San Pedro de Atacama
1
Since the town of Calama an hour ago, my first paid bus in Chile has been slowly steadily gaining elevation at sixty kilometers per hour, up this endless desert plain, an achingly gradual incline. Sixty kilometers is in no way similar to sixty miles per hour: really more of a crawl. I know our velocity, or the lack thereof, because for the passengers’ edification, there is this big red digital speedometer up front, I suppose to hold drivers accountable.
East, towards the Andes, towards Argentina, towards Uruguay which is still a very long way off. Unlike most of the landscapes I’ve encountered recently, this one is not devoid of life. There are tufts of brown grasses and little sage-like bushes. This long inclined plain is bounded by brown mountains to the north and south; beyond those to the northeast is another much more substantial range, which may well be in Bolivia, all capped in snow.
I have left the coast, and I am traveling alone. This morning I said goodbye to my friend Emily at our hostel in Antofagasta. We had a good long last talk last night, a good but brief farewell this morning. It is possible that I will never see her again in this life. That’s the bargain with this far-off wandering. Most of the people you make friends with out on the road will slip right back out of your life as seamlessly and quickly as they came in. That said, I have a feeling I will see Emily. She’s originally from the state of Maryland, and I’m from Virginia, and that kind of proximity allows for more likely path crossings than with most travelers I meet.
In retrospect, our stint traveling together for five nights went by fast. In the moment, it was an epic. Traveling with someone can get hard, making all those decisions together: this place or that? What to eat? To stay or leave? Taxi or bus? Eat or take a shower? Suddenly you’re trying to decipher someone’s moods: are they unhappy? Is it because they’re hot and tired or is it something you’re doing? You never know how all this will be until you get out there on the road. Emily and I did well enough in this crucible, but not without difficulties. And it was a full life we led together. Traveling a desert coast, hitchhiking the Panamericana and camping on beaches, playing music on the streets.
The crazy part is going from spending almost every waking moment with someone to then — goodbye — nothing. I said goodbye to a lot of people I got to know in my life in Arequipa, when they’d leave during my time there, or just now when I did, but Emily was the very last of them. We have an interesting relationship. We’ve worked together at a school, been housemates, hung out, and now traveled. Then there’s music, where we’ve practiced extensively, played on the street in two countries, did two shows, went through anticipation and anxiety, elation and disappointment, and mainly just sang together a lot. There is something about singing, real singing: raising and mingling voices, which takes place on a deeper level. Emily, hasta la proxima vez.
For hours, this road was so dull and the world outside so featureless that I had almost stopped looking out the window. Then over the past half hour the landscape has become quite dramatic. We have crossed over a line of hills, breaking up our interminable climb, then down into a deep gray basin, and up over another set of rocky hills. Down somewhere below on the next plain has appeared the tantalizing green of trees, visible through crags of red pinnacled rock, crusted with white salt.
And then over one more ridge, the road cutting through crevices in the hills, the color green amassed here like a place of the gods. Trees, the sheer number of them, more than I’ve seen since all the places since Arequipa combined. An embarrassment of riches, thousands of these willowy trees. We are pulling into the town of San Pedro de Atacama, an oasis in the desert, which will be my last stop in Chile. Perhaps I will stretch my schedule out a little. Those snow-capped mountains I’ve been looking at for a couple hours, including among them a fully symmetrical volcano, are right outside of town.
2
San Pedro is so remote, so surrounded by absolute desolation. And then there is improbably this town with all kinds of trees. A river. I got off the bus around three thirty in the afternoon, and it was so hot and dry that for half an hour I stayed in the shade of an awning at the Plaza de Mercantias next door to the terminal. Not ready to strap on my bags and wander around this town looking for a place to stay. A mottled gray and brown kitten came and sat down next to me on the bench. She looked like the desert, and quietly purred for awhile, leaning against my leg. It was a good welcome. Eventually she got bored and started attacking the straps on my pack and it was time to go.
At the terminal, I did some research on the next leg of my trip, from here to Salta in Argentina, and the price of the morning bus leaving here Tuesday is thirty thousand pesos, approximately forty five dollars, an absurdly high price for a day’s ride, at least by the standard of the countries I’ve been in over the past year. I declined to pay this sum, fifty percent more than my daily budget, without first doing more research to see that there isn’t some other way.
A friendly guide here who I met on the bus, Estaban, originally from Lima, who seemed to speak in exactly half English words and half Spanish, had strongly discouraged me from the place I was planning to camp, and recommended one on the edge of town. Six days into Chile, I so appreciated how clean his Peruvian Spanish was, which now seems clear as a bell. When I finally left the station area I followed Estaban’s vague directions a few blocks in the opposite direction from the centro.
