic society as compared to a predominantly protestant one-both of which are often quite secular. I saw a society in Chile that placed a very high value on spending time with family, but in which one rarely made friends far outside the family. My host family knew none of their neighbors' names, for example. But all of these subjects are mired in complexity, and I've summarized them in far too superficial of a way.

If I already knew that nothing in life is black and white, the subtlety and complexity in life has grown even more obvious to me-as has the danger of sinking into total relativism. Either way, I appreciate the exercise of interacting with other cultures, of attempting to look through the eyes of others, to see the infinite facets to every issue. Traveling reminds me of the irresponsibility in acting righteous and in making assumptions. I, of course, continue to do both of those things ...

Furthermore, I believe I've come to understand certain things that were unclear to me the first few times I left this country. For instance, no matter how much interaction I have with other cultures, I will forever remain an American. And, as I've already alluded to, when one attempts to highlight stark differences between peoples, they usually fail to comprehend their, at turns tragic, comical and profoundly unifying similarities. Either way, it seems that all of our souls are bound to tap out the rhythm of the same tune, even if we play it with different instruments and sing in different tongues.

(If that last sentence was a bit clichéd, forgive me.)

Every time I've gone overseas, I've viewed it as an opportunity to come back new, different, to seize the opportunity to begin again. Perhaps that's foolish and idealistic; new beginnings don't come easily or gracefully, and rarely pan out as one would hope for. Watching the past drift away and out of reach is liable to make me feel lethargic, even lost-as if in I were caught a process well beyond my control. When life is in constant motion, closure is very hard to come by. And there's no need to obsess over it.

And if life is that endlessly onward march to the sea that I've long believed it is, in which every person you meet and every place you see marks you in a way that you will carry forever, then the effects of those interactions and encounters are neither singular nor concrete. Chile will influence my future, and my future will influence the ways in which I will look back on Chile.

What changed in me? Ask me tomorrow, and you might well get a different answer.

How's that for an open-ended conclusion?
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1154839080/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1154839080/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1154839080/tpod.html Sat, 12 Aug 2006 15:33:39 -0400 Way south of the border

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Hanga Roa, Easter Island, Chile

Our jaunt to Easter Island perhaps does not fit into this log. Though it's nominally Chilean Territory, that small scrap of land, surrounded by endless miles of cold sea, is entirely Polynesian. Its only Latin American features are the currency, certain bland food dishes carried over from the mainland, and the Spanish spoken by the islanders-but only when they aren't communicating in their native tongue or in English with the tourists.
In a way, this feels like a detached chapter, tacked on at the end to provide a breather before closing. And lucky for the rest of the trip, I'll judge it that way-as an isolated and disconnected event-because it was easily the most captivating location I've visited in the last five months.
Easter Island, a barren, 66 square-mile patch of ruins, would be captivating even if it were on the mainland-simply because of the famous mysteries surrounding the carving, transportation and raising of the statues ("Moai") that are now ubiquitous on the island. But Rapa Nui, as it's now known in the native language-originally it was called "Te Pito Kura," is also the most remote inhabited piece of land in the world. One must fly five hours from Santiago, over unbroken blue sea to reach the island, which comes upon you as stunningly quickly as it could disappear. Chile sits about 2000 miles east, the Pitcairn Islands (recently famous for a polygamy scandal among their inhabitants, British descendants, involving statutory rape) over 1500 to the west.
Nowadays, the almost-treeless, windy island is somehow reaping benefits from a past that was forever turbulent. I'll fragmentarily, imprecisely and insufficiently summarize it as follows. Polynesians appeared on the island at least 1200 years ago, and the locals credit their arrival to a legendary man named Hotu Matua, who arrived from the west on a massive seagoing canoe. He landed on the only sandy beach on the island, named Anakena, and began constructing a highly organized, hierarchical society. Life was difficult; Easter Island is too cold and windy for most Polynesian crops, the water to frigid for fish. Slowly, order was established and the people found a way to survive, but not for long.
An instrument of order, like in ancient Egypt and Greece, was the construction of massive public works, supposedly directed to the gods, both the living and the eternal-in this case, those statues and the giant rock platforms they sit upon. What developed is a seemingly classic mismanagement of resources-or at least a tragic ignorance of how fragile such island ecosystems are. The population grew, perhaps to even 20.000 people, and had to be fed, and resources had to be used to raise the statues (food for the workers and timber to roll the statues across, for example, were necessary).
Be it because of drought or human excesses, at one point all of the trees were gone, the land birds and seabirds eaten, along with even the rats. The people turned on their Gods. The hierarchy was broken. Different clans began to war with one another.
And that was the type of society Europeans first stumbled across. Lurching toward the island in their wooden vessels, they were regularly greeted by the islanders, who sped out in fast, light canoes and attempted to trade with the sailors. The first European to record a visit to the island was a Dutchman, Jacob Roggeveen-who spotted the island on Easter Sunday 1722. Captain Cook later visited the island. What they found were a ragged people, hardened by the weather and by depravity, and practically all of the Moai toppled. Remember, they were offerings to the Gods, and probably meant to resemble them as well-the same Gods that had left them in the middle of the Pacific to eat but rats and, eventually, one another. They turned to a strange form of cult worship, at one point, of birds-perhaps because they wanted them to come back.
Islanders were sold off into the slave trade. Disease killed many after European arrival and many more when, in the 18 and 1900's, Rapa Nui people were liberated from slavery and deposited back on the island-newly and unwittingly infecting their kin. Foreigners raised sheep on the island and proselytized the inhabitants.
As a result of Chile's War of the Pacific-in which the country took mineral-rich lands from Perú and Bolivia, cutting off the latter's access to the ocean, lost western Patagonia to the Argentina (back then, it just seemed like a cold desert, today it's rich in natural gas)-the skinny country gained extraordinary confidence and began to demonstrate its power over the region. Looking to expand Chile's territorial sea, in 1888, a Chilean naval officer overran the island and annexed it. Like everyone else, they tried to make some money off of it, and weren't terribly successful, but were terribly exploitative of the locals. Rapa Nui still carries intense anger toward Chile and Chileans, remembering how naval officers exploited their women and ran the island like a police state-their only credibility flowing from their firepower.
The island's history, thus far, appears to have been a series of glorious ideas brought down in spectacular failure.

Today, though, most people would be hard-pressed to tell you where Easter Island is. They've seen the statues, yes. But in a world where even Americans would have to search long and hard for Hawaii on a globe, Easter Island is mused at but rarely visited.
And that plays right into the hands of those who visit it. Rapa Nui's extraordinary isolation means that only accessible from two airports-Santiago, Chile and Papeete, Tahiti. Usually only a flight a day lands there, carrying at most 300 and some people. Outside of high season, you can get the statues to yourself for long periods of time.
For dad and I, it was a stark contrast to Perú, where foreigners were easier to find than locals and where street vendors and waiters constantly attempted to corral us into their businesses, hounding us in broken English.
Perhaps the memory of the trip is taking a rental scooter out to Ahu Tongariki (dad drove, I stayed warm on the back), the largest of the Ahu ("platforms," this one with 15 statues atop it), at sunrise. Through a cold morning wind, we dragged ourselves up the south coast, avoiding potholes and squinting in the dark at stark silhouettes, long shadows and a glint of golden sky. And all morning, for over an hour, we were the only humans to be seen. Half an hour through the wind, an hour alone with the fallen gods and only two days from home. Feeling that, I believe, is why we flew thousands of miles over endless water.
The trip, of course, consisted of many other things. The first day, we biked across much of the island, resting for a few hours at the beach and dragging ourselves up the last few hills. We took two full-day tours of the island-one showcasing the Moai, the other that later "Bird-Man" cult-with the Australian husband of our hotel's owner, a Rapa Nui woman (only Rapa Nui are allowed to own land on the island). He came to the island in the early nineties as, and now I hope I'm getting this correct, the head carpenter for the movie "Rapa Nui."
The local gene pool had grown too small and all of the women were looking to marry off the island, and he lived like a rock star for the first few months. The movie, partially funded by Kevin Costner, brought quite a bit of money to the island, and certainly aroused interest in it among tourists. After a series of odd tours in broken English, Bill was more-than-welcome-well read, pensive and engaging, the tours were the best of all my five months down south.
(The film, by the way, is atrocious. Perhaps that's harsh ... but the lead actor is Japanese, and the main antagonist is named Esai Morales-I guess anyone with brown skin can go for Polynesian in Hollywood. The movie itself is full of twisted facts used to build a generic plotline that fails to draw you in, but masquerades as an artistic representation of decades' worth anthropological data.)
We even saw some Polynesian dancing, performed by a group of guys who were really into it and a group of women who were generally gorgeous. The guys slapped their chests and stomped around, and the women shook their hips the entire time. You know what I was staring at the whole time. Afterward, I wondered if it wasn't all a bit exploitative, but said to myself that, hey, I got my $20-worth of booty shake, so I had no reason to complain.
The people of the island are a strange group. One Polynesian man with long hair tied up in a bandanna, walked around in a camouflage jacket, blue jeans and combat boots. Rapa Nui Rambo, I called him. Dad bought a t-shirt from a pretty obvious Rapa Nui Drag Queen and we purchased lunch from another-whose hands had grown wrinkled, dry and thin over the years, and seemed out of place without a cigarette scissor between the middle and index fingers.
Leaving from the Easter Island airport on the 5th, I felt that the process of going home had truly begun. I had yet to say goodbye to a few friends, and to collect my things from my host family (in a civil manner). But I was heading in the right direction. Sitting out in the sun, waiting to board the plane, I caught a whiff of new beginnings.

