Chile, But Getting Warmer (Part 2)

Tricky photography by the fireside - note the unexplained goulish skull above the fire!!! (sorry Caroline)

Up until Chile, South America had failed to meet my expectations in one important respect. After such a bad dose of the runs in Roatan (aka the Hondurance Endurance), I expected at least a few ´bouts´down here in S America.

But things had been fine and my immodium supplies remained undiminished until I got on the truck for the two hour journey from San Pedro to Calama.

I have an interest in religion without feeling committed to any traditional concept of a supreme deity (bear with me, i know this seems like an obscure change of tact). Also, I do consider myself to have strong moral values, but without having derived those from divine inspiration (getting back toward the point now, honestly). But I can tell you that there´s no such thing as an atheist with the runs travelling on a truck in the middle of a flat featureless desert.

And I can resolve many an ecumenical argument by confirming that my prayers were answered when I arrived at Calama without calamity, with seconds left to sprint to the supermarket loos.

As well as divine intervention, I think music was a great help - in particular, a few listens of KWS - "Please Don´t Go", and at my moment of greatest need, i took great comfort from Wilson Phillips "Hold On For One More Day". (Graeme - over to you...)

Luckily i was able to put a cork in things for the next stage of the trip - bush-camping.

One of the biggest problems camping in the desert is getting wood. Being a responsible guide, Dan organised a scavanging hunt at the side of the road on our way to our desert camp.

24 burgers between 7 people, erm including 2 vegetarians. Who sent Caroline and Calum shopping?

Luckily, Ali got so much wood that we had to help him carry it back to the truck. At the same time, one other possible danger is getting too much wood, which can keep you up all night if you´ré not careful. A bucket of water is a handy cure to have to hand.

Our last stop before Santiago was the seaside port of Valparaiso.

Santiago itself was a real revelation for me. I hadn't been expecting much but personally i found the place to be really lively and cosmopolitan. So my last 48 hours in mainland Chile were a real adventure. Jazz clubs until 2am, clubbing until 4am, staying up until 10am and beyond... and a special hi to my Chilean friend from Santiago Camila. Next stop Easter Island.

Chile, But Getting Warmer (Part 1)

Me, on the top of a huge sand dune in the Valle de La Luna.

Chile´s geography is bizarre and counter intuitive when written in figures. 4300km long (Norway to Nigeria) but just 200km wide, it seems to defy sensible design. But once you´ve seen the looming wall of the Andes marching endlessly south, it becomes clear that Chile´s shape and separation from the rest of South America is natural and irrefutable.

So physically the border is as solid and tangible as any land border I´ve crossed. And quite appropriate too, as the transformation from Bolivia to CHile is a shocking one. The difference in wealth, prosperity and westernisation wasn´t fully shown up until our visit to the shopping malls of Calama, but even in the sleepy tourist town of San Pedro, the increased price of beer (painful) and appearance of western music (joy - you can definitely overdose on panpipes) are telling.

We have 2 days and 3 nights in San Pedro and I´m glad of the chance to recharge my batteries, both literally and figuratively. I indulge in a fair amount of sunbathing (with the drop in altitude, the temperature has soared), emailing and website updating and sorting through some of the 2,000 photos I´ve taken in South America.

I also meet and make friends with some great people. This has happened on this trip whenever I´ve been in any place for any length of time - maybe the best thing about travelling.

The Atacama desert is the driest place in the world - some parts have never recorded rainfall. Ali, Dan and I mountain biked it to the Valle de La Luna one afternoon. A bit less grey than the moon i reckon - not that I´ve been to the moon yet - but I can see the resemblance.

Thanks to its clear weather and incredibly transparent skies, the Atacama desert is also famous for star-gazing. The world´s largest telescope - the Very Large Telescope - will soon be over-shadowed by the currently under construction Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL).

However, Constance, Regina and I found that we were able to make a number of astronomical observations with nothing more than the naked eye and a few litre bottles of Chilean beer.

Bolivia to Chile

Even aside from Lake Titicaca, La Paz, Potosi and Saler de Uyuni, I could write pages and pages about Bolivia. What a country.

Our last two days were a long drive across the uninhabited high plateau of South-East Bolivia.

Though I was still exhausted by altitute-induced insomnia, and though we spent 75% of our time on the truck, this part of the trip was something special - time to reflect, and time to absorb some incredible scenery.

Flamingoes take flight as I approach them in the vast emptiness of the Bolivian altiplano.

There are no roads across this part of the altiplano and just a few intrepid tourists venture here typically on guided tours by 4x4. For a 16 tonne truck the going is slow and our crew needed the assistance of an experienced local guide.

Here´s just some of the unbelievable views from the truck on the last day in Bolivia.

My last night at altitude (4100m) was as restless as any other added to which was a hitherto unexperienced coldness that went right to the bone. The reward in the morning though was a picturesque landscape dusted in snow.

Our last stop in Bolivia was Laguna Verde, a mineral and metal rich lake at the foot of the giant volcano Lincancabur, which straddles the Chile/Bolivia border.

The last few miles to the border took us right to the edge of the Andean plateau. 1800m below us and only 20 km away was the small town of San Pedro de Atacama and around the town in all directions stretched the Atacama desert.

Laguna Verde with Lincancabur in the background.

Journey Into the Surreal

Even the most exotic tourist destinations in the world have a hint of the familiar - the Grand Canyon is just a very big hole in the ground, The Great Wall of China is simply a wall, just a very very long one, and Tannadice is only a football stadium, it just happnes to be a rather magical one.

