View from the Cerro Santa Lucia | GPS Map

After flying in to Santiago airport, I spent a couple of days in the city collecting some in-country travel information (the Turistel road guide was indispensible for driving) and other useful items (a SIM card for my cell phone that gave me a Chilean number). I stayed at the Hotel Foresta in Santiago, which faces the Cerro Santa Lucia, a park built on a steep hill capped with a tower providing magnificent views of the city and surrounding landscape. While there are higher scenic viewpoints around the city, I found this one to be the most dramatic because it sits amidst office buildings in the city center while still affording a view of the Andes mountains looming in the background, a reminder of the vast, harsh landscape beyond.

Santiago Fish Market

Sitting room in my $35-dollar-a-night suite

The Atacama desert is the driest place on the planet. Hemmed in by the Andes to the east and coastal mountains to the west, some parts of the region have never recorded a single drop of rain. Spanish explorers referred to it as the "despoblado de Atacama," suggesting it was uninhabitable. Charles Darwin described it simply as "a complete and utter desert" in the Voyage of the Beagle. Traversing the landscape, he reported, "I saw only one other vegetable production, and that was a most minute yellow lichen, growing on the bones of the dead mules. This was the first true desert which I had seen."

Every evening shortly before sunset, a caravan of tour vans arrives at the foot of an enormous sand dune in the Valle de la Luna. A column of tourists trudge up the path to the top to take pictures as, for a brief time, the surrounding pale rocks glow a deep red. I returned at sunrise the following morning (and the morning after that) and had the entire park to myself.

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A few kilometers from the Valle de la Luna is the Valle de la Muerte (Valley of Death). A trail winds its way between steep cliffs and strange rock formations. Halfway through the trail opens to an enormous sand dune, which attracts a handful of sandboarders. Otherwise the trail is usually empty and eerily silent, particularly in the late afternoon when the rocks turn colors and odd shadows appear and then fade away. A good pair of sunglasses is a necessity in this environment, even in winter, due to the clear skies and the sun's intensity at higher altitudes.

Valle de la Muerte | GPS Map

San Pedro is bustling with tour agencies hawking their services, offering guided trips to salt flats, geysers, flamingo reserves and mountain peaks. One of the more unique offerings is a night time tour of the skies, led by french astronomer Alain Maury and his wife Alejandra. Their home and laboratory in the desert is surrounded by telescopes through which visitors can take a close up look at the moon, planets, and instellar phenomena. Northern Chile is the site of numerous observatories, including the world's largest, because of the clear sky, minimal interference and high altitude.

I took this photo through one of Alain's telescopes, which has been fitted with a camera mount. Note that the orientation of the half moon is horizontal rather than vertical. Those of us who live in the northern hemisphere, Alain explained in a thick french accent, are all walking sidways.

SPACE : San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Explorations 

The trip to the alpine lakes Miscanti and Miniques was 154 miles round trip at an average speed of 18 miles per hour, as much of the route is on a dirt road climbing from 7,800 feet to 13,800 feet.

View from Toconao Bridge

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300 Miles, Saturday August 25 | My GPS Route Data

After leaving San Pedro early, I stopped in Chiquicamata, site of the largest open mine pit on the planet and the last stop for gasoline for over 170 miles. From here a pockmarked road cuts across 40 miles of brown sandy earth to the Panamericana, the main highway connecting north and south. Unexpectedly, this major artery is a narrow two lane road, patchy in spots, and sometimes diverted onto an unpaved dirt road for miles at a time due to construction. The surrounding landscape is completely devoid of any vegetation or signs of life.

This desolate image contrasts with the history of this region. While hard to imagine now, this corridor was once buzzing with activity, driven by the nitrate mining operations that brought in thousands of workers and their families. Company towns were constructed alongside the higway, with theaters, schools, and housing, but most of these settlements have since been reduced to rubble.

Humberstone, the best preserved nitrate operation and town and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, was built in the 1870s. I happened to visit during the First Biennal of Art in the Desert. Artists had been selected to create installations in Humberstone, including filling the bottom of the old pool with oil drums and painting enormous white letters on the ground that could be read from the air.

Oficina Rica Aventura 1903-1956

 

The Oficina Rica Aventura had a population of 1,900, including workers and their families. It was one of five operations owned by German industrialist Henry B. Sloman. The town included a 50 bed hospital, bank, theater, billiard hall, library, and soccer fields.

Ex Oficina Iris

Oficina Victoria

Humberstone

Humberstone Theater

Arte en el Desierto

Explanatory Sign

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My soundtrack while driving hundreds of kilometers along the flat, desolate Panamericana was the one CD I had purchased along the way, a tribute album to Los Prisioneros, arguably the most important band in Chilean rock history. The album contains 18 of their songs performed by a variety of contemporary bands, with styles ranging from ska to hip-hop to heavy metal. I was turned on to this album by the staff at Subterraneo record store in Iquique (Latorre 704).

Here's a classic Prisioneros video from the 1980s for the song We Are Sudamerican Rockers

The landscape becomes more dramatic as the Panamericana rides along the edges of enormous valleys and approaches the coastline, finally reaching Arica, Chile's northernmost coastal city. Only a few kilometers from the border, the city here has more in common with Peru than with Chilean capital Santiago. In fact this land once belonged to Peru. The Morro overlooking Arica houses a museum celebrating the Chilean military's capture of Arica from Peru.

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To truly immerse yourself in the landscape of northern Chile, it is essential to have your own vehicle, ideally one with high clearance and four-wheel drive. Driving in Chile does have its challenges--the distances are vast and the roads are often in poor condition. But then the only way to really comprehend the vast emptiness of the northern desert is to spend several hours driving through it, uninterrupted by signs of civilization. I picked up a Suzuki Gran Vitara at the Calama airport and returned it at the end of my trip in Arica, a few kilometers from the Pervuian border.

The first challenge is to ensure you don't run out of gas, as service stations are few and far between. After leaving Iquique, I fillled up the tank at the entrance to the Panamericana, as I would not pass near another for over 300 kilometers at Arica. San Pedro has only one gas station. Surely they do a brisk business from all the tour groups, I thought, but each morning, when I stopped in to fill up the tank before heading out for the day, the station was closed. On the first day there was a line of cars waiting, and everyone else seemed just as perplexed as I was. Finally, one driver stepped out of his van while the family in the back looked on and demanded to speak to the manager. A few of us followed him in and the manager relented and agreed to sell us gasoline. The whole charade would be repeated each morning over the next few days. I never did figure out why the station was so reluctant to do business; they could name their price and we would have paid it.

In Putre there was no gas station per se, but I'd heard it was possible to buy gas at the corner grocery. I asked for five liters and the shopkeeper retreated to the back room. He returned after what seemed like thirty minutes with a plastic jug and a piece of rubber tubing, which he proceeded to siphon into the gas tank, sucking on the mouth of the jug to get it started. The rental company had insisted the vehicle needed gasoline of grade "95" or higher, but I didn't bother to ask.