This town is so unlike anything I’ve seen in a long while. A dusty desert town, all made from brown adobe, a very Pueblo Indian feel. It could easily be in New Mexico. And the culture is not far off from Taos, very indigenous-centric new age spiritual, and touristy. Just when it looked like I was leaving town, I saw a sign for Quilarcay and opened a gate into this desert farm. There was some ground cover that looked like alfalfa, wild fields of sagebrush, patches of sunflowers and corn, various cabañas and outbuildings, and some ramshackle main buildings with murals of rainbow colored mountains.
Near the main building I found a serious looking dark skinned woman who told me that it was six thousand pesos to camp. Cocina, baño, y duchas incluidos, but no wifi. The campsites were all under these long shade structures set around the grounds, some with palapa roofs, some just meshcloth. This place was good enough that I didn’t need to see any more places, wifi be damned.
It took me a long time to decide where to pitch my tent, as every spot was more or less okay, but none were quite right. After considering five or so sites, I picked one on the far side of a structure from another tent. Somewhere getting on six, with the heat of the day finally lessening, it was time to go see the town and figure out about a dinner. I walked uphill through quiet and dusty streets, until at some point I hit Calle Caracoles and was confronted with how many tourists are in this town.
It was a busy street, almost all pedestrians, all manner of tourists: Europeans of every stripe, Chilenos and Argentinos, Japanese, even a fair number of Americans. What were they all doing here? I asked myself, my heart sinking. Clearly, I had stepped right smack on the ol’ Gringo Trail. It had been so nice to be off it. The route has by now in my mind become clear: from Cuzco, the Trail goes south and east to Lake Titicaca, the last point I’d seen it, then continues through Bolivia with various itineraries to the salt flats of Uyuni, and then across the border to land in Chile right in this little desert town. We are only about thirty kilometers from the southern border of Bolivia here. Arequipa, Colca Canyon and Iquique get their share of travelers, but the vast majority of people you see on the streets of those places are locals, and they don’t have this feeling of being overrun.
I wandered through crowds of sunburnt tourists with expensive clothing and sunglasses, immediately questioning my idea of staying here four or five days. Past expensive trendy restaurants with their signboards and attractive women handing out menus, jewelry and souvenir art shops, tour outfitters for outdoor activities, bars playing reggaeton or classic rock, Pisco Sour happy hours, two for one. I’ve seen it all before, too many times. This place could be unique, but unfortunately international tourism has made it the same as a hundred other places. Various travelers had recommended San Pedro to me, but I realize now they were all young and partying, living big and shelling out money.
In a daze from the heat and touristic disorientation, I found the shaded plaza and sat and smoked a couple cigarettes. European girls typed away on their smartphones and local craftsmen offered their wares: little carved vaguely- indigenous decorations and instruments; small brightly-colored paintings of what this town would look like if it was still a picturesque desert village. Maybe I would feel differently if I had friends here to go to the bars with, or money to spend at the admittedly attractive restaurants, but maybe not even then.
It did not appear that there were cheap restaurants, at least not in the center of town, so I decided I would be cooking, as usual. From various mini-markets and the actual mercado, which I discovered on my way back, hidden down an alleyway, I cobbled together a few meals worth of food. Everything was expensive, at least compared to what I am used to, even so far in Chile. I threw caution to the wind and spent eighteen hundred pesos for a can of black beans — almost three dollars — a food item I hadn’t actually seen in many months. I was feeling dried out from the desert air, and slowly made my way back to the campsite as the day was waning. Once you get out of the tourist crush, a sigh of relief, this place is quite lovely.
The hour I spent preparing food was very good for getting grounded and settled down. Made a pot of tea to start, and took my time treating each ingredient just the way it wanted for what turned out to be an excellent meal: quesadilla with zucchini, black beans with longaniza sausage and carmelized onions, avocado on everything. The avocados are different here, than the large green variety you find in Perú; Hass-like, small with black pitted skins. The flesh is thicker than the Peruvians, which are smooth and buttery. Despite the differences, both countries strictly use the word palta, from the Quechua; all the variations on avocado come from the Nahuatl ahuacate.
