On The Gringo Trail
Trip Start
Jan 15, 2006
1
32
52
Trip End
Sep 05, 2006
San Pedro de Atacama,
Chile
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
We found a government report on the nationalities of backpackers crossing the border between Chile and Bolivia. It turns out that US travelers are only the 7th most frequent. Israelis are 4th. (Most Chileans believe that Israel is a superpower due to the large number of ex-soldiers on walkabout after they complete their mandatory military service.) The French are the most frequent followed by the Germans and the British. This may explain why the French students are so concerned with Chirac's recent proposal to increase employment for young people. The students simply don't want to have their vacations interrupted by something annoying, like work
01 - Kia and Peggy
.San Pedro was discovered by the backpackers about 20-30 years ago as a small, dusty farm town. They were attracted to the beautiful weather (locals claim they get less rainfall than anywhere else in the world), spectacular scenery (16,000 foot snow capped peaks are only 20 miles away) and cheap services. Unfortunately for the backpackers, the cheap services are likely to disappear.
Currently, the main part of town is a series of dusty streets that contain nothing but restaurants, internet cafes, mountain bike rentals, tour agencies and souvenir shops that stock crystals, peasant shirts and homemade alpaca ponchos. Most of the accommodations are hostels that charge just a few dollars a day. Recently, however, several high end hotels have opened, including one, The Explora, that charges $1000 per night for a room. Included in this low, low price are three gourmet meals, a personal driver and a van with darkened windows to allow the guests to avoid any possible interaction with the common people. We frequently saw these vans crisscrossing town at high speed whisking their privileged passengers to the various local attractions. There are more high-end hotels under construction. The town is being Aspenized.
02 - Barrett and Rosa
I have mixed emotions about this process. Clearly this transition will increase prices for backpackers and reduce revenue for distributors of crystals. On the other hand, a high-end hotel will usually pay better wages than a $5 dollar per night hostel. The limiting factor for development will not be land (there is plenty) but fresh water.
Another potential claim on the water is mining. The area is dotted with mining operations that extract various low value products like sulfur and gypsum. Mining has a long history in Chile, but at these room rates I suspect the high-end hotels will end up getting the water.
We spent some time with one of the local indigenous leaders. Rosa was charming, intelligent and quite savvy about the political situation, but is clearly fighting a losing battle to preserve her historic culture.
The mining companies have a proposal on the table to pay the indigenous people for the water rights. Many of the locals would like to take the money. At the same time, the locals have set up an extensive system of user fees associated with the many natural attractions
03 - Downtown San Pedro
. My sense is Rosa feels better about throwing her lot in with tourism, but still feels uncomfortable with the looming cultural changes.While I have some sympathy for her position, I do not see the change as much of a tragedy. While it is certainly appealing for a tourist to visit historic cultures, most of the locals prefer to use flush toilets, drive automobiles and watch DVDs. I would love to be able to spend a day in historic Plymouth Rock seeing how the pilgrims survived, but Americans don't want to live that way anymore. Usually the forces for 'cultural preservation' are a combination of crotchety elders and wealthy tourists.
Homogenization of global culture also has several meaningful benefits. The US has done a good job of incorporating attractive pieces of various cultures. One example of this is food. In even small cities, one can find appealing restaurants serving cuisine from Italy, Mexico, China, Thailand, Japan and other exotic places. This is not the case in South America. Outside of a couple of cities, almost every restaurant in a particular country has an identical set of core dishes. Diners who dare to step beyond this basic capability, will usually end up with a bad case of entry envy. Classic rookie mistakes include ordering fish in Argentina or pasta in Brazil
04 - Snow Capped Peaks
.Another benefit of culture homogenization is an increased understanding of each other. The more we share culture, the harder it is to demonize other groups of people. This has been described by Thomas Friedman as the 'McDonalds Effect'. In about 1990 he claimed that two countries that have a McDonalds (a leading force of cultural homogenization) have never fought a war against each other. (It only counts after the restaurants were opened.) Big Macs are for peace. (Since the theory was proposed there have been two exceptions. NATO´s bombing of Serbia and our war with Iraq.)
Kia's parents, Peggy and Barrett, have joined us in San Pedro and will be with us for the first few days in Bolivia. Barrett manages a small foundation that specializes in using market-based techniques to solve environmental problems. He is also a crack photographer and you may notice an uptick in photo quality over the next couple of blog entries. After almost three months on the road, we are enjoying spending time with familiar faces. If anybody has a hankering to hook up in Central America or Mexico, please drop us a line.
