Crossing the Atacama
The importance of mining in the Atacama dessert and its influence on local and European economies has stuck in our memories from schooldays and helped build an expectation of what the Atacama might be like, but nothing in my mind even approached reality of this enormous and harsh desert region.
It astonished us to be driving into Atacama region III shortly after leaving La Serena. There are XII regions to Chile so, in theory at least, this means the Atacama stretches for fully a quarter of the length of this very long and thin and fascinating country.
We had camped that night by a boulder strewn river close to the Pacific, at the little town of Los Hornos, about 30kms from La Serena. Immediately after leaving our campsite we started climbing a steep hill that wound up and up through increasingly dry terrain to the 1,200 metre level. Shortly after arriving at the top we saw a sign announcing that we had arrived in Atacama Province. The wide plain ahead stretched from the coastal mountains to the Andes, but due to the hazy conditions we could only see the Andean foothills, not the peaks. Sparse, low growing vegetation dotted the landscape and our excellent road lead straight ahead over a series of gentle inclines until it disappeared into an indecipherable mixture of haze and mirage. Little changed all day except the occasional dip into a dry gully but we did see one village Incahue with the unmistakeable shone foundations of pre-Columbian dwellings. We had no trouble in maintaining a steady 100kph for hour after hour while occasional signs pointed along dirt tracks to either side saying Mina San Antonio 60kms or Mina Pedrito 56kms or even in one case, another mine120kms to the right of the road. Distances to the mines along the coast were much more modest but you just had to wander at the driving economic forces that had led to tens of thousands of men and families to accept work in such a dreadfully hot, dry and waterless region and even to the bloody and long drawn out War of the Pacific in the 1880s. It was during this war that Chile had conquered huge areas of Peruvian land and cut Bolivia off from access to the Pacific Ocean.
At Copiapo, an oasis town which, after so much dry desert, appeared almost by magic, the Pan-American Highway turned towards the Pacific. We made for Baja Inglesa, a very pleasant sandy, laid back little place where we rested our eyes on the peaceful sea. We had driven nearly 400kms that day, including a cross desert diversion to make an extremely interesting visit to one of the overnight staging camps of the Patagonia-Atacama Rally.
From Bahias Inglesa we went north again, this time along the coast, still on the Pan-Am Highway but twisting around jagged rocky headlands and spurts of black laval rocks that carried right down to the edge of the sea where breakers crashed upon the rocks and dunes. Every few kilometres we came across a basic little settlement, mostly they consisted of a very simple hut or house and a series of reed sunshades where beach campers could provide a secondary income for the fisherman owner and his family. We stopped occasionally to take photographs of this extraordinary landscape where the desert met the ocean but easily drove 100 kms before stopping for diesel and coffee at the next little run down port town.
We were heading for Pan de Azucar National Park, a geologist's dream where the desert sand has turned yellow with sulphur or green with copper deposits and the dry water courses are rust red with iron. The rocky mountainous hills are variously red, cream, yellow, grey, black or white with sand piling between the rocky outcrops and cacti growing everywhere, some taller than a man and some small clumpy ones made up of a dozen or more tennis ball sized ones, some even in full flower. Many were covered in a Spanish moss like growth which appears to have been coated in spume from the sea.
The fishermen from the hamlet of Pan de Azucar offered to row us around the rock from which the park gets its name. Sea lions, seals, otters, penguins, pelicans and many other birds live here, but the price they were asking was for a boat load of ten people, so as there were only four of us decided not to take up the offer. Instead we agreed to have a meal of freshly caught fish we had just seen brought in, Dorado so fresh that it was still wriggling when we watched it being gutted, cleaned and filleted. It was touch and go whether we got any lunch at all as we weren’t the only watchers as a crowd of about twenty cheeky and voracious pelicans crowded around the fisherman’s little marble slab grabbing whatever titbits they could. It turned out to be a draw in the end as most of the pelicans managed to get a good feed from the complaisant fishermen, while we had a large and really tasty meal of fresh grilled and the obligatory papas fritas..
Afterward lunch we drove up to a mirador or lookout, travelling along a steep sandy track that twisted and climbed through the cacti covered hills until, suddenly, we were perched on the edge of a high bluff with magnificent views straight down to the sea far below and also north and south along the dramatic coastal cliffs. To our delight, we then spotted a tiny Chilian fox. Its fur was a mixture of sandy red and grey so that it was almost impossible to see against the surrounding desert until it moved. Even close to you could easily lose sight of it. A few moments later we realised that it had three dainty but half-starved cubs. We soon found out that they just loved bacon and we almost had them eating from our hands while we took photographs. They were also very grateful for a bowl of water.
After this diversion we returned to the Pan-Am Highway and made for Tal-tal, an old nitrates port 25 kilometres off the main road. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the town had been a very important port and rail terminus, from which hundreds of thousands of tons of nitrates were exported to Europe, at first by sailing ships and then by steamers for processing use as fertiliser. Now very little remains of the industry, just a few interesting wooden, almost Victorian style offices and manager’s houses. All the dock area has been flattened and the old loading pier is in a sad and dangerous state of disrepair. The town itself still had plenty of civic pride though, with tumbling fountains, civic gardens, children’s playgrounds, a main square shaded by tall trees and a preserved steam locomotive. We parked up for the night right on the quay side, just feet above the sea and shared the space with yet more pelicans. The day had seen us cross another 250 kilometres of the Atacama.