These mountains are still very much in the Andean culture sphere of influence. Tahuantinsuyo, the Inca name for the four corners of their empire, encompassed the north part of Chile, all the way down past Santiago. It is such a long way from the northernmost reaches of Chinchaysuyu in southern Colombia to Qullasuyu down here, a distance that feels greater because of the multitude of mountains in between. Ten miles of flat land is a lot less land than ten miles of Andes. And I covered the length of this vast stretch of the earth by motorized vehicles; it is mind-boggling to imagine administering this territory on foot.
I have been sitting in the open air kitchen of the campground now for several hours past dinner. This kitchen area is the only place on the grounds that offers both a place to sit and a light that is not my headlamp. Savored a quiet meal, and started reading a new book, In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin, which seems quite promising. I have to confess, fully cognizant of the ironies involved, that I don’t usually like travel writing very much. But this one is different. There’s this sense of an almost Kafka-like quest, where the protagonist is just a lens through which we encounter a cryptic and mysterious world. And his descriptions are very poetic and evocative in a matter-of-fact way.
I feel far away here from everything. Far from Arequipa, far from Perú, far from the ocean that I woke up within sight of this morning. It occurs to me that I’ve been roughly following the Pacific coastline since I left Santa Marta in January of last year. And now I’ve turned inexorably away from it; East. Of course I feel far from the United States of America. It doesn’t even seem real to me at this point. I mean, Argentina on the other side of the border, where I will presumably be in a few days, feels far. This campground farm on the edge of the desert feels to be on the outskirts of time, which you can find running quickly in the center of town, but here the currents are not so strong.
What was shaping up to be a quiet, peaceful night has been marred by the emergence of some kind of dance club a little further down this street, pumping out Reggaeton and EDM. I realized that it was a Saturday night, and this would seem to be one of those Global Party Villages, so I’m not surprised. Supplementing the music, there is a chorus of dogs barking in the distance, the soundtrack of Latin America.
The stars are good and bright in the desert sky — I imagine that a couple miles out of town they’re unbelievable. Maybe tomorrow night I’ll make that walk. One of the most important astronomical observatories in the world is not far from here, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array up in the mountains to the east. There are tours that go there, but they are costly, and I am left to do my own observing. I notice that the Southern Cross is turned on its side as compared to the Arequipa sky, and that Orion is directly overhead. We are just seven degrees different in latitude, but it appears that makes a significant difference. All the Flat Earthers — strategizing about polar flights and homemade rocket ships to the stratosphere — need to do is just travel long enough north or south, and pay attention to the stars.
3
Took a day of rest for most of the following day, hanging around the campground, savoring in the shade and slow-moving time. Made a pot of tea and wrote for some hours about Pisagua while it is still relatively fresh in my mind. My six days with Emily were full, and I didn’t do enough writing. That’s the thing about writing: it’s hard to do while you’re fully living at the same time, and at least for me, it’s almost impossible when I have people around.
Around midday I cook up a very satisfying mess of eggs with tomato and onion and longaniza, sit at one of the tables in the kitchen building and read about Patagonia in the 1970s. It is so hot here that activity when the sun is high in the sky seems inadvisable, so I feel no guilt for taking a rest day. Sadly, Patagonia is not on my itinerary at present, but is making its play. To truly complete this migration, to go as far south as can be done on land, requires it. But I would need to amass a significant amount of pesos. It is still far from here to to Tierra del Fuego, forty five hundred kilometers, and it apparently gets more expensive the farther you go. Knowing what I know about teaching English in Latin America, it is no way to amass pesos. I’d say “I’ll just go into debt” but I already have. The trip I took in September up to the states for two non-optional weddings went almost entirely on a credit card. So for now, I’m grateful to see Patagonia vicariously through Mr. Chatwin.
In midafternoon I venture out in the hot sun and up into the center of town. Find a good comfortable cafe and for the price of an expensive pot of half-decent chai I can use the wifi and linger for an extended hour. Walk the streets still full of tourists, looking at all the things I can’t afford to eat or do. There is this incredible world of desert wonders outside town in every direction, but everything is geared towards pricey pricey tours. Feels like I am in the wrong place. Sit in the leafy plaza and buy a champiñon empanada from a woman with a basket. While I eat it I ponder whether to splurge on renting a mountain bike, the cheapest way I have come up with to get out into the terrain.
Next door to the cafe was a bike rental place, and I‘d gone in earlier to investigate. They have a special half-day deal, where you pick up the bike at five pm and return it at noon the next day. This would work because I don’t really want to be out in the desert after that. It is almost five, time to shit or get off the pot. I shit, which is an absurd way to express that I walk back to the bike shop and rent a big burly mountain bike. Nothing to do now but to take a ride.
