by Steve Hely
Chile and Patagonia
Chile: The Longest, Skinniest Country
If you spend a lot of your spare time looking at maps (and who doesn’t?), then you’ve gotta be fascinated by Chile. Look at it down there, the slender country. The only country with the body shape of a runway model. A slice, a sliver of Earth hugged for 2,600 miles of coastline by the Pacific.
What’s down there?
Let me give you one answer: lots and lots of true nothing.
My travels in Chile began in Iquique, since that was the northernmost place I could fly to from La Paz. It was a shame to skip the salt flats of southern Bolivia, but salty wasteland takes a while to cross, and I had an appointment in Santiago in a few days.
Iquique is a charmless and tsunami-prone former nitrate port. About a month before I turned up, Iquique had been hit by an 8.2-magnitude earthquake, which might be part of why the streets had a desolated feel. During the earthquake, almost three hundred women escaped from a local prison. Some of them were still on the loose, though quite a few had eventually turned themselves in. My taxi driver did not have what I’d call a can-do attitude, but his job wasn’t easy on the dark streets, lights out everywhere. Only with many mutterings that mounted in volume did he finally find his way to the address I had for a youth hostel, said by my Lonely Planet guide to be Iquique’s “place to be.”
If it ever was, it was no more. Deposited on the dark doorstep, I rang the bell for, oh, probably forty minutes or so until a sleepy woman in a bathrobe at last arrived. She showed me to what appeared to be maybe her son’s bedroom, and disappeared. I was the only guest in this hostel, if it really was the hostel. Maybe I’d gotten the address wrong somehow and become the uninvited guest of a luckless Chilean woman. She wasn’t thrilled about the situation, that was clear enough. She did have me sign my name in a little book, though. That felt at least kind of official.
In the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, there were once hundreds of refineries for the extraction and processing of potassium nitrate, saltpeter, a valuable fertilizer and firework ingredient. The synthesizing of ammonia, the Great Depression, economic shifts, chemical advances, all this in time destroyed the saltpeter business. The refineries of the Atacama became ghostly industrial wrecks. Ghost towns, or ghost mines.
The abandoned works at Humberstone and Santa Laura are just forty-eight kilometers from Iquique, and are the most spectacularly abandoned of all. Now UNESCO World Heritage Sites, they’re not much visited, most people being not all that interested in decaying industrial complexes in harsh and remote desert. It’s said the iron of the buildings and the old gates creak and moan in eerie symphony with the sun and wind. In photos, Humberstone looks like the loneliest place in the world, stripped of everything, the conveyor belts crumbling, pathetic graffiti on the walls of the old hospital sunlit through holes worn into the concrete. Just enough to remind you that people were once here, but everything warm or human hauled off or eaten away by the dust.
Man, I would’ve liked to see Humberstone. As I lay in my child’s bed in Iquique, I couldn’t sleep from wondering if I should wake up at four in the morning, which would maybe give me time to get a car and make my way out there. (On Humberstone-related sites, you are highly advised against hitchhiking—it’s not dangerous, you just might be stuck there for days.)
But you can’t see everything in this world. If I have to skip something, I guess I’ll pick a rusting, decrepit nitrate works in a bleak desert that, also I should note, is said to be spotted with a few land mines from the days when the abandoned mines were used as concentration camps for political prisoners.
Instead, I took a bus to San Pedro de Atacama, legendary hippie oasis of the Atacama Desert.
Austenland (2013, PG-13)
The scenery wasn’t bad. Ten or even twenty minutes of it: That could’ve been amazing.
The bus ran first south, Highway 1 running in Chile just as it does in California, pressed up to the coast, dropping off into thin beaches and then the Pacific. Hardly any waves here, not enough for surfers to make anything of it. Just the softest lap of water, or dramatic breaks against scattered and jagged rock.
