Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  Three men we had passed working on the road came in. They were wearing all-in-one garments resembling snow-suits, as well as cotton hats and goggles. I thought, What are they hiding from?, and I looked outside again, and realized they were hiding from everything – sun, wind, cold, dust. It was as harsh as another planet up there.

  The vegetation changed again after the oregano and potato fields of Socoroma, a typical Andean village where Aymára and mestizos (Chileans of mixed indigenous and European descent) had built their abode houses around a crooked white church. The bus stopped, and the driver got out to hand a package to an Aymára man who took it and turned away, without a smile.

  Groups of Aymára entered Chile centuries ago, probably from the Titicaca basin, and their existence has been an unrelieved struggle against the brutal conditions of the high Andes. Nobody knows a great deal about them; the written history of most of the indigenous peoples west of the Andes before the Spanish conquest is sketchy, at least compared with that of the high cultures of more northerly Latin American countries. It wasn’t until I got home and historically minded friends asked me about ‘sites’ that I realized there weren’t any – or very few. Chile didn’t breed any great empires and civilizations like the famous cultures of Mexico, Central America and Peru; it was frugally peopled by a heterogeneous (though often related) collection of tribes, each rich in its own particular areas of development. Most of them subsequently melted into oblivion. There was one exceptionally strong culture to the south, the Mapuche, which continues, but even they never had a centralized government. The other indigenous peoples were too fragmented to present a united opposition to the Spaniards. With the exception of the Mapuche, small groups of other Araucanians (of which the Mapuche are a branch) and the northern Aymára, miscegenation assimilated the original Chileans fairly swiftly.

  The racial mix of the nation therefore settled at an early stage, compared with other territories of the Spanish empire. Relatively few black slaves were brought in. Approximately 65 per cent of the thirteen million contemporary Chileans are mestizos, 30 per cent are white and 5 per cent indigenous (this latter concentrated at the bottom of the social scale). I remembered what a salient feature racial differences had been in Brazil. They barely exist in Chile, which enjoys an ethnic uniformity almost unique on the continent.

  The rolling high plains of the central Andes above about 12,000 feet are called the altiplano, a word which has worked its way into the English language; it refers to the entire discontinuous series of plateaux and basins extending from southern Colombia to northern Chile. The high desert around the intersection of Chile, Peru and Bolivia is also known as the Puna, and it is the largest tableland outside of Tibet.

  When we reached this territory we found long-necked vicuñas (close but wild relations of the llama) grazing on bunchgrass, and rocks covered with the rare llareta (laretia compacta), a dense and bright green lichen-like plant which ónly needs a twentieth of an inch of water a year and which protects itself from the environment by turning hard and gathering into dome shapes. I glimpsed a mountain vizcacha – a furry grey rodent which resembles a long-tailed rabbit – sunbathing on a rock near a cushion bog. Spangled volcanoes overlooked lakes skimmed by black-headed Andean gulls and giant coots, and on the shore of Lake Chungará, at 14,800 feet probably the highest lake in the world, I got out of the bus and waved goodbye as it trundled towards Bolivia.

  Deep silence. I walked across to a tiny wooden refuge pointed out by the bus driver. It was run by a genial employee of Conaf, the national forestry service; he was called Umberto, and he said I could sleep on the floor of what purported to be an office. I sat talking to him outside the hut, and almost immediately the salmon pink streak of a flamingo curved above the lake.

  The change in air pressure had caused my fountain pen to leak over my clothes. I wondered what it was doing to my body. I drank a lot of water, didn’t move much for twenty-four hours, and watched the vicuñas next to the hut. They were eating bunchgrass as hard as granite and spikier than a gorse bush. Umberto knew them all personally. He told me that they were much nicer than their relations the guanacos, who live at lower altitudes; guanacos spit.

  As the sun prepared to set, delicate pink fingers curled around the volcano in front of us.

  On the second day Umberto unfurled a Chilean flag on the flagpole.

  ‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

  ‘We like to put one up because we’re so near Bolivia,’ he said. ‘The last one got ripped in the wind. Besides, the boss is coming up tomorrow.’