I ride down to the campground, marveling at the ease of movement permitted by these wheels, and get some things together for a sunset excursion. Last night at the market I was delighted to find coca leaves for sale, and I make a pot of my standard Arequipa evening tea: coca, mint and muña, and fill up my thermos. This last item, a purchase made on my last full day in Perú, has been a fantastic addition to my traveling program. What a luxury to be able to have hot tea anywhere you like.
The day waning, I set off by bike to climb a mountain on the same little highway I came in on, up to the first range outside of town where I’d seen all the trees. I am in no kind of biking shape, and the elevation quickly gets the best of me. Somehow, with many stops, I drag my body and bicycle up the ridge. To the south and west the barren, spectacular Valle de la Luna, to the east over the green river valley that holds San Pedro. At sunset at the undeveloped look out viewpoint there are so many vans of tourists scrambling on rocks that I can’t actually get a spot for an unobstructed view of the horizon. I accept that there will be dozens of people between me and the sunset, so I just go to sit on the edge of the road where I at least have the space to sit down, and focus my attention on the less-glamorous but still majestic other directions.
4
As I am making a couple sandwiches for dinner, in the name of hopelessly trying to keep to my budget, a young guy with long dark hair in a ponytail comes into the kitchen to cook. “Buena noche, hermano,” he says, with a kind of wild look in his eye. I am fatigued from biking up a mountain with the wind in my face to see the sunset with a hundred people, getting home in the dark, hungry. I only want to make my sandwiches and eat them and read my book. “Buena noche,” I say absent-mindedly, back to my pan. I am frying strips of zucchini and he can’t figure out how to use the antique stove, so I help him and he says “de donde sos?” which gives him away as being from Argentina or Uruguay.
“Estados Unidos,” I say.
“Que parte…Canada?” People have asked me a lot of things about my country, but this was the first time for this one.
“Canada es un otro pais,” I say, “New Orleans estaba mi ultima lugar.” It didn’t seem to ring a bell.
“En el norte,” he tries.
“No,” I say. This conversation isn’t going well, and I pull some of the zucchini out of the pan and put some more in, adding “el sur.”
“Si, si.”
“Y eres de Argentina,” I presume to guess, not ready to use the vos conjugation. “No, Colombia.”
I am shocked, had him completely pegged as an Argentine guy, and ask if they use vos there. He says they do. Bizarre. I thought never encountered it, but maybe my Spanish wasn’t developed enough to notice. “De que parte eres?” “Neiva.” Sounds familiar but I can’t place it. He asks if I went to San Agustín, and I tell him I did. His city is four hours from there, on the way to Bogotá. I remember seeing it on a map. He asks about my time in his country and I tell him: a month on the Caribbean coast, a month in Santander and a month everywhere else. That’s my summary of Colombia.
“Como va el EU?” he asks.
“El pais?” I ask back.
“Si.”
“Malo,” I say with sadness, “un mal momento.”
“Porque?”
I tell him about Trump, about racism, about the people being so angry and shooting other people. I am burning my food and turn away from him to rescue my dinner. Even just mentioning the state of my country is liable to ruin a meal. He is cooking a big omelette with tomatoes and onions and is burning his food, too. Neither of us appear to be very good at multi-tasking. He says it is the same in Colombia. No, I say, making the point that there are certainly problems there, but the way in general they are treating Venezuelans, accepting millions of refugees, is very different than my country, where they are putting children in cages. I don’t know the word for cage so I say cajas de metal.
When I mention that I had been an English teacher in Perú, he gets very excited and declares: “vamos a hablar en Ingles!” He is odd and emphatic and reminds me of someone from a book I’ve read, but I can’t think of it. I decide I like him. “Cuando quieres,” I say, and he begins speaking English with terribly stunted pronunciation, at first very simply. I marvel at how much he is able to transform the language, and I wonder how my Spanish must sound to him.
“Mi name es Antonio, y I am frome Colomebia.” He smiles at me all big, like this was a game. “I were stody profesor of artistico edoocazion.” This was going to be incredibly tedious; “Es correct?” he asks, “You teaching me.” I can’t help but smile, warmed by his enthusiasm, but where to even begin?
“I understand you perfectly,” I tell Antonio, laughing.
“What was that cause of you trava?” he asks, quickly followed by “es correct?” I had gotten sucked in.
“The cause…” I say, “but — in this case we usually say reason, and for, not of.” This was no way to go about teaching.