Perhaps I should give you more, but I'm ready to close out this journal. One more entry and you'll be done with me, and then we can both begin something new.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1154137620/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1154137620/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1154137620/tpod.html Fri, 28 Jul 2006 21:48:52 -0400 Way south of the border

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La Serena, Chile

Last Monday, a little after 2 a.m., I stood waiting in line with dad at Chilean immigration at Santiago's airport. Having just returned from an exhausting whirlwind tour of Perú, and at such an early hour, handing my passport over to the official felt laborious. And it was certainly strange to re-enter a country that I saw myself in the process of leaving.
The prospect of two weeks in Chile after such a successful tour drained me, and as I settled into bed at the hotel, sleep came easily. In truth, I think I was simply unhappy to be back in Santiago, the city whose air had made me sick for several months, and where I had a list of things to do in a short period of time-with the host family, with the few friends left in town, and with my grades. Besides that, the weather wasn't good; it was cold and very rainy.
Call it a hangover, if you will. In ten days, I'd seen Lima, Cuzco, Machu Pichu, the Sacred Valley, Lake Titicaca and the "White City" of Arequipa. I didn't keep my journal those days, and I wasn't taking notes-the days were too full, and I ended them too tired to do so. If you want a synopsis, go to www.aventouras.com and find the "Discover Peru" tour. In essence, I ate well, flew all over the country, saw strange and unique cultures surviving into modern times (like the inhabitants of the "floating islands," a chain of thick, man-made reed rafts floating on Lake Titicaca) and I wandered a dozen Inca and Pre-Inca ruins, but not enough to sour my taste for them.
It was an "adventure tour," so parts of the travel were done either by foot hiking, pedaling on bikes or paddling in rafts and kayaks. If I were to attempt a comprehensive review like I wrote on my trip to San Pedro, the result would be far more than I want to write and far more than you would want to read-at the very least, you wouldn't be entertained.
So, I'll give you an anecdote that, hopefully, will be interesting and agreeable ... sorry, no vast descriptions of the mountaintop ruins of Machu Pichu or of the strange dressing habits of the residents of Taquile Island. I'll do what I can from here in La Serena, a city 7 hours north of Santiago in bus, where dad and I have escaped to clean air, lower population density and sunlight.

At the very least, I've got 30 pictures up on the previous entry.


As I said in San Pedro, tours become a story of guides, and perhaps the most compelling-and strange-character to drag us through a ruin waited for us at the train station in Aguas Calientes, at the base of Machu Pichu. Everyone on their way to that "Wonder of the New World," must step off the train in Aguas Calientes, wander through a handicrafts market full of overly aggressive salespeople hawking alpaca clothing, find a hotel and take the bus up the hill (barring those who walk four days on the Inca Trail). Standing silently outside the depot, dressed all in khaki, with a clipboard, a placard bearing our last name and a hat embroidered with the name of a "certified guide school," was Rubén.
Perhaps five-foot-four, of dark Quechua complexion and black-hair, Rubén had very feline features. He quietly took my father's bag, instead of jerking it out of his hand like everyone before, and led us down to the hotel, only to reappear an hour later-wearing a t-shirt and carrying a backpack-to take us to the top of Putukusi, a large hill overlooking Machu Pichu and not frequently visited by tourists.
Quietly, and without a bead of sweat on his forehead, he led us up the 1500 feet of vertical rise, half of which had to be climbed on antiquated wooden ladders (6 of them, with 224 rungs) supposedly like some the Incas built. He took his job more-than-seriously, and confidently believed that he knew where the best photo-ops were, carrying our walking sticks up the ladders, climbing with one hand, egging us on toward exhaustion. As we caught our breath, he dispensed information in slow and well-pronounced Spanish ("Castellano"), as we had requested-too many guides had given us partial and garbled lectures in broken English up to that point. Highly professional, each series of factoids rolled off his tongue as if they had been memorized.
Off the clock, though, Rubén's strange side came out. And it was such a contrasting personality that reconciling the two became impossible.

All of Perú, it seemed, was celebrating the festival of the "Virgin of Carmen." The tourist-loving town of Aguas Calientes was no exception, and every night they hosted some sort of celebration in their Plaza de Armas. That Tuesday night (perhaps it was a Wednesday-in the morning we would tour Machu Pichu), a loud parade led six groups of dancers and their brass bands past our restaurant to the Plaza.
The restaurant was openly "turistico," and the meal-pizza and ribs-was eaten silently as the brass bands' noise drowned out our very thoughts. Once the party had reached the plaza, a band came into the restaurant to play Andean Music. Only three things separated them from all of the previous groups we'd seen-in the baggage claims of every airport, on street corners, in plazas and in almost every restaurant we ate in-they only played "El Condor Pasa" once, their bass player used an amp and they had dancers.
One of them was a tall, homely girl of about 16, who seemed to absently lope across the floor. But the other, who appeared lively, though she must have danced the dances a thousand times before, caught my darting, almost shameful, glances. She couldn't have been over the age of 15, but she was absolutely gorgeous. Her black hair was woven into a pair of braids that curled down behind her ears. She flashed a smile that could immediately disarm anyone whose eyes she met, and I had such a sinking sensation in my stomach more than a few times. There was a large, open grill in the middle of the room, where everyone's food was being cooked, and she spun toward and away from it with a gleeful distance that seemed to carry her miles away. Yes, I was captivated.
At one point, though, the music stopped, and everything appeared to be over. I looked toward the bar, thinking that Rubén might go over there to sort out the check, but instead saw her walking vaguely in my direction. I assumed she was headed for the door, to watch the remains of the procession outside, but she continued straight toward me. She put her hands on the backrest of my chair and asked me the question that had killed my spirits a hundred times before: "would you like to dance?"
My head sunk into my hands. Could she have asked nothing else of me? Certainly, I would have joyfully obliged her by doing anything other than dance. (That sounds wrong, but I say it with the purest of intentions.)
The opening notes of "La Bamba" began to play in the background. A girl at the next table, an American, leaned over to encourage me, "Do it! I did it!" But she clearly loved dancing; on the way to the restroom, earlier, she'd spontaneously danced with the cook. Dad and Rubén egged me on. I had to dance; there was no courteous way to opt out.
So, for the three and some minutes of that ditty, I did a self-conscious, hesitant, almost pathetic twist with her. She smiled the whole time. I attempted to make witty statements in Spanish. When it ended (mercifully) she was still smiling, and I brought her two hands together by the curled fingertips and thanked her. I never got her name.
But halfway through the song, I'd seen something strange. There was a man on the dance floor with that American girl, who my dad later described as "hot to trot," and the pair was drawing claps and cheers (and, luckily, attention away from me). I didn't recognize him at first, but it was Rubén. He was standing straight and proper, gracefully and forcefully leading his partner. It was not the man who'd been leading us all day, reserved, always 30 seconds further up the trail and speaking memorized, precise Castilian.
He sat down at the table when it was done and remarked that he really only like to dance to Andean Music. Perhaps he was trying to be humble. He laughed at me. I thought the laugh rather girly.
Dad complemented him and remarked that I, on the other hand, needed lessons. I need more than lessons.
For some reason, though, in the 15 minutes before we paid and left, Rubén kept raising his beer to toast me every time I was about to take a sip. At a certain point, it became irritating and strange to continuously toast him.
Everyone walked down to the plaza and looked at the dancers. The groups were arranged in separate corners of the plaza, and beer and chicha flowed freely. It was about 9 p.m. Dad said he was ready for bed. We were getting up early for our trip to Machu Pichu-the bus would leave at 5:30 the next morning.
As Rubén walked back to the hotel with us, he kept trying to convince me to return to the party for "una cerveza más." In truth, I was hoping to shake him and do just that, but his insistence that I do it with him became almost pathetic, and I said I would.
You see, I had impressed him earlier in the day with the two words of Quechua I had learned in Santiago earlier in the year. I couldn't say my name but I could perfectly state that "yes, I speak Quechua." He wanted to introduce me to some friends, and was acting strangely.
Halfway down the two blocks back to the square, Rubén said he had to go to the bathroom and turned to a wall. I walked 20 feet down, with my back to him, and he jokingly squeaked that I was "embarrassing him." I still haven't figured out how or why he was embarrassed, but the statement has stuck with me.
As naïve as it may sound, I was hoping that is would be just "one beer more." But he introduced me to his brother-already absolutely blasted-and four of his friends, all guys. They were friendly enough, but had formed their circle off in the corner of the plaza when I wanted to be in the center. I was handed a beer by a dashing man of about 30 in a brown leather jacket that Rubén called the "next mayor of Aguas Calientes."
One friend was a kid about my age named César who made several jokes about marijuana and offered to "show me the menu" of girls in town. One was guy whose appearance reminded me of a Peruvian kid at Georgetown named Marco. The last one I remember was a man who had to be a tour guide-he wore a matching baseball cap and windbreaker and proclaimed what a lovely town Aguas Calientes was ("no one here will rob you ... "). I talked with him most of the time, about the town, the festival and about the language of Quechua (but not in Quechua).
Halfway through the first beer, the "mayor" came back and gave me another. I tried to turn it down, but he was insistent. Rubén stared at me and implored me not to refuse the man's generosity. I was double fisting. Then Rubén appeared with a liter of beer, and a drinking ritual involving that bottle and a small plastic cup began. Apparently, one was supposed to down the contents of the cup, pass it to the right, and pour it for the next guy. When it reached me, somehow I was made to pour it for myself-a tough duty when I was already holding to open beer bottles.
I down the cup and, perhaps as intended, downed the contents of the partially finished bottle to free up a hand-that liter was coming back around the circle all too quickly. Rubén continued toasting me nonstop.
At one point, he disappeared for thirty minutes to apparently deal with some customers who'd arrived on the night train. He implored me to stay in that corner, with his friends, and to wander nowhere. Most everyone left, and I stood leaning against a wooden pillar talking to that tour-guide-type, staring at the girls dancing joyfully only 20 feet away. I probably drank a beer or two more.
I didn't go anywhere. I guess Rubén considered me his responsibility. I found him overbearing. When he returned, I asked him where the bathroom was. He felt like taking me to the wall I was supposed to pee on, though he could have just pointed, and then waited for me to finish. I said I wanted to see the dancing. He told me to wait, and pointed me back toward the circle.
When he showed up again, he was carrying another liter. I said I wanted to see the dancing and then to go home. I said I didn't want to go up to Machu Pichu with a hangover. He said it was better with a hangover and said he wouldn't show me the dancing in the plaza until we (he, his brother and I) finished the new liter. Irritated, I dutifully and quickly drank my small plastic cups to make the liter disappear quicker.
It felt like morning, and I knew I wasn't going to get much sleep before taking that bus up into the mists. I was uncomfortable with how Rubén was forcing me to drink more than I wanted to. His friends kept making jokes about Rubén's intentions with me, which I didn't understand. Rubén kept laughingly warning them, now uncomfortable, that I spoke Quechua. That was a good one.
When the liter was empty, I gave Rubén a look and he looked back, mildly disappointed in me. For five minutes, we wandered the plaza, cursorily touring the event. Rubén's brother told me five or six times, pointing to the dancers that, "this party is very typical of the region." Another time he explained that the dancers were dancing out of "devotion to the virgin."
A boy appeared with a pitcher of chicha. Rubén allowed me to take a sip and jerked the cup from my hands-probably correctly, seeing as my stomach wasn't used to the high-alcohol "corn beer"-and then he downed the rest. So much for "una cerveza más." It was frothy and red, bland but sweet.
One group was declared the winner of the festival. Their leading dancer was hoisted up onto the rest of the group's shoulders. Foreigners like myself wandered through the plaza, unsure what to make of it. Toddlers who'd stumbled across half-full beers and cups of chicha wobbled and tripped their way across the cobblestones. Everyone passed through in their own world, crammed together and strangely distant.
Rubén and his brother tried once more to get me to drink, trying to lure me into a bar on the way back to the hotel. I refused their generosity. Earlier in the night, he'd told me that the "real party" would begin after midnight, in the bars where they played "good electronic music."
As suspicious as he'd made me, though, Rubén led me right back to the hotel, told me goodnight, and made his brother do the same on the front stoop-imploring him to say, in broken and drunken English, "it was a pleasure to meet you."
I stumbled upstairs to the room, waking up dad. I sat down on the bed and asked him what time it was. "11 o'clock."