On the other side of the highway, sharp and immediate, a steady ridge of mountains. Enough mountains that no one lived here, seaside. We passed through one grim port town, and a few clusters of what must’ve been seasonal houses or fishing camps, constructed in a flimsy way, maybe so if you lost yours in a tsunami, you could shrug it off.
Then: We turned inland and crossed through the mountains. Now: the desert. The Atacama, one of the harshest, hottest, and driest places on Earth. There are stretches of the Atacama where it’s gone twenty years or more without raining. Punishing country where there are long stretches of nothing, nothing to either side of the highway, nothing for miles.
When I say nothing, I don’t mean a little something, a cactus or a sagebrush or a few rocks here or there, like in Texas or Arizona or California’s Mojave. I mean nothing, nothing but red-brown sand all the way to the unbroken blue sky. No clouds out here—clouds are moisture. In the Atacama, there is no moisture. There is nothing.
In the Atacama, the air is so clear that where the red earth meets the blue sky on the horizon, the colors stay so vivid it’s as if they were right up next to your eyeballs.
Very cool, absolutely. Worth seeing. Very cool thing to see.
But, I mean: The bus ride was seven hours.
To break the monotony of the trip, an indifferent female attendant who was above average in size walked to the front of the bus and put on a movie.
Now: Let us say you are transporting a busload of almost entirely Chilean men, most of them on a long journey to or from work in the mines.
What movie would you choose to play for these men?
The movie the attendant put on was called Austenland. It came out in 2013, and it stars Keri Russell and Jennifer Coolidge. It tells the story of Jane (that’s Keri Russell), a young American woman who loves Jane Austen so much that she spends all her money to go to, like, an adult camp or theme park or resort in England where you pretend to be Jane Austen characters and gigolos in period garb pretend to seduce you. Only, Jane doesn’t know they’re only pretending, so she gets her heart broken. But then a decent Jane Austen actor guy (Bret McKenzie from Flight of the Conchords), who is playing a stableboy in the fake Jane Austen land, actually does love our Jane or comes to love her.
Jennifer Coolidge plays Jane’s friend.
I could understand the plot of the movie, because I am fluent in English. I could listen to the English under the dubbed Spanish.
For the other men on the bus, I’m not sure it was so clear. Another problem is that many of the jokes play on how snooty English people pretending to be nineteenth-century landed gentry talk, versus how modern American women talk, and also regular English people, and then the Americans do silly versions of the English snooty way, and so on. How were these jokes re-created in Spanish? I wondered. Listening hard I tried to divine it but could not hear the way. Chilean Spanish is already itself famously crazy and hard to understand, even by other Latin American Spanish speakers. So that’s another wrinkle.
The guys on the bus were not laughing at the movie. I will say they were mostly all watching.
How had this movie been chosen? Surely the bus could play whatever movie it wanted. I doubted the Chilean desert bus company had a deal with Sony Classic Pictures Entertainment that mandated they show Austenland. Someone must’ve chosen it. Why? How?
My best guess was that the indifferent attendant wanted to see it. I looked to her, at the back, to see if she was enjoying it. No: She was watching, but her posture and face were still very indifferent. Her arms were crossed in stern nonenjoyment.
The best solution I could think of was that she had come to despise the men on the bus. Truly hate them. Why? I can’t say. They seemed inoffensive to me. Maybe it was the way the
y smelled.
She devised a twisted penalty for whatever crime she had found them guilty of. Whenever she bought the DVDs, she tried to select at the market the movie these men would least enjoy. The movie the furthest from their tastes. Her sole, meager, perverted pleasure as she rode the bus was watching them sit, imprisoned, as their wills gave out and they sank in their seats and watched.
* * *
Hey, I’ll tell you this, people have done stranger things in the Atacama Desert.
ATVs, Hot Dogs, and Relationships in the Atacama
Why did you do that, Steve?”
Not angry, not accusing. Just asking. Why had I done that? Gotten the wheel of the ATV stuck, wedged quite tight actually, in a concrete drainage channel.
