Iquique, 24 September
Getting out of Santiago was a chore. The first shipping agent we
contacted kept stalling us and changing procedures for almost a week
before we realized that what he wanted was to force me into selling him
the bike for practically nothing.
By Monday, the situation was desperate. We had to leave the hotel.
It was much too expensive, and I was getting dangerously low on funds.
I'd spent $9000 dollars already. Yosefa wanted to
go home. There was no way she'd continue north on the bike.
Then my luck changed. I managed to reach a friend from Miami who
was living in Santiago. He put me in touch with a highly respected
customs agent who assured me that he would handle all aspects of
shipping the bike. My friend also took me out for the best dinner I'd
had in Santiago. I didn't know it at the time, but it was the last such
meal I'd have on this journey.
Another friend, Carlos Prosser, offered us a place to stay.
I'd met Carlos in June when I visited Defensores del Bosque, the
environmental NGO he works for. Defensores is working very hard to
rescue Chile's remaining virgin forests from destruction. Now Carlos was
rescuing me.
By Tuesday afternoon, everything was arranged for shipping the bike
back to Miami. I spent my last night in Santiago talking to Carlos
about the future of humanity and the planet.
His calm optimism helped me relax for the first time in weeks.
The next morning I said goodbye to Poderosa III.
I videotaped the humorous scene of three businessmen from the
customs agent's office attempting to lift a 600-pound motorcycle into a
pick-up truck. A panicked call for reinforcements nearly emptied the
office but produced the muscle power needed to complete the task at
hand.
Like Che had described in his diary, "the big day finally arrived on
which two tears ploughed symbolically down [my] cheeks and, with one
last wave to La Poderosa..., we set off" towards Arica and beyond. The
show would, afterall, go on.
But the script was about to change. I am almost broke, and we still
have over two months and four countries to go. If I limit myself to ten
dollars a day for the rest of the journey, I may make it. Never let it
be said that I turned away from a challenge. From now on I'll be
travelling like Che and Alberto: on a very fine shoestring.
By mid-afternoon, we were hitchhiking north. Before, it had been
the bike that was overloaded. Now it was me. I am carrying all of the
electronics: computer and video equipment, electrical converter and
adapters, and a multitude of other gadgets, as well as my clothes,
books, and personal effects. I keep reminding myself that what doesn't
kill you makes you stronger. Thoughts of thin thighs and a tight butt
keep me from crying.
Our first ride was with Marcelo, a young mechanical engineer who
worked for one of Chile's larger copper mines. Marcelo got so flustered
when he realized that he had picked up two cute babes that he instantly
took a wrong turn and had to backtrack to where we started.
I asked him about working conditions in the mines. He said they
were excellent for both management and labor. I would verify that at
Chuquicamata.
He stopped at a rest stop and insisted on buying us cold drinks.
His actions were a foreshadowing of the incredibly friendly, generous
treatment we've received from everyone whose given us a ride. People
have given us food and drinks, driven out of their way to bring us to
our destinations, taken us on town tours, found us places to stay... We
thought Argentinians were hospitable; Chileans may have outdone them.
In his diary, Che described a different situation. "This was a new
stage in our adventure," he wrote. "We were used to attracting idle
attention with our strange garb and the prosaic figure of La Poderosa
II, whose asthmatic wheezing aroused pity in our hosts. All the same,
we had been, so to speak, gentlemen of the road. We'd belonged to a
time-honoured aristocracy of wayfarers, bearing our degrees as visiting
cards to impress people. Not any more."
Perhaps it's that we're women. Perhaps things have changed.
Che and Alberto "were determined to avoid the desert in the north of
Chile by going by sea." We've gone straight through it.
We spent September 17, the night before Chilean Independence Day, in
Papudo, a small fishing village 160 km north of Santiago. There we went
to the ramada, a structure built every year specifically for
Independence Day celebrations. We watched local dignitaries, including
the mayor, dance Chile's charming national dance, the cueca, in native
costume. We drank the traditional drink, chicha, a kind of beaujolais
nouveau, and ate the traditional foods, empanadas and fieritos, meat
turnovers and shishkebobs. We were the only foreigners there. Again,
everyone was extremely friendly. Patricio, the gentleman who appeared
to be in charge of the ramada, insisted that we needed dates for the
festivities and volunteered two of his friends. We politely declined,
explaining that we were leaving in the morning.
The next day we hitched to La Serena. The scenery was magnificent.
The desert was in bloom. We were viewing an aberration, our driver told
us. Excessive rains, born of the El Nino current, had caused untold
damage nationwide, but they had also brought the desert alive. The
normally black and arid Atacama, the world's driest desert, was carpeted
with flowers of every color. The effect was stunning.
We were travelling "La Ruta de los Muertos," the death road. The
roadsides were dotted not only with flowers but with shrines of the
deceased. We knew how the highway got its name. It wasn't the road, it
was the drivers. Chileans, and Argentines, drive too fast. Passing on
corners is the rule. Concentrating on the road is the exception.
I was reminded of an earlier trip to Chile with my friends Steve and
Suzanne. We'd hitched a ride in a pick-up truck and found ourselves
barrelling along the cliffs of Tierra del Fuego at a hundred miles per
hour. Our driver was clearly mad, and we were going to die.
As it turned out, our driver and his mechanic were doing their last
practice run before the Trans-Patagonia Road Rally. They were very good
drivers, and we became very good friends.
I've been reminded of that experience many times on this trip.
La Serena is a thriving summer beach resort. When we got there it
was cold and dreary. We were a bit behind schedule, so I recommended
that we save the cost of a hotel and take the 1:30 am bus to
Antofagasta, a twelve hour ride to the north. I couldn't afford to drink
much, but a beachside bar still seemed the best place to rest and pass
the time. I nursed one beer for a long time and was attempting to
surrepticiously pour the last of a carton of wine we had with us into
the empty beer bottle when, of all things, we were rescued by the U.S.