  The next morning he scrubbed the hut, shaved and put on a clean shirt, tie, pressed trousers and regulation Conaf sweater. We sat outside watching white-throated sierra finches hopping in the shale. The boss never turned up. This didn’t bother Umberto. It was difficult to imagine anything ever bothering him; he was so laid back I wondered if he was on anything, and if he was, I wanted some. His maternal grandmother was pure Aymára, his other three grandparents mestizos; he had been brought up in a valley not far off. He was diffident when he spoke, but apparently completely at ease with himself and his isolation. I asked him how he liked living alone so far from anyone else, and he laughed.

  ‘It’s better than the town! Pure air!’

  ‘Thin air!’ I said.

  ‘Thin for you, not for me. My lungs are used to it.’

  ‘Do you like it best when there are people staying at the refuge, or when you’re alone?’

  ‘Alone! I like peace. I like my thoughts. I like to write poetry.’

  I walked to the shore of the lake, and counted the giant coots’ nests floating on the water.

  When I woke up on the fifth morning I surprised myself by feeling stirrings of desire to move on; I was uncontrollably eager to grasp more of the country. Inconveniently positioned mountains meant that I was obliged to go back before I could go forward, so I decided to leave for Arica. After packing my bag, however, I had an attack of altitude sickness, called soroche in South America. I threw up my breakfast, had a tight headache that aspirins wouldn’t dislodge, and felt weak. It wasn’t only oxygen deprivation which made life punishing up there: it was viciously cold at night, too. I had worn all my clothes to bed, including hat and gloves, and in the morning there was always ice in front of the hut. But during the day the sun was remorseless. I sat still inside the hut, recovering, and in an attempt to entertain me Umberto turned to Princess Anne’s signature in the visitors’ book, and asked me if I knew her. I wondered if she had suffered from altitude sickness.

  By early afternoon I felt better, and decided to return to Arica after all. I said goodbye to Umberto and walked down the road, reasonably confident of picking up a ride down to the coast. Umberto was singing. I sat on a rock and looked back, so I could see the volcanoes behind the lake for a little longer. One of them was the highest volcano in the world. Chile has over 2000 volcanoes, and about fifty of them are active; they were all gods to the early peoples, many with names and personalities. Two of them were reflected in unbroken lines on the waters of the lake. Agents of the Pinochet regime had tried to drain that lake once, claiming they were going to pipe the water to the people of Arica. As it is salt water and they were apparently not building any desalination plants this was not very plausible. It was eventually revealed that the object was to increase the water supply to a hydroelectric plant which they were about to privatise. The project was dropped.

  The wind whipped up little typhoons of brown dust. After an hour a juggernaut crawled over the ridge. I knew it was Bolivian, as virtually all road traffic over that section of the Andes carries freight from landlocked Bolivia to Chilean ports. Bolivia lost its coastal territory in the War of the Pacific, and is obliged to station its navy on Lake Titicaca. Over a century after the war, its demands for free and full access to the coast continue to poison bilateral relations. I had already been told a laboured joke three times about Bolivian representations at the UN, which for some reason, according to the Chileans, we
re expressed in English (‘We want sea’). Turned around (‘Sea, we want’), this allegedly sounds very much like ‘Yes, bollocks’ (Sí, huevón) in Chilean Spanish.

  The lorry skidded to a halt a few yards ahead of me, causing a minor cyclone, and I climbed up into the grimy cab, greeted by two sweaty and smiling dark brown faces. I reckoned the journey back down to Arica would take about eight hours. It was to turn out rather differently.

  The truck was loaded with 34 tons of timber on its way to the United States. Simón and Rodríguez sat a couple of feet apart in the front seats and I perched on the narrow wooden bed behind them. A large plastic model of the Virgin in prayer, her body wreathed in fluorescent roses, was swinging violently from the mirror. (This, the South American equivalent of the furry dice, was to become a familiar sight on my trip.) Most of the metal in the cab was exposed and dented, and wherever possible it had been decorated with circular stickers printed with pithy Bolivian aphorisms such as ‘Virginity kills – inoculate yourself’. Every few minutes the two men dipped their stubby fingers into crumpled paper bags on the dashboard and took out lurid jellyish sweeties. I ate one of these later. It tasted of Swarfega.

