Tacna-Arica-Calama

A few days ago, we returned to Arequipa from Cotahuasi. The bus ride was perhaps the most eventful yet. Around midnight, the bus stopped and the lights went out. After receiving no information for 15 minutes or so concerning this curious development, I got my flashlight and clambered out of the bus. It turned out that the bus ahead of ours was stuck in a patch of deep and remarkably adhesive mud. There was a group of men digging out the wheels of the bus, and another group of people watching. The landscape was utterly surreal, as we were in the middle of a 15,000 foot mountain pass, well above the timber line. It was raining, and we seemed to be the only lifeforms for miles and miles. I went walking off to the side of the road into a field of boulders and large mounds of green moss. Finally I got back onto the bus, and within another 10 minutes we were moving again. Another part of the road seemed to have turned into a river, and though the small pickup truck behind our bus stopped at the side, we went barreling through. It made me sort of jumpy, but seemed to work out fine.

Despite the delays, we wound up in Arequipa at the projected time of 4 AM, and almost immediately boarded another bus to Tacna, which is the Chilean border town. As the sun came up, we were passing through sand dunes littered with red rocks. Food and newspaper vendors started boarding the bus around 9:30 and hawked their wares, and the steward deemed it the appropriate time to put on some absurdly violent movie. The desert spread out into long planes with hills in the distance. In one place there were dozens of dust devils in the distance, some seemingly towering up to 50 feet or so. The sand was dotted with little oases occasionally, and one large one toward the end that turned out to be Tacna.

We checked into a hotel in Tacna, took baths, and then walked around town. It had a different sort of feel than any of the other towns so far. Maybe a little more European. There was a sand colored cathedral on the plaza with beautiful, circular stained-glass windows. Some of them had masonic imagery for some reason. Further down in the plaza there was a large cast iron fountain that had been made by A.G. Eiffel and shipped over to Perú. He apparently made quite a mark on the towns in the area.

The next day we bought tickets for Arica at the quaint train station. It seemed to have been relatively unchanged for years, though a sign painted onto the traincar proclaimed that the Peruvian government was “on the edge of the future” or something like that. We rode to Arica in a combined engine and passenger car. It was bright yellow and green, and carried us through a familiar landscape of amazing desolation. Eventually I could see the sun reflecting in streaks in the Pacific. We arrived in Arica at about 7 o’clock with the 2 hour time difference.

It was immediately evident that we were in a different country. Chile is much more European in feel than Perú. There are many more privately owned cars, and thus many gas stations with coffee and junk food, including delicious packaged flan. It also seems to be more consumer based, with lots of pedestrian malls selling clothes and electronics. A lot of the youth are painfully fashion conscious. In general, it felt more like the U.S. than anywhere I have been so far. The prices are accordingly high across the board. I cannot understand Chilean Spanish nearly as well as Peruvian; it seems much more rapid and slurred together. After spending a night in a french owned hostel, about which roamed a cat named Napoleon, we got on an annoyingly expensive and uncomfortable bus to Calama. We were stopped twice in the middle of the night to get out and open our bags for inspection by the police.

Calama is in the middle of the Atacama desert, which is the most arid in the world. It is a fairly nondescript city, apparently the retirement place of miners from the nearby hills. It has a large shopping mall and a small downtown that is somewhat unattractive. When I hopped on the wrong bus one day, I saw the paved streets dead end in the desert. While the downtown is crowded with ostentatious construction, the people out in the far reaches of town live in corrugated metal shacks. Groups of stray dogs roam around. While walking in the plaza one day, I saw a dog show that involved a bunch of the unfortunate beasts being dressed in tutus. I thought of it as just one more reason to be in Argentina soon.

Arequipa I

I arrived in Arequipa at 6 in the morning fueled by 2 hours of sleep, but having had a much better overnight bus experience than the last.

We came to the Terminal Terrestre after rolling through miles of perfectly desolate and beautiful desert.  The city loomed up beneath El Mistí, its snow-capped volcano.  Much of the city is built out of a white volcanic rock called sillar.  It looks something like a dense pumice with flecks of mica and other impurities throughout.  Our first hostel was an old colonial structure built from the stone.  It had a large courtyard, a garden, a cat, and a curvy roof upon which I scrambled about enthusiastically.  We cooked stir-fry and noodles the first night.

The city itself was fairly spectacular in many places.  The sillar façades of banks and churches were covered in beautiful and delicate carvings.  Flagstone sidewalks and stately churches were everywhere.

One day we walked to a suburb across a river called Yanahuara, apparently a cloister of the rich.  There was a beautiful park in the center of the neighborhood, with a lookout, or mirador, that consisted of sillar arches inscribed with poetry in a beautiful Spanish Nouveau script.  I could see the curve of the earth from there, with the simple houses sprawling out toward the mountains.

Christmas cheer, I suppose, called for music to be blasted from the main cathedral every night, along with a psychedelic light show on the front of the building.  They played classics ranging from Alvin and the Chipmunks to Louis Armstrong.  It was truly bizarre. 

On Christmas eve, I went to a grocery store on the plaza to get Panetón and wine, and experienced once again Perú’s drastically different regard for personal space.  I find myself squished into impossibly small spaces with impossibly large numbers of people here on a regular basis.

Later that night, we made dinner and sat on the rooftop terrace of our hostel, La Casa de Margott, and observed the festivities.  Around 11 PM, the city exploded in fireworks.  I could see and hear them from all directions, from all over the city.  Even the policemen standing watch on the corner set some off.  Cars honked their horns even more than usual, and in general, the excitement was contagious.

On Christmas day we took a walk up to the city’s main park, Selva Alegre.  There were lots of wholesome family-enjoying-Christmas-in-the-park scenes, including one in which some kids and their father messed around with one of the grasscutter alpacas that was tethered to a tree.  It got very mad and spit at them.  At one point I was afraid it was going to hurt one of the smaller children, but in the end nobody was injured.  It was just some good old Christmas alpaca torment.  Later on, in another part of the park, we observed some caged animals, including a monkey that grabbed my hand.  When it realized that I didn’t have any food, it lost interest.  It was sort of like shaking hands with a miniature old man.

On my last night in Arequipa, in la Casa de Margott, I drank several Pisco Sours with Andy, the desk clerk, and a German traveller.  It was fairly amusing to try to learn how to make them through communications in a combination of both germany and spanishy englishes.  The main thing I understood was “mas pisco.”  I guess you can never go wrong with that.

The basic recipe is:
-1 egg white
-1/4 cup Peruvian lime juice
-2 tablespoons sugar
-mas pisco
-ice water
-bitters
-cinnamon

You pretty much blend everything but the last two together until it is white and frothy and then sprinkle the bitters and cinnamon on top.  I quite like them.

The next day we got on a bus to Cotahuasi in the afternoon.