Oh, lotsa reasons. The exact cause was I guess I assumed the ATV could bounce or jump over such obstacles, like G.I. Joe’s and Cobra’s do in cartoons. Even over ditches slightly wider than their tires. Also because the ATV had sorta seemed to want to go that way, and I wasn’t assertive enough to tell it not to. Biggest core reason is that I wasn’t giving full attention to what I should’ve been: steering this monstrous machine.
A truck came along. We flagged it down. The guy helped pull us out, with a noble minimum of side-eye and smirk at the gringo idiot, and went on his way.
Juan was my guide. He was taking me out to see some good and roadless parts of the desert.
In San Pedro de Atacama, there is a main street of red packed dirt, and along it are rows of low buildings made of red clay and caliche. Skinny but friendly street dogs follow you around—the oldest joke in San Pedro is to call it San Perro, Saint Dog.
Some of the buildings along the main street have clay and woodstoves inside and make great food, and some have little offices that book tours out to sites in the surrounding area: the Valley of the Moon, or high shallow lakes where flamingos pick their way along, or even overnight expeditions to the Bolivian salt flats. And, of course, a volcano.
I’d already been, at four in the morning, out to El Tatio, where you can watch as the rising sun warms underground water and sends fumes of hot steam up through vents in the rock. You can bathe in a hot spring, if you want, or an indigenous Atacameño will sell you skewers of grilled guanaco for breakfast. The bus was full of Brazilians, and the tour guide enlisted them to vote loudly as she moved her hair around in different possible styles, from ridiculo to muy atractivo. We stopped at the sixteenth-century church at Machuca, bright white with bright blue doors, standing alone on the red hillside, an almost comical display of missionary optimism.
Today, though, felt like it needed something more adventurous. So I found Juan. He lived outside of town in a house with a dog and some trucks and his drum kit and a girlfriend I never saw. I knew we would get along because his rooms were a mess but the walls were covered with maps. Places he’d been and places he wanted to go, all over South and Central America and the world.
“You have to dominate the beast,” he said, as I mounted again my now unstuck ATV.
“Got it,” I said. To my surprise, I did. I made it clear to the ATV I was in charge now. I dominated the beast, and there were no more problems. We tore off again.
Farther on down the trail, Juan flagged me over and we stopped under a tree.
“This is a special tree,” Juan said. So it was, I could see that. It was the only tree around for what had to be miles. Looking at a photo of it now, I believe it was a Chilean mesquite tree, but before Juan could tell me about it, he got distracted by a text.
If you can get texts out here, I thought, then game over. The unknown realms of the world are gone. The whole planet’s connected and the mysterious places are gone.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m having a problem with my girlfriend.” We were speaking in English, which Juan spoke very well, mainly, he said, because of watching movies.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yes.” Juan was almost exactly my age, also never been married. He stared off.
“What kinda problem?”
For the next twenty minutes, under the shade of the mesquite tree, he told me. We discussed and considered aspects of his problem with this woman. Sometimes I offered similar cases for comparison, in case they might be helpful. He considered them, and nodded. He added more to the story, and a description of this woman’s character, both her exciting qualities and her troublesome ones. He told of warning signs, past disputes, upsetting revelations. He told of his own life, of his sisters, and his family, and we discussed how the patterns and ideas of our youth can express themselves again later, in ways we may not even realize. How we form our notions of what can be accepted, and what cannot be tolerated. Juan made an accounting of his own behavior and possible misjudgments. The mysterious and sometimes contradictory and baffling nature of women’s minds and wills and emotions were considered as well. We ate some almonds from a bag and drank some water as we spoke.
In time the conversation came to an end, as all such conversations must, in a melancholy but not unhappy agreement between us that some difficulties won’t ever offer even the small relief of being wholly comprehensible, and must be simply accepted. You must accept, choose, and try to move on.
“What can you do?” he said after a long while.
“What can you do?” I agreed. We got back on our ATVs and kept going.
