It was the Ides of March when I flew to Santiago, Chile’s capital and largest city from Lima, Peru’s International Airport. I had learned that flying to most South American destinations had to be done from the airport of a major city.
I won’t write too much about Santiago. Of the several large South American cities I experienced, this was was my least favorite. And yet, my photos from there do evoke some happy memories.
Watching the buskers, for example.
It was fun looking at Santiago’s tattered poster walls, too. Around the most recent additions were the pentimenti of earlier postings. For me, these collages were an accidental expression of street art.
Learning about an unfamiliar city through its art and architecture has always been a reason to travel. In Santiago, my guidebook told me to head for the bohemian district of Lastarria. There, I walked along a busy street filled with sellers of artisanal products much better than what is usually offered as such. I saw some small, framed art pieces I would have bought if I could have carried them.
All along, there were interesting boutiques and cafes that were just getting ready to open as I passed.
I was searching for the Centro Gabriela Mistral without knowing exactly what it was. I had to look up Gabriela Mistral to learn that she was a poet with an international reputation in the 20th century and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945. As I wandered looking for the Centro, I asked some policemen who told me that the Centro is referred to as GAM and that I could find it ahead on the large avenue named for Bernardo O’Higgins.
O’Higgins was the Chilean independence leader, who freed Chile from Spanish rule.
When I arrived at the wide boulevard memorializing him, I walked smack into a large march of locals protesting the thousands of Palestinian deaths caused by Israel’s conflict with Hamas.
Many were chanting and carrying signs and banners.
There were covered women, their faces painted white, carrying white-wrapped bundles symbolizing children killed in the fighting.
After the procession, I found the GAM, a large building containing various galleries, some of which were closed that day.
I did view a show celebrating women that was partly conceptual. There were photos, paintings, sculptures, and other works that I could not understand since much of what was written was only in Spanish.
In an open courtyard, I watched a group of young persons working with a choreographer to rehearse a dance routine. An older woman sitting near me explained that it is common to see these kinds of amateur dances in Santiago.
She was a friendly person with a dog who sat in front of us, very alert and ready to play with his two toys that he carried in his mouth. It was a lovely day and a very comfortable place to sit. The woman warned me to watch my camera carefully because there were a lot of active thieves in the city.
Intending to get an overview of the city, I took a téléferique to the top of a mountain. I won’t detail the long wait to buy a ticket or my confusion about which line to stand in.
Exiting the gondola, I was rewarded with views in different directions that showed how extensive that city of seven million had become.
Still above me, reached by a flight of steps, was a white statue of the Virgin Mary, large enough to be visible from the city below.
Down from the mountain, I got into a taxi and asked to be taken to the fish market at the Mercado Central, not far away. I made the amateur traveler’s mistake of not asking the price before entering the cab. At the market, the driver wanted to seriously overcharge me, and I refused to pay. We argued, and I told him in my fractured Spanish to drive to a police station, which he refused to do. In the end, I gave the driver a fraction of what he was asking and left the taxi. I hate these kinds of confrontations and am happy to report that this was the only one I encountered during my entire voyage.
Not wanting to travel anymore by taxi in the city, I asked reception at my hotel how to use the metro and traveled underground from then on. One of those trips took me to the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights).
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that this human-rights museum was only about Chile and the Coup in 1973 that replaced President Allende, a democratically elected Communist, with the reactionary General Pinochet, who murdered, tortured, and disappeared thousands of Chileans that he deemed enemies of the state. As Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger was obsessive about bringing about that coup and did so through the CIA. As I toured that museum, whose mission is to document the atrocities Pinochet visited on Chile’s men and women, I couldn’t help despising Henry Kissinger for what he did and was happy he was dead.
My accommodation in Santiago was different from the hotels I had stayed in elsewhere. My room in the Park Plaza Apart Hotel had a kitchenette, and since I was tired of eating in restaurants, I decided to buy some groceries and make some meals in my room. A short distance away was a large supermarket where I went to shop. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the store had no deli counter or any prepared food at all. Nor did it have microwaveable meals or small-size containers of products like jam and mustard. No big-city convenience there!
There is more I could say about Santiago, but I want to write about my next destination, the Atacama Desert in the north of the country. Its beauties turned out to be some of the natural highlights of my entire voyage. Because I didn’t know anything about the Atacama – the best way to get there, or where to stay – I bought a package from a reputable travel agency. It included a flight to the airport at the city of Calama, a transfer to the town of San Pedro de Atacama, and a comfortable 4-star hotel for three nights. I would return to Santiago’s airport in the reverse order.