I hated and envied Rubén the next morning. We caught the 6 a.m. bus, not the 5:30 one. Mountaintop ruins mean lots of stairs, and he trotted up them with ease, while I trailed behind with a mild headache and a 2-liter bottle of water in my backpack. His guide persona was back, and in full form. After a couple of cups of chicha, six or seven beers and five hours of sleep, he hadn't missed a beat. He kept asking me, "Don Agustín," if I planned to climb "Wayna Pichu Mountain" that afternoon.
I was noncommittal, and thought back to the night before, when he'd told me the ruins were "more beautiful" with a hangover. I wasn't so sure.
But they were damned interesting.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1153267560/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1153267560/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1153267560/tpod.html Wed, 26 Jul 2006 13:06:36 -0400 Way south of the border

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Cuzco, Peru

Here are some photos from Dad and I's ongoing trip in Perú. Will I figure out how to write this trip into an entry? We'll see. First, I have to find time.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152557340/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152557340/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152557340/tpod.html Wed, 12 Jul 2006 15:22:29 -0400 Way south of the border

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Calama, Chile

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Sunday meant relaxing and waiting around for the bus to Calama in the evening. I wandered the town, looking at Lapis Lazuli and kept balking at the prices. By the time I'd decided to make a purchase, the shops had closed down to watch the World Cup Final. We all caught most of it over a cheap lunch on a small TV, whose signal faded in and out. Mark left at 3 to take his sister to the airport-he would return after I'd left to catch a bus with Sarah toward Arica, beginning their voyage north to Peru and Cuzco.

Sarah and I wandered the town until 6, when I left. We talked, and I wrote some of this-though clearly not all of it, it's far too long and far too much information. We said goodbye.

I sat down on the bus, hoping to get some video of the barren desert, but it was too dark at that point, and I just admired the view on the road toward Calama: the mountains fading from red to blue, the near-full moon above them, and the lights of town and of Chuquicamata, whose orange glow flared up in plumes of dust.

There, I wandered town looking for a cheap hostel. The best I could get was $11 a night, at a place called "el Arriero." Your bargaining power is nil when you're a lone gringo, and the owners knew it. The bathroom was trashed and the rooms had no heaters-though the beds had lots of blankets. The place clearly doubled as lodging for out-of-towners working in the mine, and they were crammed into rooms to save money.

Later on, in an internet cafe, I tried to piece this together, and a strange woman begged me for money-first by simply asking, then by asking to see my hand (for good luck), then by pushing out her stomach to act as if she were pregnant and then by tapping the wooden room key in my pocket (saying it was my wallet and that I surely had a "monedita" for her). All I had was bills, I refused her and repeated "Lo siento, Señora" until she left. I wonder if I've become calloused in the face of such things.

I went to bed early, wrapping myself up in the mummy sleeping bag, hoping to awake and call to arrange a tour of Chuquicamata before the plane left. My cold didn't seem to have improved much over the previous 5 days, so I loaded up on decongestants and closed my eyes.

Monday, July 10, 2006

I awoke rested, and called the numbers I had for Public Relations at Chuquicamata precisely at 8:00 a.m., as the man who'd given me the number advised-the tours fill up quickly, he said. But no one answered. As I packed up and got dressed, I kept calling and no one responded still, even at 8:45.

As I left, I walked out with some miners clad in yellow, waterproof suits, splotched thoroughly with mud and covered in a film of dust. We nodded, acknowledged one another, and I left. Not trusting "el Arriero" to store one of my bags until night, I walked up the street to a more reputable-looking establishment whose owner allowed me to stash it for free.

The tourist information center was only a few blocks away, in part of a run-down city park, and inside the ladies working there informed me that Codelco might not be offering tours-the Friday before, a deadly accident had occurred precisely where the tourist overlook was located. Uplifting. They told me to come back at 9:30 and pointed me toward breakfast-$4 worth of undercooked eggs. The fruit juice was good, though, and I got to see a new part of a new town, looking on the bright side.

When I came back, the women in the tourist center said everything was in order and offered to reserve my spot on the tour for free. They told me to start heading up to the mine at about one in the afternoon. To burn the time, I wandered town, and when 13:00 rolled around, I walked to the plaza to find a yellow colectivo, a type of taxi that doesn't leave until it's full and follows fixed routes (to save its passengers money), boarding one of the five that were lined up on the corner.

In short order, we raced across a barren stretch of land, where ground appeared to have been broken on a massive development (there'd been some moving of dirt, at least), up the hill and into the town of Chuquicamata-"Chuqui" for short. It reminded me of every other company mining town I've ever seen (Silver City, Jerome, Sewell ...), though it was probably most similar to Tyrone, N.M., which sits aside another famously huge open pit mine, the Santa Rita. The atmosphere was working class, and a little run down-most bars were "employees only," and no one walked in the parks.

It turns out that, because of a recent accord Chile signed onto, no one is allowed to live in an "industrial area," so Codelco was moving all of the workers away from the mine and into Chuquicamata-hence the ghost town atmosphere.

After waiting around in the lobby, an expensive building filled with old wooden cabinetry and lined with American-made "antiques" from before the 1950s, I listened to a brief introduction in Spanish, skipped the English one (inevitably less informative) and boarded the bus. Once everyone boarded, English and Spanish speakers alike, the pretty tour guide began to describe what we were seeing, first in Spanish and then partially in English: what was once the world's largest steam shovel, now replaced by smaller, more efficient machines (it had to be operated by 12 people at once); the pools of sulfuric acid, to leech out the copper from the rock; a large dump truck, too small to be efficiently used in the mine any more, etc. I think she was basically hired to be a visual attraction, so some of the strange things she said would go unheard.

One of those odd sights was a mountain of tailings that, she said, covered what was once the local hospital ("one of the most modern in all of Latin America"). Apparently, because the dump trucks burn 3 liters of gas a minute, it's cheaper to dump the scrap rock in town.

Why dump so close to the residents? Well, the guide began to describe the "Plan Calama" to move people away from Chuqui, saying it would be done in 2007 ("next year") and pointing to its successes, like a small housing development near the airport. The funny thing is that my guidebook says the project should reach completion in 2003. I assume his info came from the same tour as mine. But 5000 people still live in Chuqui. How long have they been saying "next year" at Codelco? Could they have at least waited a little longer before burying the hospital?

The closest we got to the mine was a metal observation deck on the mine's lip. Over a mile and a half long and a mile wide, Chuqui is a truly massive hole in the ground. An intertwining set of spiral roads, dozens of them and all about a football field wide, weaved up the pit's walls. I began to think that Santa Rita was a bigger mine, but remembered that you only look down into Santa Rita, and that I was much younger and smaller when I saw it. At Chuquicamata, the opposite rim was about 30 stories higher than where the viewpoint stood-and several kilometers off.