After some rough country, we rode up and stopped at a salt deposit, a jagged wall of exposed crystals, drooping and dripping like stalactites. Juan said that you can hear a kind of creaking music the salt makes as it expands and contracts in the heat of the sun.
“So now we will be quiet for a few minutes.”
We were. The salt tower tinkled and hummed like a trippy tune played by some faraway or celestial instrument.
We rode on and came to the rusting shell of an abandoned bus. Truly in the middle of nowhere. How did it get there? We dismounted and discussed it for a while, the conversation turning to the abandoned bus in Alaska and the adventurer, told about in the book and movie Into the Wild. Then we talked about Eddie Vedder’s album written for that movie. Juan was a musician, and into music. He’d wanted to go to school in California to learn to be a music producer, but in the end his father told him they couldn’t afford it. So he went into tourism. His big gigs were leading packs of rich middle-aged Brazilian men on motorcycle trips into Bolivia.
We talked about girls more, too. The town of San Pedro has a semimystical, hippie reputation. The light, the air, the colors, the dreamy formations in the desert, the laid-back vibe, the dirt roads: Strange people wash up there, and many backpackers, but it’s a small town. If he broke up with his girlfriend, Juan figured, it might be a long time until he found another. He was a good-looking dude, both rugged and intelligent. Surely hippie backpacker chicks must pass his way?
“You can hook up with the tourists,” he said, “but that is a lot of work for little pay.”
We thought about that for a while.
Then it was lunchtime.
On the edge of town, there was a true hole-in-the-wall, more a shed than a restaurant, that Juan recommended to me. He’d told me to get whatever the day’s special was. That day it was two hot dogs and some kind of refreshing floral lemonade for 3,000 pesos, less than five dollars. Chileans are serious about their hot dogs. They don’t just boil up some garbage, they grill their hot dogs properly. At this place they lined the bun with guacamole and a tomato salsa—a Chilean specialty known as the completo.
I know what you’re thinking: guacamole and salsa on hot dogs? Do we need to bomb and invade Chile and teach them Correct Ways? But I tell you, it was delicious. My beard was salty and I was dusty and thirsty and this lunch was so satisfying I ate it and then ordered it again and ate it a second time.
I’d hired Juan only for the morning. What had I been planning to do with my afternoon? Visit the museum or some
bullshit? No. Of course not. Obviously, I should control the monster and blast around the desert some more. I texted Juan.
“Well,” he said when we met again. “That’s it. We talked, and she is moving out.”
“Whoa. Fast.”
“When I make a decision, I make it. There is no point in going back and forth.”
“When’s she moving out?”
“Right now. She is there now.”
“Damn.”
“Yes.” We stood there a while. “She used a word to me that I cannot allow to be used to me. After that, it was it.”
“Man.”
“C’mon. Best thing to do is take a ride.”
So we went, in the late afternoon, out into the desert again. The other direction this time. We rode out to a deep round sinkhole of water. Along the dry reeds at the lip, some boys were daring each other to jump in. We watched the first one go. By his reaction the water must’ve been friggin’ freezing. We rode on across lands owned by the indigenous people. We stopped so Juan could talk to a friend of his, and show me a kind of solar-heated toilet they’d installed just off the road. He was impressed with it and showed me its innards, though between my memory and a jumbled schematic I drew in my notes, I admit that I can’t quite explain its workings. The sun somehow heated human waste to create energy, I think? That maybe powered a compactor of some kind, too. Very little water was involved. This toilet was provided for those who came to visit a wide but very shallow turquoise lake, studded with spikes of white crystallized salt. Shoes off, we walked out into the water.
In the mountains beyond, we could see the home of ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, where sixty-six radio telescopes beam out through the clear moistureless air of the desert and study merging galaxies forty million light-years away. With our feet on the crunching salt and our legs cooling in the water, we talked more about music and women. Juan had worked in the Amazon for six months, hunting turtle-egg poachers.