Marines! Their ship was anchored here on its way around the cape to
Buenos Aires. One of the lads, Jimmy, was from Kendall. He was a
delightfully polite and intelligent young man, who had a year to go
before he could resume civilian life and college. I amused him with
stories and news from home, and he bought me beers. I introduced him to
the fine Chilean tradition of chicha guzzling, and he paid the bill. It
was a symbiotic relationship.
Amazingly, we made it to the bus and on to Antofagasta. I felt
gratified to know that my tax dollars had been put to such good use.
Between Antofagasta and Iquique, we knew we were in the world's
driest desert. It was both frightening, especially when we were
hitchhiking alone in the middle of nowhere, and beautiful. There were
no flowers here, only sand and rock.
As we passed a very large ghost town, our driver explained to us
that towns like these were frequent in the desert. People built a town
out of adobe. When the adobe began to decay and the work or water that
sustained them diminished, they stripped off the roofs and doors of
their houses, packed up their few personal belongings, and moved on to
build again, somewhere else in the vast, sprawling desert.
I found our driver's story fascinating. More importantly, I was
glad to get him talking. For miles now he had been falling asleep at
the wheel, swerving precariously each time he snapped back to life. We
were cruising at about 100 km per hour. I wasn't at ease.
This aside, he and his companion were really nice to us. They
stopped and gave us a tour of Baquedano, a small nothing of a town where
Che had met an impoverished Communist couple whose pitiful state had
inspired him to assess the plight of workers everywhere and the appeal
that Marxist doctrine held for them.
From Calama, we took a day trip to San Pedro de Atacama, an oasis
town some 7,000 feet above sea level, at the north end of a vast salt
lake called the Salar de Atacama. Nearby is the Valle de la Luna, the
Valley of the Moon, whose eerie yet beautiful eroded landscape inspired
me to hike ten kilometers into its interior.
On the way to Calama we saw ancient rock carvings on the desert
hillsides that had survived, in perfect condition, for over a thousand
years. I took the time to carve mine and my son's initials into the
face of a Moon Valley hillside. Who knows. Maybe one day, a thousand
years from now, someone will wonder who the hell we were.
My first impression of Chuquicamata was that it rises out of the
desert like a huge fortress, its crenolated parapets the only feature
that distinguishes it from the surrounding natural formations of the
desert.
Whatever one's first impressions, Chuqui is impressive. And it
inspired Che to write one of his most eloquent attacks on capitalism and
the mining industry.
Chuqui houses the largest copper refinery in the world. It supplies
twenty percent of the world's copper, over 600,000 tons per year. The
huge pit from which ore is extracted will soon reach a depth of one
mile. The behemoths that climb up and down its sides day and night
carry 150-250 tons of ore per trip. As I stood beside one of them, I
felt like an ant must feel watching a child play with Tonka trucks in
the sand.
Our tour guide painted a very rosey picture of the operation.
I found a few flaws. Chuqui is not paradise, and I doubt that it helps
the environment.
Nonetheless, it now belongs to Chile, not to foreign investors, and
it is considered part of the national patrimony.
It was clear to me that this was not the Chuquicamata of Che's time,
though it may be devouring lives and the desert still.
An hour after leaving Chuqui, our ride dropped us at the
intersection of Route 5 north to Iquique. We were now in desert more
bleak and barren than anything we'd seen so far. There was only us, a
customs outpost, the occasional commercial truck, which we knew by now
couldn't give us a ride by law, and the desert. We refused the first
ride, a van packed full of drooling miners, and waited.
When the second van full of miners pulled up, it at least had a
luggage rack on the roof that made the interior less crowded.
Yosefa stated the obvious, "They are all men in there!" My reply was
equally obvious. "Yosefa, I don't think we're going to find too many
cars full of women out here." We hopped in.
The miners couldn't have been nicer. They offered us drinks and
treated us with the utmost respect.
The mine they were going to was only forty miles south of Iquique.
Along the way we talked about life in the mines. They told us about the
working hours and how mining communities function. It is a hard life,
but it provides employment and the possibilty of upward mobility.
Along the way we passed more ghost towns, lonely cemeteries, and
hillside paintings. They told us that with the revival of the nitrate
industry, artificial substitutes being worse for the environment, many
of the ghost towns in the desert will revive as well.
Shortly before crossing into Chile's northernmost region, we had a
flat tire. The driver deftly maneuvered the van from nearly 100 mph to
a smooth stop and, with a crew of seven men, had us back on the road in
minutes. I was impressed.
Our next ride took us into Iquique and right to the door of the
guest house we'd picked out from South America: on a shoesrting.
The ride through the desert had been anything but dull. The desert
floor is a grand display of textures and designs. In addition to the
ubiquitous sand and gravel, I saw vast honey comb designs on the salt
plains, oceans of deeply cracked red clay, a surface that looked like
tar paper shingles viewed through a microscope, and another that looked
like newly plowed fields, freeze dried.
A few miles from Iquique, we confronted a range of sandstone
mountains behind which loomed a massive wall of clouds. These clouds,
born on ocean winds, could have fed the desert had their passage not
been relentlessly obstructed. As we emerged from the mountains, we saw
below us the city of Iquique, its fingers of wood and concrete jutting
out into the ocean, watched over by the massive sand dune they call "the
Dragon," and buttressed by the mountains that separate it from the
driest desert in the world.
It was a beautiful sight.
Old Iquique looks rather like New Orleans, moved very, very south.
I'm waiting here to receive the shipping papers on the
bike that will allow me to leave the country. I'm looking forward to
Bolivia, but I'll miss Chile. A lot.
