Argentina at Last

On one of the last days in Calama, we took a micro to the “cementario” on the outskirts of town.  I had not yet been so aware of the magnitude of the Atacama Desert; it was the sort of scene that overwhelms one with its inconceivable emptiness.  We walked through the cemetery, skirting around a funeral, and into a plain full of low bushes.  Lizards darted around, sometimes stopping to look at me, twitching their heads up and down.  As we walked along an old barbed wire fence, I heard a screeching cry and looked up to a small owl sitting on one of the fence posts ahead.  It had a bright white, warlike face, and soon went flying away into the adjacent field.  On the way out of the cemetery, I saw people sitting in front of the raised, concrete tombs of their family members, which looked like a number of square, glass-fronted dioramas stacked on top of each other.  One man held his hand out to the tomb for a moment and then walked off. 

Before going back to town, we sat at a little flower stand next to the road and drank the national soda, Bilz.  It was a great relief to get out of the dirty and hectic center, where it seems we were daily assaulted by the sight of stray dogs acting on their amorous desires, among other unsavory things.  The next morning, after being forced to pay more than we owed because of the innkeeper’s mathematical error, we got on the bus to Salta, Argentina.  I was very glad to leave.

The ride was obscenely beautiful.  At first, it seemed no different from any of the other recent rides.  The desert stretched on and on.  Plumes of smoke from the mines loomed in the distance.  The landscape was a seemingly endless, lifeless plain.  A few hours in, though, we started climbing in thick fog, and when it cleared, the scenery had completely changed.  There were lakes and beautiful snow-capped mountains in the distance.  We went past small herds of vicuñas and alpacas.  The stone of the mountains blazed blue and red.  There was the same sort of vast emptiness, but it was somehow much more alive.  We rode through salt flats that reflected the beautiful clouds, and past canyons cut in painted rock.

Around 10 PM at night, we arrived in Salta.  It was hot and humid as we walked through the night streets to the hostel.  After putting our bags in the room, we walked out into the city, which was still bustling at what must have been midnight or later.  Beautiful, slightly dilapidated buildings towered up all around us.  Intimidatingly attractive people sat in outdoor cafés and assessed us as we walked by.  I am glad to be in Argentina.

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.