Massive dual-wheel trucks cranked up the roads to the smelter with ore, and barreled back down for more. They dwarfed the Toyotas tailing them, as well as the out-of-commission dump truck left out for the tourists (the in-service ones, German-made, were almost twice as large-and I was only half as tall as the wheel on the smaller of the two).

The trucks move 60,000 tons of rock a day-the equivalent of one Cerro Santa Lucia, the famous hill in the dead center of Santiago. They work day and night. It may not be underground, but there's still no night at Chuqui's mine.

Basically, though, we were left to stare at the pit for a 15 minutes, dust spiraling up out of it, before the guide called us back onto the bus and ended our cursory, hour-long "tour" of the mine. Mildly disappointed, but with a grasp of Chuqui's singular size, I left in another yellow colectivo for town, where I piddled away the time, waiting to go to the airport. The sunset out the airplane window-when I finally got on the plane (none of the announcements were in English and you know how hard intercoms are to understand ...)-was unbelievable. All of the dust thrown into the sky by the mine, by the supposedly under-construction housing developments (el Arriero?, reflected the fading sun in deep violet, indigo, red, yellow, orange and even some green (ROY G BIV, yes it was like a rainbow).

The flight was routed through Antofagasta, half an hour to the west. Two of LAN's flights that day had been cancelled, and my 1 hour, 20 minute flight dragged on into 3. Haggard and ready for bed, I stumbled off the airport shuttle and went up to the apartment, where I gave the family a short overview of the week's activities and drank some Nescafé. They wanted to feed me, but even though I was tired, some friends were leaving the next day and their goodbye dinner was that night.

At 11:30, I arrived at the Brazilian steakhouse they'd gone to, just in time to have a beer and say goodbye. I walked around for a few hours with two friends and hung out at one's apartment. Time flew, and I got home at 4 a.m.

Without much sleep, I ran around town to turn in almost-overdue library books and to turn in my last paper. When night came, I ate dinner with the family-lasagna made with ketchup-and began to pack, ready to be out, for dad to come and for our trip: 3 weeks, the two most famous archaeological sites in South America. Until then ...
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152470700/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152470700/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152470700/tpod.html Wed, 12 Jul 2006 14:48:50 -0400 Way south of the border

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San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

Saturday, 7/8/2006 Sandboarding with Emilio

To open, I must say that Emilio, the man I hired to take me sandboarding in Death Valley, came to as a result of rave reviews from the two girls I was traveling with. One had hired him two days in a row, the other one: both went with him to the altiplano lakes, one went sandboarding. Fitz, who went on those same tours, told me that during an entire day, Emilio didn't say more than 10 sentences to his tour group.

Emilio came to pick me up in a hired car on Saturday at 9:45, 15 minutes late. He sat in the passenger seat, and his driver, a chubby, jovial San Pedro Indian handed me a book on the region's history, printed and compiled by CODELCO, Chile's national copper company, while Emilio looked for the other five people who'd promised to come sandboarding that day.

Emilio is a wiry Uruguayan man of in his late 20s, by my best estimation. He could be older, as the cracks in his sun burnt face and worn hands are permanently filled with a film of sand and grime. Nonetheless, his European ancestry is impossible to hide: dirty and worn as it his, his skin is as light as a tourist's, and his accent (the butchery of Js and double Ls) is all-too-characteristic of an "Uruguaayjo." His shoulder-length hair is dirty blonde and unkempt. He pranced around town, when he didn't have a client, in well-worn Bolivian-knit pullovers and cargo pants.

Emilio and I stopped at about 4 locations, and returned with no one. In silence, we drove to Death Valley. This was the point where I should have ensured that Emilio was planning on giving me the price he'd given Sarah the day before-about $14-because it looked like I was going to get private lessons. After all, Latin American tour guides, like taxi drivers, love to screw you if you don't fix a price beforehand.

But I didn't. The picture book was interesting enough, anyway.

After the truck stopped, Emilio asked if it would be "OK" if we only stayed out until noon. I said sure. The dune was big, but there was only one way down it, and I assumed I'd be bored of sandboarding after two hours. Emilio pulled the board out of the bed of the Nissan, waved off the driver, and we headed uphill.

The first trudge up the dune was the hardest. Probably more for Emilio than for me. You see, he explained that, the night before, he'd been out with two of the girls who'd promised to come that day, and that they'd stayed out until about 1. And Emilio, breathing a little too heavily for someone who leads tours on an almost-daily basis, was clearly still feeling the effects. He called the current situation his "worst nightmare."

I did two short runs to get used to the feel of the board, a cheap laminated plywood construction that Emilio had rented from a local shop. It had to be waxed before every run, with a few streaks, and Emilio did that for me since there was no other purpose he could possibly serve-sandboarding is like snowboarding, you just don't turn, because you'll fall.

Used to the board, Emilio and I trooped to a higher ridge on the sand dune. He waxed the board again, and I flew down, stumbling at a few spots. The run couldn't have lasted longer than 15 seconds.

I trooped back up to the top, the slight rush of adrenaline making the climb a little easier. When I got to there, Emilio was sitting down, waiting for me. This time, he just gave me the wax. I drew some lines on the base, gave it back and handed him my camera. I asked him to take a few pictures and headed back down. It was starting to get redundant.

Climbing back up, I had grown tired, and paused at a few points for breath. The climb to the top could have lasted no longer than 5 minutes. Once at the top, I found Emilio, who was lying down on his side in the sand, not moving, breathing softly and dreaming about who knows what.

I sat down to catch my breath for a few seconds. Then I tapped his foot. No response. I did it again. The same. So, I got up and shook his shoulder. When he awoke, opening and closing his mouth to try and moisten it, I asked for the wax. He gave it to me and half-apologized, saying it had been a long night. He refused to speak Spanish, because I was to be his English practice. "Yew know, mahn, aye was out wit dose girls ahnd ... "

I didn't give a damn, and raced back to the bottom, with a little more wax. Two turns this time. Still not terribly interesting. When I made it back to the top, Emilio was asleep again. I woke him and asked for the wax. For a moment or two, he propped himself up on an elbow and stared off into the distance, acting as if he hadn't been sleeping. He'd already fallen asleep once, what did he have to lose?

I asked for the wax again. He casually gave it to me, then he offered, you know, to like take pictures from another angle, whatever that meant.

Once at the bottom, I looked up and he gave me a thumbs up. Somehow, I knew he'd be asleep when I got to the top. When I reached our bags, which we'd left halfway up the dune, I could see him passed out at the top. I searched through his bag and found another stick of wax. Walking up to his feet, I did three more runs, making noise but without waking up his lazy, scraggly, hung-over ass.

Then some other boarders showed up. I walked to the top of the dune and sat at Emilio's feet. I looked at my watch, it was about 11:30. I sat for a while and took in the scenery. The newbies trooped up to the top, stepping around me and over Emilio, asleep as ever. As they passed, they accidentally kicked a little dirt on him, which accumulated on his black and white knit pullover. Nothing fazed him.

Trying to act like he wasn't there, drunk and asleep, I thought about how unbelievable the view was, and how strange it was to be in such a place and to still long for home. The whole region simply reminded me too much of lands back home.

I shook Emilio awake. It was 11:45. I told him that the next would be my last run, and that I wanted to meet him at the bottom to wait for the truck. I said I would be too tired to hike back up. He nodded. I waxed up, flew down and crashed at the bottom. Sand everywhere-it'd take hours to get it all out of my clothes and ears, despite a long shower afterward-it was the best part of the whole trip to the dunes.

I wriggled out of the board and looked to the top of the hill. He wasn't moving

I waited five minutes. Emilio was motionless.

So, he was asleep for a fourth time, no big deal. Then I heard the truck winding up the valley. I realized I was, in fact, going to have to climb up and fetch him. Who was the guide now? Hell, he should have been paying me for the English lessons. I made it to the bags and shouted his name. It took him 30 seconds to come to his senses, perhaps he awoke and stared at the mountains with that same empty look, and the tramped down the sandy slope. Acting as if nothing had happened, the sketchy jerk said, "I furgot to tell yew, I take your bag to ze bottom on ze last run, but iss OK if you wawnt to take it ... "

I took my bag off and tossed it to him. In some way, he was going to earn his pay-at least some of it.

I beat him to the truck. He handed me my shoes. I took my bag and got in without a word. The drive back was silent. Even our driver acted like Emilio was a sketchy bastard, and gave short responses to the scraggly Uruguayan's attempts at idle conversation. Back at the hostel, Emilio got out with me.

"I furget to tell you ... becuz ze other people not come, I got to charge yew 10 thousand pesos for ze tour." That was four dollars more than anyone else had to pay. A series of responses ran through my mind, here are a few:

--I'll give you eight
--Here's eight ... that's ten, minus the time you spent sleeping
--I didn't know sleeping lessons could be so expensive
--Here it is, now get yourself a goddamned haircut
What did I do? I paid him the 10 luca ($20). Everyone else charged that price, after all, and they didn't give you the hill to yourself, totally to yourself. Emilio's last words to me?

"Ok, so how long you in San Pedro until?" (implied question: can I screw you into another tour, Mr. Loaded Gringo who doesn't complain?)
"Tomorrow, Emilio. I leave when my friends leave."
"Ok, well, maybe I come by and say goodbye to Sara, Sarita ..."