So there was something extra-ordinarily fascinating and moving about my visit to the unique and unfamiliar site of the Saler de Uyuni, Bolivia´s giant salt flats.

Neither words nor pictures can fully capture the place, but having made that cop-out, the following will try to do some justice to the experience.

The Saler de Uyuni is 10 billion tonnes of salt, covering 12,000 sq kms of the Bolivian altiplano. For most of the year, the salt flat is an immense expanse of blinding whiteness, but in the rainy season the salt flats become an endless perfectly reflecting mirror producing the incredible reflections seen in these images.

From the edge of the salt-flat a drive into the centre becomes an increasingly eerie and unnerving adventure. The chalk white surface at the edge of the salt flat appears to change colour as you head towards the centre, taking on a pale blue colour, until you realise that this blue is the reflected blue of the sky.

It took us about two hours by pick-up to get to the middle of the salt flat. The distances are so immense and the ground so profoundly flat that after a while it appeared that we were simply floating in space, going nowhere.

Every tourist´s destination on the flats is the Isla de Pescadores (Island of Fishermen). This is an outstandingly beatiful and unlikely place - just a couple of square kms of land in the middle of nothing, like a single lily in a giant frozen pond. There´s nothing cold about this place though, as the island´s inhabitants - thousands of exuberantly bushy cacti - testify.

Close inspection of the salt flat shows it is made up of billions of hexagonal salt ´tiles´. As well as their aesthetic beauty, these tiles represent a commercial bounty for the local people - 20,000 tonnes of salt are harvested from the flats each year.

A closer inspection of the flats also reveals the opportunity for some trick photography. Here I am pushing over a giant pre-Incan statue found sitting on the salt flats.

Danger! Danger! (Mines and) High Voltage!!!!

Cerro Rico, Potosi

One phenomenon that becomes immediately obvious in both Central and South America - and I imagine in any developing county - is that safety standards are a heck of a lot lower than we are used to in the Western world. Machu Picchu in Peru was a case in point (see below) but nothing so far has been quite as hairy as my exploits the day after leaving La Paz.

While La Paz is the highest capital city in the world it is still several hundred metres below the highest city in the world - Potosi. Potosi today is a shadow of the city it once was. At one point, Potosi was one of the largest and richest cities in the world, larger even than London. This all came about as a result of the discovery of silver in the mountain that overlooks Potosi in the mid 1500s, around the time when the Spanish were conquering South America.

The Spanish were quick to exploit the huge potential of Potosi (basically the inside of the mountain was one giant lode of minerals) and they were willing to stop at nothing to get at the treasures.

Over the next two hundred years they extracted huge quantities of silver from the mountain. No-one knows exactly how much, but it is seriously suggested that enough silver was extracted to build a silver bridge from Potosi to Spain. The human cost of this industry was immense. When the poor air, poor safety standards and back-breaking work killed off thousands of local workers, the Spanish brought slave labour from Africa to replace them. Over those two hundred years, it is estimated that 8 million men died on and in the mountain at Potosi.

Amazingly, mining work goes on by hand today in the very tunnels built over 400 years ago. Even more amazingly a new industry has built up around this - tourism. Yes, believe it or not, tourists can go into the mines themselves and see the miners at work.

Despite vague memories of claustrophobic experiences in the past i donned a helmet and fetching overalls and went into the mine.

This was an experience never to be forgotten. After crawling through a couple of tunnels, myself, two others from the tour and our guide were right at the mine face, where the modern day miners worked in cramped conditions but with much better air quality than those of their 16th century counterparts.

As we crawled deeper into the mine, we passed through tunnels dating back to 1545. This tunnel was carved by hand by local workers at the hands of the Spanish. Who knows how many of the 8 million died building this very tunnel.

After about half an hour we met a miner who told us that we couldn´t go any further as they had just set dynamite charges in the next cavern. I couldn´t quite believe this was happening, but the ´excitement´ in our group was ´tangible´as we weighted for the 30 explosions to go off. If anyone is interested I can email you a short video in which you can hear the explosions going off, and see our reactions. The only thing you can´t experience is the smell of the dynamite and the shaking of the mine!!

After this I wasn´t surprised by anything. We proceeded to belowered 25m down a hole on a rope, scrambled up loose rock and through tiny openings, and I even helped with the mining operaton by pushing out a barrow of loose rock and carried a pneumatic drill into a tunnel for one of the miners. But when we came to a tunnel that had partially collapsed and had to change our planned route I was definitely ready to come back to the surface. Thankfully that was indeed right at the end of the tour.


Perhaps the most bizarre element of a visit to the mine is the purchasing of ´gifts´for the miners. As compensation for any disturbance caused to the miners by their visit, tourists are expected to offer the miners some offering. I purchased a goody bag that consisted off coca leaves (to make tea), coca cigarettes, a length of fuse, a small block of TNT and a starter cap containing nitro-glycerine.

Those safety-standards in action!

As much as I was excited and thrilled by my experience in the mine, I couldn´t help but think how horrendous the history of Potosi is and what a bleak story it tells about ´human endeavour´. And that is definitely reflected in the atmosphere of the town and the mines.

And that wasn´t the end of dangerous activities that day. In the afternoon, Ali and I took the seemingly safer and more sedate option of a trip to the thermal pools outside of Potosi. The picture below shows the pool created by the Incans 500 years ago to exploit the natural springs that come out of the ground at 25C. Unfortunately when we got there it had clouded over but we were determined to make the most of it and had a very enjoyable swim for about 30 minutes, at which point a large lightning flash directly overhead persuaded us to call it a day.

Hopefully the most dangerous day of my year´s travels is now past...