“Okay. Say all?” I finished assembling my sandwiches. Ham, zucchini, cheese, tomato on a thick locally-made bread. Not so bad. Slowly I say “what was the reason for your travel,” but he hears the word “your” and jumps on it. He is genuinely interested in learning, and I am as good as lost. Now I have to very slowly explain possessive adjectives (without using that term) and how they differ from pronouns, staying away from possessive pronouns altogether.
When that is done I figure I should try to answer his question, and I tell him that I had always wanted to see South America. It is a bad time in my country, so a good time to leave. He listens intently and asks me to repeat several parts. By now my hot sandwiches have gotten cold, and his omelette, too, so I ask if he wants to sit. We do, at a colorful painted wooden table and eat while we talk.
“And you?” I say, “What was the reason for your travel?”
“The reason for…my travel?” and he looks at me with excitement. He had learned something.
“Perfect,” I say. He says he has been traveling for seven months playing music on the street, and gets out his melodica from his bag. Talks about the “quotidian” life at his university, and not knowing if he wanted to teach school children at all. I tell him I understand, even though I’m not exactly sure what quotidian means. “It’s a good word,” I say. He tries to explain, then switches tacks and says “if you no want the future, you stop time and go.” I like this idea, and don’t correct any part of it.
He tells me how he had been traveling with friends, but two weeks ago “we separation” and I have to explain that the verb was “to separate” and the past is “ed” and he can’t really pronounce this, but he tells me this long and stumbling story about what happened. His friend plays guitar and is very talented but didn’t ever want to practice or prepare for playing. He has a young, 18-year-old girlfriend who Antonio describes as dishonest, that had been traveling along with them. The friend was obsessive about things, physical objects, but not only about his. He twice berated Antonio for not caring enough about things, cosas. Finally, after getting kicked out of a city park where they had been camping by the Chilean carabineros, the friend had said they had to separate.
Now the friend had contacted him and said he was sorry and they should reunite in Bolivia. This is Antonio’s ninetieth and last day on his Chilean tourist visa, so he needs to leave the country anyway. He is going there tomorrow, to Uyuni in the salt flats, to look his friend in the eye and see if he is sincere. Antonio’s English is getting better and better the longer he talks, and we have gone over object pronouns too, and he is super proud of himself whenever he uses “him” or “his” or “her” correctly. He isn’t sure if he wants to travel with them again, doesn’t much like the girlfriend. He loves and misses playing music with his friend, who is a “monster” on the guitar, but is tired of the obsessions and drama.
We have long since finished our dinners and gone to sit on benches just out of the kitchen structure under the stars. I smoke cigarettes and we drink some coca tea that I had made. I tell him that I play music, too, and that I had just said goodbye the day before to my friend Emily, a music friend, so I know about the connection you can have through music. He completely agrees that it’s a different kind of relationship, knowing someone on a deeper level, but it doesn’t always translate to the day-to-day life of traveling.
We talk about the language of music and the relationships that happen inside that language. We talk about music on various levels for a long time and not once is the question “what kind of music do you play?” posed. He grows philosophical:
“The one thing I learn in this moment is… we are alone in this world, in music and in life.”
I am not ready to concede the point. “Sometimes we are alone, and sometimes we aren’t. Right now we are not alone. But tomorrow we might be.” It is late at night and this seems profound to us, and we look out into the darkness and wonder where we will be in a day’s time, and who we might be with. “The most important thing to learn while traveling,” I add, “is to be a good friend to yourself.”
“Yourself?” he repeats, excitedly.
I realize he has recognized a different type of word like “her” and “she” that he doesn’t know yet. I love his enthusiasm.
“You are a good student,” I say. “You learn fast and you want to know more.” “You are good teacher,” he says, and we have formed our mutual admiration society. “I want be great in languages,” he proclaims, “and music. I want practice and practice before I am great.” Again he has that wild look in his eye that I saw right away. And so I have to go over reflexive pronouns, which by this point I think covers them all, a whole advanced lesson.
It is time to go to sleep, midnight, and tomorrow morning I am getting up at six to ride my bike up into a canyon. I tell him I am sad I won’t see him tomorrow or hear him play music. I tell him he will find other people to play music with, who are on the same page. He says they have the same saying in Spanish: “en la misma pagina.” We shake hands. “Buena noche hermano,” he says again, and this time I say it, too. After a couple hours with him, I am more earnest and sincere. He takes down my contact information, though I’m almost positive I’ll never see or hear from him again. We go out into the dark to our respective campsites and the cold high desert night.