I looked at him, said "whatever" and walked away. I never spoke to him again. He didn't come by and say goodbye to his beloved "Sarita"-local tour guides, I guess, are better when you've got breasts and blonde hair. Walking around town with her on Sunday, though, we passed him. She said "hi," and walked on awkwardly. All he got from me was a drop-dead stare.

At least he was looking healthier. When I looked at the photos on my camera, later that night, half of them were shadow; the shadow of a longhaired man, on his side, propping himself up with one elbow, a camera in the other hand. That'll be the shady little memory I'll keep of Emilio.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152295980/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152295980/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152295980/tpod.html Wed, 12 Jul 2006 14:32:32 -0400 Way south of the border

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San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

Friday, 7/7/2006

With Monday, and my flight back to Santiago, still three days away, I began to take notice of how much money I'd spent in San Pedro-on tours, on hotels, on food-and how much I still expected to spend (on gifts). Luckily, most of my friends had reached the same point and, for the first time this trip, we decided to do something together (well, half of us). So, we rented bikes.

After searching around for the cheapest rental, and realizing that the whole town is really just a series of cartels collaborating to maximize tourist exploitation, we headed north of town on new Trek mountain bikes, to a series of ruins called Quitor. Only 3 km out of town, it was built in the 1100s by the San Pedro people to fight off an Aymara invasion from the Altiplano. Its web of mud-bricks climbs up a softly sloping valley wall, near the most fertile land for a hundred miles.

Mark and his sister, my companions for the day, had already come to the site and I had decided to save myself for the ruins of Peru, so we walked up to what the historical site's owners (the tribe) called the Plaza Quitor, a viewpoint atop a neighboring hill.

Probably built only a decade ago, the viewpoint was marked by, what else, a series of giant stone crosses-4, in fact, facing one antother in a square formation, each side engraved with "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?," in a different language (English, Spanish, Portuguese and Quechua). It seemed strange to me to place such an image of suffering in such a relaxing, scenic location.

The Mirador waited at the end of only a 30 minute hike from the base, up a well-laid trail that wound through a few smaller plazas. From the viewpoint, I came to realize that Tomás' tour could have cut off a stop, as the "dinosaur backs" and "death valley" were actually the same set of hills.

To the north was a fertile river valley, where more ruins laid waiting ("Catarpe")-sadly, though, some girls we passed on the road over said that construction was blocking the route. The Plaza Quitor, crowning one of the areas taller hills, was probably the best viewpoint of the area yet, with views of the salt lake, death valley, the dunes, the Andes and San Pedro all in one.

We took some pictures, sat around for a while and raced back down the hill and back into town to say goodbye to Katie, whose bus back south was going to leave in only half an hour, realizing we'd lost track of time in the plaza. We caught her, getting an old tour guide's e-mail address (it was Emilio, but more on him later). Lunch, and then back on the road.

Having rented the bikes for a full day, Mark, Laura and I headed up the highway toward Moon Valley, and cut east across a dirt road toward the old ruins of Tulor, and an "ayllu" of the same name (the word means "family" in quechua, but is also used as a geographical a political division. Strangely, none of the locals spoke quechua). Reaching an intermediate Ayllu called Coyo, Laura and Mark, tired of the hot, dry sun, turned back.

I continued up the road five minutes further, passing a dirt soccer field, its lines drawn in chalk, its goals made of wood. There were probably a total of 40 people in both Ayllus added together (on a good day) but game's everywhere here. The gates to the Ruins of Tulor were only a few yards futher, and after paying a lonesome ranger $2, I rode down to the park. Wandering across a wooden catwalk, to look at what once was a family's mud brick home, now only a few lines in the dirt, as the roofs caved in and the walls disappeared under the shifting sands. I looked back up the road for a moment and saw that the ranger was riding his bike down. A number of questions ran through my head, mostly centering on "what the hell's he doing?" and "what'd I do?" But the guide had simply come down to answer my questions, and he did so for about 20 minutes. I'd already guessed most of the answers, but he was a captive audience and the conversation was decent. Pictures, goodbyes and back on the bike.

I raced back to town, stopping to try and take some pictures of myself in the scenery with the camera's timer. I needed a shower, before heading taking yet another tour I'd arranged, this time to observe the southern sky at night.

The sun setting over my shoulder, got back in time to take a shower, and to realize that, once again, I'd lost my debit card. I asked around at shops, to see if it had fallen out, and made my way back to the bank. The ATM was open, the bank closed. At the tourism office next door, I asked when it would be open, and if that was how I'd get my card back, should the machine have eaten it. The man there nodded an affirmative and told me "Thursday afternoon." My flight out was on Monday morning.

I went to an internet cafe, found USAA's toll-free number in Chile online, and then called it from a payphone. The card cancelled, I headed back to the hotel. I wasn't totally moneyless in the middle of the desert, because I'd planned on just such an idiocy and packed a back-up credit card in a separate bag. Either way, the loss lent even more symmetry to the trip: I'd first lost the card two days into Chile, and then lost it again with only a few to go.

I bought an empanada and ran to the tour's office. The bus pulled up as I finished my empanada, giving a few crumbs to the street dogs licking my feet. The bus, 100% english speakers, drove south of town, to our guide's house. I'd reserved my spot the day before, with the pop of the mom and pop establishment. The "pop" was a frenchman, Alain, and told me to come bundled up in "3s of everything: socks, hats, shirts." Looking out into the night, dressed in pairs of everything, I saw four telescopes in his front yard and, glancing up, watched as he trundled out of his front door in a one piece, baby-blue ski suit and a grey wool ski mask-visor and tassle included.

Easily the best part of the trip was his reparté with a French Canadian, who refused to put on warm clothes and feebly attempted to make sarcastic jokes during the introductory lecture:

-Ass we all know to-day, ze world is not flat ...
-What?!?! are you serious ...
-... well, ah hem, perhaps, ze world is still flat in "ke-bec" ...

Wandering outside, we took digital photos of the moon through one of his telescopes and saw a few faint nebulae and some star clusters. The moon was practically full, and high in the sky, so the light of the stars was a little overwhelmed. Put simply, the view not as clear as it would have been during a new moon. Cold (-5 degrees Celsius), and getting bored-except when he would flash his laser pointer through the sky or jog from one telescope to the next in his clown suit-we went inside to the best part of the tour: homemade hot chocolate with a hint of cinnamon and rich with milk. After his final lecture (on the incomprehensible size of the universe),and the requisite applause, we headed back to town, to bed, to sleep.

That night, before everyone passed out, I exectued a plan that, I'd hoped, might allow me to fall asleep before the other two males in the room began to snore. I brought up my kidnapping story, and told it in agonizing detail with the lights turned off. Problem was, Fitz was so tired he fell asleep and began snoring before I'd even been tied up. You try telling that story with snoring in the background.

To his credit, Fitz had woken up that morning at 4 for the geyser tour, and had ridden a bicycle for two or three hours late that afternoon. If he was beat, it wasn't by accident. It was kind of like on Chiloé, when Ben, Josh and I hauled him twenty miles across beach and into the mountains, and paid for it with poor sleep in the tent that night (Ben says he heard me murmuring that night: "Jeeesus, Fitz, I'm gonna have to strangle you").

The conversation afterward shifted to how I'd quitely woken Mark up the night before to get him to stop snoring. I'd walked to his bedside, touched him on the shoulder and whispered at him to roll over. He didn't remember it, and the message had worked almost subliminally. I tried similar things to Fitz then, but he was out, and nothing would work. Sarah remarked that, had I done that to her in the middle of the night, she'd have probably screamed.

Being who I am, I quitely snuck over to her bedside five minutes later, as we continued to talk. And, making a decision that will probably haunt me with bad karma for months, I touched her on the leg. She screamed, and like a falling domino, Fitz jumped up and huskily murmured, "oh, shit, what's going on?" I laughed, and thought I'd finally assured myself a good night's sleep, now that their hearts were racing.

Five minutes later, Fitz was snoring.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152121380/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152121380/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152121380/tpod.html Wed, 12 Jul 2006 14:11:29 -0400 Way south of the border

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San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

Wednesday, 7/5/2006

After a fitful night's sleep (it was damned cold), I awoke at 6 a.m. for an all-day tour. I awoke coughing, my chest and lungs stinging, despite the fact that I'd gone to bed in long underwear, a sweater and a warm hat. I'd packed up the things I hadn't moved the night before and stepped outside to wait in the grey-blue morning for my ride. The bus, once again, came on time.

I was the first to be picked up, and took a front row seat. A family of four from Nevada that I had toured with the day before hopped in the van, and we greeted one another as best you can so early in the morning. At another hostel, the van picked up two Brazilians, who greeted everyone on the van with a quiet "bom dia."

In a sense, this trip is a story about my guides. In a way, by profiling them, you get a picture of what type of trip each was like. This morning, it was Eduardo, a man built to be a miner-small in stature but broad-shouldered. His hair was short-cropped and he wore aviator sunglasses. Eduardo said he was a native of Salvador, a mining town three or four hours south of Calama-home to a series of large copper mines, if not one gigantic one. His job was like his duty, and he did it well without overdoing it. He spoke in Spanish, and the information was detailed and complete-the Nevadan's younger daughter, who'd been teaching English in Santiago, translated for them, only asking me about vocabulary every so often.

The man at the tour office-a sleazy-looking Chilean who claimed to have lived in Chicago, with a long pony tail and Italian (bug-eyed) sunglasses-told me the tour would only be to a few lagoons up in the altiplano, but it turned out to be much more inclusive than I'd planned, and basically stopped at every major monument in the National Flamingo Reserve.