  I had underestimated the capacity of 34 tons of wood to slow a vehicle down. In addition, the height of the cab magnified the bumps (there were many bumps) and I often clenched my eyes in pain as soroche flooded back. When the sun began to set I made a headrest out of my sleeping bag, and then the pink and orange liquid Andean sky turned my torture chamber into a palace.

  I began to realize that there was more to the extraordinary slowness of the truck than was immediately apparent. It was slowest when we went downhill. Whenever we confronted a sweeping slope downwards, beads of sweat appeared on Simón’s brow and he rammed his foot on the brake and changed down to first gear.

  We passed two other Bolivian juggernauts parked on a verge, and pulled over. It appeared that each truck needed a tyre change – an astonishing coincidence – and a team effort was required. This took two hours. I sat on a rock trying to be patient and finished Gavin Young’s Slow Boats Home.

  We set off again, and I estimated that we could still make Arica by midnight. I asked Simón when we would be arriving. ‘En un ratito,’ he said, a phrase I had already heard many times in Chile. It had the same connotations as mañana in Spain (without the sense of urgency, as the old but reliable joke goes). It was the first of many journeys which took far longer than it would ever have been possible to imagine at the outset, and by the end of my six months in Chile I experienced a sense of achievement whenever I actually arrived anywhere.

  When we pulled over again, at ten o’clock, a building materialized in the blackness, and it was surrounded by Bolivian trucks. Simón hustled me inside, where an Aymára family was watching television behind a straw screen. In the front portion of the building Simón and Rodríguez greeted about fifteen of their compatriots and we joined them at a long table.

  Thus it was, then, that at 13,000 feet on a cold night in the heart of the Andes I had dinner with seventeen Bolivian truckers. They all had masses of glossy, straight black hair, dark skin, thin moustaches, high cheekbones and large, straight white teeth. We ate cazuela, a staple Chilean dish I became very fond of comprising potato, corn and a chunk of meat in tasty brown broth. The truckers were in high spirits (though they didn’t touch alcohol) and graciously tried to include their strange dinner guest in the conversation, but I had just about got my ear around the Chilean idiom, and this Bolivian Spanish defeated me. The volume, inflection and accompanying gestures indicated that they were not discussing the finer points of the Bolivian constitution.

  As we left the building Rodríguez cheerfully announced that we still had four hours to go. This was depressing news, as the boarding-house where I had left my bags only received its guests until two o’clock. I fidgeted on my wooden bed. After a couple of hours we reached a section of road allowing one-way traffic only, and had to wait in a line of trucks for half an hour until we were mysteriously waved through. And then, at one o’clock, we drove into a lorry park where Simón announced that we were to snatch ‘a couple of hours’ sleep’. Rodríguez, whose sole role was apparently to allow Simón to boss him around, was dispatched into the back of the truck with blankets. I was motioned forwards while Simón made up the bed behind the seats. He lay down, breathing heavily. I sat rigid in the passenger seat.

  ‘Why don’t you come back here?’ he said alluringly. ‘It’s much more comfortable.’ After two or three further attempts at persuasion he fell asleep. I tried to do the same in the passenger seat, but the man could have snored for Bolivia, so I put my thermal gloves on and watched the stars until the sky transformed itself from deep black to the pale pearly shades of an oyster, and sunlight leaked from the east.

  A cockerel crowed, but it was a very old cockerel, and half way through his wheezy crow collapsed into a rasping cough. A small dairy farm coalesced out of the gloom. A man was chasing cows around a pen. Simón woke up with a snort, cross at having slept too long. He shouted at Rodríguez, spat on the floor of the cab, got out and stumbled around outside in the cold, climbing into the adjacent trucks and waking his colleagues. We left in a hurry with a lot of loud farting, past the man who had been chasing cows, standing now in the sunlight concentrating on a mirror hanging on a gatepost and working at his chin with a cutthroat razor.

  It was no surprise when the three trucks pulled over half a mile further on. Everyone got out and started shouting. I learnt a few Bolivian swear words and figured out that the Chileans operated a weighbridge at the Poconchile customs post. Any Bolivian truck over a certain tonnage was required to pay stiff excess charges. The lumber trucks were way off-limits, and had no means of paying the charges – the plan had been to pass Poconchile before the weighbridge operators arrived at work. But the truckers had overslept, and were going to have to idle on the side of the road until nightfall, and cross the customs post in the dark, when it was unmanned.