Day three saw yet another 300 kilometres slip by, as we drove through an area of totally empty desert with not even a single living cactus, let alone anything greener. A single track railway had been criss-crossing our path for hundreds of miles, but, apart from this and the evidence of old mining activity there was very little else to see. Towards the end of the day we passed through the coast range of mountains which meant the mining now closer to the road and we dropped down into the large town of Antofagasta.
Antofagata is still a thriving port from which heavy loads of copper sheet are exported, the diesel trains bringing them down from the mines and processing plants right through the heart of city traffic. There is mining and metal processing activity all around the city while the town centre is thronged with smartly dressed people. It is an attractive place with large municipal gardens and scores of well preserved Victorian and Edwardian style homes and shop fronts, evidence of its long history of commercial success.
All these ports and villages along the coast have to be reached by steep inclines running down gulleys in the coast range of mountains.
When we left we took a 200kms diversion inland across the desert in a NE direction heading for Calama on our way to San Pedro de Atacama. It was day four of our Atacama journey. Once again we drove through heavily mined, flat, sandy desert, but for once, we had plenty of accompanying heavy truck traffic. This was another surprise after days of seeing only a few vehicles of any kind.
Day 5 saw us travel the 100k to San Pedro climbing to well over 8,000 ft to cross the ridge into the bowl in which the charming adobe oasis town sits. From here we paid dawn visit to the volcano flanked Taito geysers, which at 14,200 ft, are the highest in the World. Another day saw us scrambling and hiking in the Valle del Luna, an extraordinary landscape of salt crystals, mineral rocks, clay, sand and salt flats.
On our sixth day of travel we returned to Calama, another bustling oasis town and had a tour of the Chuchicalama open pit mine, the largest in the World. It is currently 4.5 kms long, 3.5 kms wide and 950 metres deep. It has taken forty years to become this size, but it is growing all the time as giant machines bite into its huge seam of ore to produce 2,500 tons a day of pure copper a day and it is expected to treble in size before the seam runs out in 60-80 years. The surrounding spoil heaps are enormous and will soon completely bury the nearby barrack-like accommodation so thousands of miners and their families are being moved to new and better housing in Calama itself.
On the seventh day we headed first west for 100 kilometres before turning North again for another 200kms on the good old Pan-Am Highway to reach our destination for the day. All the way through this desolate landscape there were signs pointing out defunct mines and oficinas, places where miners were able to bring their ore for working and payment. Dates on the signs indicated that nitrate mining in the region started about 1865 and carried on until the 1930s. Some mines only operated for 8 or 10 years, while others lasted for 40 or more. The sad remnants of hundreds of mine buildings, oficinas, barracks and cemeteries littered the desert. Only two of these offices still functions.
It seemed to us that God must have had a very off day at this particular part of the dessert. Yet, when we turned off the highway into the Pampa de Tamaruga National Park we only had to drive another 4kms to find a wild campsite under a range of brown hills covered by hundreds of geoglifeos, remarkable paintings made in pre-Inca times by pushing aside the stones with which the hills were covered and disclosing the smooth underlying rock. There were oblongs, rectangles, circles, arrows, fish, whales, birds, condors, flowers, men walking, men with staffs or weapons and men in boats plus many other subjects, ranging in size from a few feet high to maybe sixty feet wide. Hard to see at first they all became highly visible under the slanting rays of the setting sun. Disappointingly there was no information on when they were made, or who by or why. Was the area greener at one time? Did people from the desert interior go whaling or feast on beached whales? It was an altogether an amazing sight that gave us a real lift after so much bleak and desolate landscape.
We stayed the night before driving on to Arica on our eighth day, when we put yet another 300 kms or more on the clock. Immediately after leaving the geoglifeos we passed through a large plantation of the hardy tamarugar trees whose deep roots are capable of coping with saline water. Most of the day was spent driving up and down the sides of four enormous canyons, the largest of them, which was about 4,000ft deep, took us an hour to drive down and another to drive up. All but one of the narrow canyons floors were fertile, with fields, homes and paddocks, while the fourth, where the water supply had obviously dried up, was covered in the sad ruins of failed farms. All of the canyons had a few geoglifeos, but nothing like the display we had seen the previous afternoon.
At one stage in our journey we had to make a ten kilometre diversion down a very rough, dusty and bumpy ‘ripio’ section of the original Pan-Am. How did people face the 2,000 kms journey to Santiago on horse drawn transport or in early motorcars on such roads?
Arica, the most Northerly town in Chile was another pleasant surprise. It had a real buzz with colourful crowds thronging the pedestrian shopping areas and many good restaurants. We drove out a few miles along a flower lined road to an absolutely superb ethnographical and archaeological museum where we learned more about the people, history and culture of the region in pre-Inca times.
Travel day nine saw us cross the border into Peru. It was still bone dry, rugged, hilly, desert country but it was no longer the Atacama we had both learnt about in school. And, yes we had lived and worked in other desert regions, but there had always been a trace of life, a scorpion, some flies, or a lizard perhaps, but much of Chile’s desert is utterly devoid of life and, in size and impact it really does take some beating
Janet and Peter Milner, Arequipa, Peru March 2006
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