The first move was to strike out around the salt lake before cutting across toward a few large puddles of water surrounded by fifty square miles of sharp mounds of salt. The sun climbed up over the volcanoes of the northern Chilean Andes-Licancabur and Lascar the most notable; the ash from the latter's most recent eruption white like snow at the crest-but it was still freezing.

San Pedro sits in a closed basin, surrounded on all sides buy unbroken, linking mountain ranges. Every stream from the high country flows into it (mostly under the ground) and, thousands of years ago, there was a huge lake in the valley. But the water was heavy in minerals, which it scraped out of the mountainsides and carried downstream. As the climate changed, the lake slowly evaporated, leaving what you see today: a dusty, dry wasteland of salt, ringed by snow-capped volcanoes.

Walking toward the lakes, I struck up a conversation with the Brazilians, a literature professor and a housewife from São Paulo-and soon learned how out of practice my Portuguese was. After five or ten minutes, though, my Portuguese picked up and they were complimenting me. For most of the tour, I wasn't sure what language to speak in, though, and I probably looked like that pretentious show-off who thinks he can speak to everyone. Either way, I got my Portuguese practice for the last six months.

The biggest puddle is called Chaxa Lagoon, named for what ... I don't remember. It's probably a Kunza word that most tour guides would translate into a full sentence. But here, large groups of Chilean and Andean Flamingos (don't ask me the difference; I think one's pinker) grazed through the salty water for microorganisms, and took flight, loping through the sky, carrying a deep bow in their long necks. We walked around took some pictures, and did what tourists do: squint at the distant hills, remarking about the beauty and about the heat.

On the way up the hills toward the lakes, we stopped in a hamlet named Socaire, a town of approximately 0 residents, but as always, with a captivatingly interesting church. What made this one special and different from all the rest? The mud-brick bell tower was separated from the sanctuary: "a separation of the masculine and feminine" as our guide so vaguely, and perhaps tactfully, described it.

Chugging for oxygen, the van made its way up over 14,000 feet, to lagoons Miscanti and Miniques, the purpose of the trip. Coming over a ridge, the van stopped, and the larger of the two lakes, Miscanti, sat placidly before the peaks, reflecting their treeless, snow-streaked faces.

It's here that my new cold began to get to me, mixing the lack of air with my phlegmatic lungs. Huffing and puffing-and rubbing my stinging chest-I walked down to the lake and up the shoreline, over a ridge and to Miniques, intermittently stopping to take pictures, to breathe deeply and to admire the view. It's Funny, though, how even sickness hasn't kept me from appreciating the beauty of places like these, locked high in the lonely Andes.

Miscanti sat at between two inactive volcanoes, one rocky and snow-patched and the other shaded red, its iron soils oxidizing in the thin air. Miniques sat on the other side of that rusty hill (which was over 16,000 feet-tall), and small Andean gooses swam in the rippled water, lapping the shores as the wind picked up, and a smaller variety of grey bird hopped along the shore. The lakes' water emerged from underwater springs, and drained back into the Earth, out of sight. The shoreline was a soft white crust of salt that crunched underfoot.

After a lunch of bread, sausage, cheese and avocado, we headed downhill, napping as the driver made his way down the rugged trails and across the barren desert to Toconao. A funny little town with, yes, another church, the guidebooks raved about it as a way to see how the local Atacameño people lived: in quiet solitude, basking in the shade inside of their homes, built up of white volcanic rock, work of expert masonry.

What the guide book didn't say was that Toconao isn't interesting for more than 20 minutes, and just as I was getting bored, sitting on a park bench, chugging bottled water, the guide herded us into the van and headed back toward San Pedro.

Before leaving, we visited a steep-walled canyon, where the Spanish had planed apricot, peach and pear trees, much like they did in Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Rez in Arizona. A quiet, shady area, it was a good place to take a little rest before the hour drive back to town. Translated, it would be the Jere Gulch, and was the source of a white volcanic rock that the townspeople assembled into the walls of their homes, cool in the day, warm at night. My guidebook said that was the attraction of the trip-to see the locals' fine stonework. In the end, though, there's only so much masonry one can appreciate.

In town, the first stop was a pharmacy, where I bought some chewable tablets the guy inside said would ease the pain and would loosen up the phlegm in my chest. One every four hours. Funny thing, though, they're basically chewable codeine

At night, I met up with my friends, who'd become attached to the tour guide they'd traveled with that afternoon. A Canadian on the road for the last 20 years, Tomás (as he called himself, though he's really just a Tom) was working in San Pedro to save up a little cash. He showed us a cheap Bolivian restaurant, and we talked politics. As one would expect from an ex-pat of two decades, his opinions had become somewhat radicalized, but the conversation was lively enough. And the restaurant was a real find. On Caracoles, San Pedro's main street, you can't get a meal for under $9, lunch or dinner. For the price of one meal down there, we fed almost everyone on traditional food: not terribly inventive, but certainly filling.

My friends raved about the tour, and about Tomás as a guide. Afterward, another friend from Santiago arrived, after 25 hours in a bus. Haggard, hungry and a little claustrophobic, we pointed Fitz toward a restaurant. Fitz was the poor soul Ben, Josh and I lugged up the coast of Chiloé almost four months earlier. Ever since, he's been all over the country on busses.

After some hot chocolate, we all settled back into the hotel for sleep. The room was warmer, with six bodies and thicker walls. Someone suggested I sleep in my sleeping bag, because it would be warmer than the hostel beds-brilliant.

Thursday, 7/6/2006

Savoring my first good night's sleep in a few days, I stayed in bed until about 9 a.m., took a shower and headed into town. The cold in my chest had begun to break up, and I wandered the streets, looking for breakfast and contemplating the day's possibilities. Originally, I'd planned to rent a bike and a "sand board" and to head out to some local sand dunes. Relaxing seemed a better idea, and after an omelets and some Coca tea, I arranged a tour for the afternoon to the Valley of the Moon, the area's most popular tourist site. In a sense, my day began at 3 p.m., with that tour.

Having come a day before my friends, it took us a while to get on the same page, as Sarah and Katie went up to the lagoons I'd visited the day before. Mark's sister was having some issues with the altitude-she was visiting him from sea-level Washington DC, so the effects of San Pedro's height were really no surprise, since she'd had only two plane flights-worth of time to acclimate.

Interestingly enough, my guide to Moon Valley was Tomás, whom we'd dined with the night before. He was a tall, lanky fellow, with a strange right arm, which he kept continually in his pocket. The story behind the disability was a pink elephant we never pointed out, though we'd extracted his stories about traveling Iraq and Israel in the late 80s on a motorbike, and tips like "In Peru, always put your phone number in your wallet, because thieves like to return them for large tips-because they know how hard it is for you to replace all those identity cards."

Tom and I exchanged some friendly words, and I boarded the van. Eighty percent of the passengers were Brazilian, and I considered striking up conversation, but my shyness stopped me-speaking Portuguese to two people the day before was overwhelming enough, and 12 was going to be a stretch. So, I sat down as the van struck across the desert to make its first stops, staring out the window at the scenery and eavesdropping on my neighbors' conversations.

Five seconds outside of town, the van darted off road and began climbing a rocky hillside, to a scenic overlook marked with a huge cross, dedicated to the late J.P. II. Tomás gave a short explanation in broken Spanish to the Brazilians, who refused to try and speak Spanish when asking him questions. Brazilians and "hispanohablantes," it seems, love to travel to one another's countries, and to speak to one another in highly idiomatic language, supposing all the while that they are perfectly understood.

Tom grouped the four or five English speakers together and gave a detailed, interesting explanation of the geology of the area-speaking about wind, sand and water erosion, the lifting of the local sedimentary rocks, etc-a lecture that far outdid its Spanish translation. The view was of the "dinosaur backs," named as such for their supposed resemblance to, perhaps, a stegosaurus.

Boarding the van again, we went to another overlook, this time of the salt lake. If I've called it a "Salt Flat" before, I was wrong. Salt flats, apparently, are naturally occurring deposits of salt, not the result of an evaporated lake. San Pedro's is the second largest "salt lake" in the world, trailing the "great" one in Utah. Tour buses converged on the spot, and large groups of tourists grouped together for photos on juts of rock that, unbeknownst to them, were rather precarious points.

No one fell though, and we moved on to el Valle de la Muerte (Death Valley), the next stop in this tour of scenic overlooks, where the group looked out on a barren stretch of hilly, highly eroded land. A road led down the left side of the valley to a steep, tall sand dune that I would come to know better the next day, on a sandboard, with a sleazy Uruguayan named Emilio. Overlooking the valley, sitting high up on the edge of the plains, was Lincancabur the giant, hazy-grey, conical volcano that watches over the entire basin.

When the photo-op was over, we moved on to the place everyone had paid to see, El Valle de la Luna, 20 km west of town, down paved highway and dirt road. Stopping the tour once more, perhaps to justify the cost, our guide led us into some salt caves a few miles short of Moon Valley, named for its assume resemblance to the surface of Earth's largest satellite. One of the Brazilians claimed to have problems with the dark, and our guide had only two flashlights to divide up between the twenty tourists. By my estimation, it was simply a diversion, in which those who had never experienced a cave could do "Spelunking" wandering around in partial darkness with sure footing for approximately five minutes. I was near the end of the group, and I heard the two Germans behind me begin to make out when the lights dimmed. Giggles. I looked ahead, as ready to get out of the cave as that afraid-of-the-dark Brazilian.