  It was tacitly and mutually understood that we had to part company. I reckoned we were about twenty-five miles from Arica. Despite the fact that I had a hard slog ahead of me to any kind of settlement, with only a brief period of pleasant air temperature between extreme cold and extreme heat, I couldn’t tolerate another stultifying day getting nowhere with the Bolivians. Simón was displaying pointed indifference towards me. He felt the rebuff of the previous night, and the delay meant that he had a problem with his schedule, so didn’t want to be bothered fussing around a gringa. My bag wasn’t very heavy, and I was fairly confident that another, better organized Bolivian truck would pass, and pick me up. If it didn’t, I could probably break the journey at Poconchile.

  As I left, Simón belched loudly. I set off along the deserted road through the Lluta valley, returning the occasional wave from straw-hatted figures intent on their fields. It was warm by the time I reached the weighbridge five or six miles further on, but the pale light of morning still hung over the valley. The weighers waved me through, grinning, and soon another Bolivian stopped for me, smirking with delight that cunning redistribution of his load of timber a hundred yards up the road had secured him a clear passage over the rudimentary Chilean weighbridge.

  The remoter reaches of the north Chilean Andes require a four-wheel drive jeep, and Hertz produced one for me for the next leg of the journey, the first of many of their vehicles which conveyed me to the more difficult areas of the incontiguous Chilean landscape. My plan was to go inland again before I left the far north, which meant I was descending the country in a zigzag. There were tracts of volcanic land near the Bolivian border post of Colchane which people told me were inaccessible. That was like catnip to me.

  Another gringo was heading south, so I asked him if he wanted to join me on the mountain trip. Matthew was a tall, skinny Australian in his mid-thirties who worked as a computer programmer when he wasn’t travelling, and we had shared a meal together three or four times in Arica. He was quick-witted, with a touch of ped
antry about him, and always knew exactly what he thought, a trait which makes me cautious. But he was open and friendly, with a highly developed sense of humour, and he was game for anything. His Spanish was good, and he made a great effort with the Chileans. Whenever someone asked him where he was from, he used to put his hands in the begging dog position, crouch over and hop around impersonating a kangaroo.

  We loaded up with essentials such as water, emergency provisions and ten gallons of spare fuel, and set out down an empty Panamerican, windows down and a dubious Australian cassette marked ‘various artists’ batting out of the speakers. We travelled at our own pace on a good road through trembling mauve mountains, smooth caramel desert and swathes of red and brown pampa, at one point required to abandon the fruit in our bags at a pest control ‘fruit check’. Matthew was handed a receipt for an orange, and wondered whether it would enable him to claim the fruit back on a return trip. Passports, driving licences and sundry documents were pored over. In the police room they had erected a board displaying photos of smashed cars and corpses.

  We stopped to climb in the crispy heat to the human geoglyph at Chiza, picking among limbs like Gulliver on Brobdingnag. The hot wind stuck in our throats. When we got back in the jeep I put on a Ry Cooder tape: it was perfect desert music. Time dissolved in those empty spaces, and hours passed that afternoon without us noticing them go. Later we searched a valley below the road for a nineteenth-century British cemetery, a lonely memorial to the families who came out to make their fortunes from Chilean nitrates. Invisible dogs started barking when we drew up outside a solitary house, and an old man standing on the porch squinted at us. He guessed what we wanted, waving in the direction of the mountains, and beyond a small oasis, on the opposite side of a sandy wasteland, we found an arched iron gate.

  Little children called Amy and Hubert had died before they had learnt their own names. The climate had killed off most of the settlers’ children; on one porous headstone I read the names of four brothers under two years old. They must have hated it there, those Victorians, with their layers of clothes and their inhibiting Britishness, and at that moment, the sun high and the tall tombstones casting no shadow, I hated it too; it was murderous. I put a desert flower on a cracked flagstone, and as I turned to leave I saw an inscription. It was from the sixteenth chapter of Numbers. It said, ‘Is it a small thing that thou hast brought us up out of a land that floweth with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, except thou make thyself altogether a prince over us?’