The most interesting part of the caves was the entrance, a tiny canyon of soft sedimentary rock. Approximately six months earlier, heavy rains hit San Pedro, dumping the equivalent of a high-year's total rainfall (just an inch and a half) in a day. In such a fragile climate, though, that bit of rain had extensive consequences, and in the rock, little rutted streaks broke up the once smooth rock, leaving a trace of each individual raindrop's path. And that rain leached salt out of the rock and brought it to the surface, crusting the brown and red sediments with white crystals.

After pulling a few overweight Brazilians up and out of the cave and lugging them back to the van, we drove, once and for all, to the Moon Valley (one of the ladies was more concerned with getting pictures of herself scrambling up the rocks than with actually making it out alive).

We were running behind and, once there, I trudged up the side of a large sand dune, almost symmetrical in shape, with a few footprints down the sides ($80 fine for the offenders, because the wind is very slow to cover them). Once there, Tomás directed me toward the best overlook, where I would get a clear view of the setting of the sun in front and of the changing colors of the Andes' at my back. I crossed the top of the sand dune, and Tomás led everyone else out onto a rocky point (the easier of the two hikes, he said). Winded after jogging across sand at high altitude to make it in time for the sunset, I sat down on the ridge, lined with other tourists who'd made it there first. As the darkness came, and the cold with it, you could hear the soft crackling of the contracting stone hills.

I began snapping pictures like it was my job, though half of them had to be deleted later to make space on my memory card for later trips (they were all of the same thing, anyhow, and most of them didn't come out as planned). The bright whites and oranges of the rocks ahead reflected the dusk's intense sunlight, while the Andes' volcanic ash, ten or twenty miles behind me, melted into blues, purples and reds. Everyone atop the ridge stayed quiet, absorbing it. I overstayed the half hour Tomás had given me, and returned last to the van, after plodding down the sand dune, following a few Aussies and Kiwis who jokingly bashed one another's homes, as far away from them as they were. The dusk was still blending into darkness.

Dinner. Conversations. Bed.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152118800/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152118800/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1152118800/tpod.html Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:39:46 -0400 Way south of the border

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San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

Monday, 7/3/2006

The plane ride to Calama is a boys' club; the flight attendants strolling up and down the aisles are the only women you'll see. Calama's a mining town and, therefore, if you've got business there, chances are you're a man. It's the base-camp for the world's largest open-pit copper mine, a massive terraced crater called Chuquicamata, first worked under the Guggenheim brothers' Anaconda Copper Co.

The bus from there to San Pedro was a different deal entirely. The company running shuttles to San Pedro, 120 km east of the airport, didn't have enough passengers to make a trip economically feasible. This was lucky for me, because I took a taxi into town, ate lunch and bought a bus ticket for less money than the shuttle would have cost. No skill, pure dumb luck-especially since the cabbie gouged me out of $2 bucks. The bus, though, took two hours, just like the flight, even though it never stopped.

Now, not to dwell on my health, because I've done that recently in these entries, I went to San Pedro to get healthy, to get pure, clean, dry air. And on the bus, the window wide open and my right arm pinning back the whipping sun curtain, I breathed in that air, looking out on the white rock of the Atacama Desert, the driest in the world. At least initially, I felt better, or at least that there was hope for my sinuses.

The Atacama Desert is just like what you've seen of it in movies, like, say The Motorcycle Diaries, where the young Che walks across a dry, bright desert, flat and extensive with the sun blaring down so hard you squint through sunglasses. It's unforgiving land in the broadest sense of the term.

My bus got in shortly after 2 p.m, and it was the same one I took out 6 days later-on the surface, a newer model, but with the back bumper missing and the fan belt spinning wildly and totally exposed. My plane had left at 7 a.m., forcing me to leave for the airport at 5 (I woke up 5 minutes before the Supper Shuttle came, luckily, because the alarm didn't go off). If I felt healthier, the tradeoff was how tired I was.

I wandered the town, ate lunch and arranged a tour. I set myself up in a cheap hotel on the west end of town, alongside one of the many irrigation canals that bring water to the town. I knew San Pedro like the back of my hand within half an hour, had taken all the pictures I could bear and signed myself up for the tour that began at 4 a.m. the next morning.

San Pedro, in a sense, is like an indigenous (and even drier) Moab, Utah, set among similar polychromatic geological features. It may be even touristier, though. The mud-brick and adobe huts that line the streets of the 15 square-block town are filled with tour companies, mountain bike rentals and kitschy restaurants, with annoying waiters who try and corral everyone with white skin into their respective establishments, peppering them with the same random 6 words of English.

And that's the funny thing, it seems, about the town. Like many tourist towns in the southwest US, it's largely inhabited by indigenous people (Kunza/Atacameño), who seem to work elsewhere-like in the salt mines. None of the restaurants employ them, and the tour agencies only hire them as drivers ... but you can buy arts and crafts made by some of them in the Artisan's fair on the northeast end of town.


It may sound crazy to sign up for a sunrise tour, but it was an excuse to go to sleep at 7 p.m. A little congested and a lot tired, I watched the sunset, took some meds and went to sleep. My rest was fitful-the only heater in the room was a plug-in radiator, and the only electrical socket in the room was hanging loosely from the wall. Two or three times in the night, I awoke cold, and had to plug the heater back in, as it had fallen out. I never thought to take out my sleeping bag.

Tuesday, the 4th of July.

The fourth began at 4, cold as hell. The Atacama Desert is so dry and so high (above 11,000 feet, for the most part), that it holds absolutely no heat. It even puts Phoenix to shame: 85 Fahrenheit in the afternoon, 15 in the early morning.

The tour bus came to pick me up on time (I knew then why I'd paid extra to go with an established company), and hustled me the two hours through the night to the Tatio "Grandpa's Crying" Geysers, on a tiny, frozen flat of land near the Bolivian border. The dim moon barely lit up the rocky land around, and the only breaks in utter darkness were tiny villages set in that high country, with a lone streetlamp lighting each.

The highest geyser range in the world, though certainly not the largest (Yosemite steals that prize), El Tatio's spouts of heated, mineral-heavy water are surrounded by a gorgeous chain of red rock peaks and low hills, covered in yellow and green scrub brush. That's the reason you come, to stand on top of where the rivers under the Earth steam up onto the Altiplano amid a series of beautifully austere mountains.

Though only two hours from San Pedro, hauling ass up dirt roads and sprawling flats of sand and rock, you're no longer in the desert. It's the Altiplano, "High Plains," a geographical feature that sits mostly in Bolivia, though its little offshoot across the Andes into Chile is crammed with scenery. It actually gets rain, though not often, but enough to allow for some small scrub vegetation for the Llamas and their smaller cousins, the Vicuñas, to feast upon. And they come in herds, some tagged with colorful yarns, woven into their fur, to brand them as someone's property.

Our guide, interestingly enough, was a San Pedro native and indigenous. Well-spoken in Spanish, I was on a tour of gringos, and he insisted on speaking in English. Luckily, and this is going to sound cruel and callous toward him, I'd read my tour book before setting off, and therefore was able to understand what I saw, so that I could now so wantonly share these little tidbits of scientific information with you.

Five tour shuttles converged on the area, which was big enough and home to enough geysers to keep us all spread out and entertained. San Pedro is starting to receive the floods of out-of-school Chileans and foreigners, and the tours to everywhere are filling up. Luckily, these were only the first signs of high season; the big wave of tourists was still a week away.

Pictures taken, toes numb, we drank Coca tea and boarded the bus (a high-roofed Mercedes van). The next stop, five minutes back toward San Pedro, was a pool, built by mining companies in the late '60s with funding from CORFA, a Chilean government entity that helped fund development in Chile for a few decades, especially under the Frei and Allende governments in the 60s and 70s.

The pool once formed part of a plan to carry water up to the copper and sulfur mines in the mountains above. A stand of rusted, weather-worn machinery near the geysers was also part of the project. Built to purify the geyser water, it was scrapped because the liquid was too heavy in minerals and not cost-effective to purity.

I'd never swum at 13,000 feet before, but didn't plan to either. I'd been waiting for the sun to rise all morning, and it had, but it was taking far too long for its rays to heat up the rocky earth. I'd brought a swimsuit but forgotten a towel, and feared exiting the water would be like death. Hell, it was cold enough through the four layers I was wearing.

The only other stop on the way back, outside of photo-ops with the Vicuña and a stop at a small river to pickup an indigenous hitchhiker, his backpack loaded with trout, his dress a grimy mix of John Lennon (the glasses and the headband) and James Dean (the jacket), was at a small village name Machuca. I would later see him offering taxis to Calama near an artisan's market.

In that nowhere town, everyone descended upon Machuca's two year-round residents for Coca tea and sopaipillas. A small church stood atop a hill. From the top, from the front gate of the church (locked) I looked out on the town, the tourists and the scenery.

At the bottom, I ran into some Americans who had been studying abroad, albeit in Valparaiso, and they invited me to their hostel for a 4th of July barbecue.

[note: The last time I spent Independence Day in a foreign country, I saw my Ecuadorian professors drinking Jack Daniel's (Black) straight from the bottle, I danced and sang in a circle to Tom Petty and had an M-80 firecracker lit off at my feet (a cruel joke two weeks after I'd been kidnapped, but funny to this day: I hit the ground and covered my head). And all of that on a rooftop in Quito. So I know what gringos are capable of, to say the least, and that's probably similar to what my friends in Santiago were up to.]

After stopping again for another photo-op with the vicuñas and llamas, the bus headed back to town. I fooled around for a few hours-watching the World Cup semifinal in a room full of sad Germans and boisterous Italians. I went to the hostel, hoping for a barbecue, but the owners refused to allow anyone who wasn't paying for a room onto the premises, and no one could negotiate me in.

So, I waited until 8 p.m. for some friends who'd left Santiago that afternoon. They came, ate dinner and I had a beer. Their hostel was much cheaper than my hotel, and we were guaranteed a room to ourselves-so I moved my stuff in so that I could quietly vacate my hotel the next morning. I had already arranged a tour to the Altiplano Lakes for the next day, though my friends-all Midwesterners: Mark and Lauren Feldman (Chicago), Katie Taylor (Chicago) and Sarah Sanderson (Holland, Michigan)-planned to relax and take a tour to Moon Valley, the area's biggest tourist pull. More on that later.

Back at the hotel, the pathetic little radiator, which I'd left running all day in the hope that the room might warm up-the plug pinned to the socket by a bedstand-had accomplished nothing. I coughed before going to sleep and my chest hurt. Nothing, it seemed, could make me healthy. After the morning tour, it had turned into a lackluster July 4th, but what could I have expected in the middle of a desert at the south end of the world?
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1150851660/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1150851660/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/arichardson/chile-2006/1150851660/tpod.html Wed, 21 Jun 2006 15:18:41 -0400 Way south of the border

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Santiago, Chile

Walking home Sunday night, minding my own business-staring at the sidewalk as I made my past the Metro Station-a random Chilean youth walking past me, asked "¿Qué te pasa, güeon?" And the complimented it, before I could respond-and before I'd caught the tone in his voice-with a "¡Conche tu madre!" I don't think I need to translate that.

In some ways, I probably deserved it, or at least I shouldn't have been so surprised by it. I was wearing a jacket I bought in Mendoza, Arg., with the logo of the Argentine national soccer team on the left breast. Needless to say, though, I was shocked and a little scared and put off, and chose not to respond instead of picking a fight with a middle schooler. But I did walk the next block home with my hand over the logo.

Chile isn't in the world cup. I know plenty of Chileans rooting for Argentina. After all, they're the only other Southern Cone country in the "mundial." Heck, it was 6:30 at night and pitch black (it's winter down here, again). I was wearing a hat. In that light and attire, I should pass for Argentine, no? Wouldn't that give me a right to wear the jacket? After all, Argentina just beat Serbia-Montenego 6-0 in the best performance of the tournament so far.

I really only bought the jacket, though, because I look pretty good in it (not something I can say about the bright yellow Brazillian jacket I saw).

I'm nearing the end of my trip, though, and I just read over my last entry. Add the beginning of this entry to it, along with some large selections of other entries, and you might think this experience in Chile has been largely negative for me. I would vehemently argue that it hasn't, but I've begun to wonder to myself if my attitude's been wrong for some time. I think I've found an answer to that, but I'll save it for my final entry before dad arrives.

Every day in Chile, though, is a learning experience. And if you're patient, and take a few of the opportunities, you can make something good happen.

This Friday, looking back, was probably one of those good days. That's surprising at the very least, because the places I saw were shrouded in a gloomy past. I went to sleep early Thursday night-I'd had class until late and no one was going out-in order to wake up and meet up with Mauricio, an assistant program director/CIEE sex symbol for his good looks and the mystery that surrounds his past (we could probably just ask, but it's fun to wonder). I've heard stories from bank robber to political prisoner. Anyway, I have a class with him and he'd invited us on his other class' field trip to the General Cemetery and the Villa Grimaldi, once a torture center.

I'd been to the cemetery, but had mostly just gotten lost the first time, and thought it might be good to take time off from paper-writing to see the things no one had pointed out to me at the cemetery. Mauricio's other class is called "Historical Memory and Human Rights in Chile." If you know the name Pinochet, you have a vague idea what the class talks about. Admittedly, Mauricio is assumed to be pretty far on the left personally, but his presentation of the material doesn't alter the facts: Chile has been terribly slow to recognize its bloody past, and the reminders are everywhere.

The first stop at the cemetery was the monument the the "disappeared detainees" of the Pinochet era, which was under remodeling for the third time since its construction. To add new names. Nothing gigantic or overwhelming, it was simply a small mausoleum and a large slab of marble engraved with the names of everyone who was likely tortured and buried in a mass grave, if not dropped into the sea or burned into dust. Yes, this was heavy stuff for a Friday.

The next stop was Patio 29, a nondescript section of the poor part of the cemetary, which a few dozen DD.DD. (as they're called) were buried in the few days after Chile's 9/11, Pinochet's coup. Every grave was marked with a cross, whose horizontal section was painted with N.N. (basically, "no name"). Apparently, some of the graves originally held several people, tied together and placed in the same coffin. In the late 90's when Pinochet was still Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, a journalist asked him about the fact that bodies were made to share a coffin. The general's smug response: "what could be more economical?" Today, the graves of still-unidentified bodies in Patio 29-whose ground is rough and uneven, and a few months ago was covered in trash-are marked with red roses.

Right across the way was the grave of Victor Jara, Chile's Bob Dylan who became more-than-legendary after he was executed in the days following the coup. Taken the National Soccer Stadium (which now bears his name), along with most of Chile's famous liberal artists, his torturers broke every knuckle on his hands and mockingly gave him a guitar to play (according to legend, at least). His coffin is buried among the people, as he would have wanted it, though it is painted a bright red and framed with fresh flowers. Every so often, Chile's remaining musical figures from the time, who largely played a folk music in support of the Allende government, will reunite and do small performances to remember him.

On our way out, we walked past several presidents' tombs, including those of Balmaceda and Allende, which I believe I've already described. The grave of Orlando Letelier, an anti-Pinochet lobbyist who died in Washington D.C. during the Carter administration. Pinochet sent operatives to the US to strap a bomb onto the underside of his car. This was in the days before C4, when car bombs used less-powerful explosives and depended on good positioning to kill. According to Mauricio-yes, his class gets pretty morbid-the aim was to blow off the legs of the front seat passengers, so that they would be trapped inside a burning vehicle with no ability to escape. It worked, and it was the first act of terrorism on US soil perpetrated by a foreign government. Just before Pinochet had him killed, he took away Letelier's citizenship, which was only reinstated after the end of this regime, I believe, when the Chilean congress had to vote to give it back to him. His epitaph is: "I was born Chilean, I am Chilean and I will die Chilean."

From there, it was a bus to Peñalolén, a poorer eastern barrio of Santiago which, 25 years ago, was in the country. Here, the Pinochet government took the land and estate of a wealthy Chilean leftist and forced him into exile. The property, a large house with ample land, a pool and outbuildings, was turned into a torture and detention center. Men and women, though separated, were both torutured there. Electric shock, dipping people in the pool during winter ... everything that could be used to extract "information" (at a certainly point, you'd probably start naming your mother as a militant revolutionary) was used.

A tower at the southwest corner of the property was built up and divided into small yard by yard solitary confinement chambers: just big enough to stand in, but to small to lie down in. Almost all of the buildings have since been torn down, and Mexican artists came in when it was converted into a park to make it a place of remembrance for its victims. Many of the people who came there did not return. Beautiful tile-work (sometimes with tile from the very house, before it was torn down) runs up and down the park. Sets of plaques, one in marble and one in metal, carry the names of those who passed through never to be seen again.

With the coming of democracy, an ex-general in the intelligence services bought the land and tried to have it turned into budget housing. Luckily, someone stopped him. If you ask most people in Santiago, though, what the Villa Grimaldi is, they'll look at you with a clueless stare.

The watchtower has been reconstructed, and inside there are little cupboards that resemble the old solitary confinement cells. I climbed into one, but demanded that no one close the door on me. That desire was respected. I can tell you it was dark and uncomfortable. The strange, nervous fear it sent though me, even so many years and so many governments from what happened there, is not something I have any desire to analyze or explain. It was probably a bad idea to climb into that cell-I think I was the only person who tried-but it gave me a tiny, tiny taste of what it must have been like for those people.

Chile is a strange, strange place, in terms of daily life and in terms of its entire, idiosyncratic history (which I've hinted at here). I think even Chileans would accept that. I'm still unsure what signals my family here is trying to send me. It still weirds me out how sometimes that no one makes eye contact on the subway, and how no one talks either.

In the same way a nondescript park can have the history of thousand lives in every footstep, there's so much left to see, and so much I will never see. In a sense, every day here is full of messages that slip by, of things I overlook. If I have finally settled in here, maybe it's time I allowed myself to slow down a little and let things sink in. The best days are the ones where you can just sit back and muse. Finally seeing that more than justifies visiting the sad sights of the day.

The other things going on in my life:

- My ear infection is gone. My ears still feel weird, however, but the good doctor told me that was simply congestion. She said the only thing that was going to really cure me was to get out of the Santiago air.

- My program does its "goodbye dinner" next Friday. Already. There's also a "re-entry workshop," to talk about going back to the US (a good month and a week before I do, but there's plenty of free coffee, apparently).

- I plan to travel north to the Atacama Desert the first week of July. The air there is so dry and clean that many of the world's largest, most technologically advanced astronomical observatories are located there. If that doesn't cure me, what will?

- I have a paper and a test due next week, a paper and a test the next week and a paper the week after that. I'm ahead on all of it, and most of the work is disturbingly simple and easy. In general, classes here have been disappointing in how easy they are and in how little they teach.

- Ecuador is into the second round of the World Cup. If you're not too busy supporting the US, give the poor, overlooked Andean nation a little bit of your love.
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