At the Calama Airport I exited into a throng of people who were available to take me to San Pedro de Atacama. I showed my transfer voucher to a woman who led me to a small passenger van. I sat next to two women from Brazil and behind a young, friendly Irish couple.
The drive to San Pedro was one-and-half-hours through desert scenery. Shortly after leaving Calama, we passed the largest wind farm I had ever seen. On the ground between the windmills was an enormous array of solar panels that covered a dozen acres.
I became fascinated by the land with no vegetation until our approach to San Pedro whose greenery appeared like an oasis. Once in the town, I saw brown adobe walls. The driver dropped me at my hotel without my telling him its name. It seemed he had a list.
The exterior of the NOI Casa was not prepossessing, but inside it was a lovely hotel, and my room was super although a trifle warm. The hotel restaurant was top end. My meal of tuna steaks in a sauce accompanied by Thai fried rice was excellent.
Guided excursions are the way to visit the Atacama Desert, so I booked three. That day, I lounged by the pool and, in the evening, walked to San Pedro’s main street where I found Emporio Andino that I had been told made the best empanadas. I ordered one with chicken and cheese and drank a concoction called iced tea berries, slushy-sweet but not bad. The unpaved street with is one-story adobe buildings might have been the setting for a Mexican western except that its bars, restaurants, and hip-looking clothing stores were chic 21st century.
Thursday, March 21.
My guide arrived in the lobby shortly after 7:30 and introduced herself as Barbara. She had learned her English at school and spoke it quite well. Unlike other guides with separate drivers, Barbara drove her own Toyota SUV and talked as she drove.
I really didn’t know what was in store and was surprised at the length of our first leg that took us to a salt flat and the Chaxa Lagoon. Barbara spoke a lot about the geology of the desert, most of which I couldn’t take in. I did get that the whole desert had once been underwater millions of years before and that its lagoons are the result of water flowing underground that rise to the surface in places where the tectonic plates allow it. Parts of the desert get a tiny bit of rain occasionally, but other parts never do and are some of driest places on earth.
The salt flat we crossed was not pure white as is the one in Death Valley. It was a rough mixture of salt and hard clay. There were patches where various minerals colored the surface. It was impossible to approach the shores of the lagoon, so we looked from a distance at the
Andean and Chilean flamingoes, using filters in their beaks to capture the almost microscopic shrimp they feed on. It was easy to tell the two species apart as the Chilean move their long legs in a kind of dance as they feed.
Back on the highway, we made a quick stop at a large sign marking the Tropic of Capricorn.
Another long drive, the last few kilometers over a very rough washboard road, brought us to the Miscanti Lagoon, the largest in the area. Hills, whose smooth slopes without any vegetation, made a striking background reflected in the deep blue of the water. White mineral deposits lined the shores. Swimming in the water of the lagoon were several coots, that I could see only with Barbara’s binoculars. Coots build their nests above the shallow water near the shores. What we had been seeing were the lagoons of the High Plateau. At one point we were at 13,000 feet, and I felt the altitude.
We ate lunch at the village of Socaire. Barbara carried a large cooler from the vehicle. She spread a cloth on the surface of a rough stone table and proceeded to lay out a fancy picnic lunch that had been prepared by the agency she works for. We ate herb-stuffed chicken breasts on China plates together with three kinds of quinoa. There was olive oil and Balsamic vinegar for a green salad and plenty of water and juice. I was surprised to see a full unopened bottle of red Carmenere wine on the table with a single glass. I opened the bottle and poured some for myself. For dessert there were dried apricots and a couple of tiny chocolate cakes. I drank instant coffee with my dessert. It was a fine meal.
On our drive back to San Pedro we spotted a fox and some distant ostrich-like flightless birds called Rheas. Barbara estimated we had driven 250 kilometers that day.
I had booked two group tours for the following day:
The morning’s was to a place called The Valley of the Moon. Although its landscape was exceptional, I won’t write much about it since what there was was not as grand as I had been led to believe. I was learning that all the company guides had been trained to talk about the desert’s geology, but I was more interested in how the landscape looked than in how it was formed.
The worst aspect of that tour was that it included a lot of high-altitude walking on trails covered in deep sand. It was like walking on a beach and was tiring.
The afternoon’s tour to Rainbow Valley was led by a voluble guide whose name was Vincente. I rode shotgun in front while two English couples sat behind us in the Chevrolet Suburban.
I enjoyed that tour much more than the morning’s. Rainbow Valley was further from San Pedro, and Vincente kept up a steady commentary as we drove. He clearly loved his subject and wouldn’t stop talking about it.
We paused for what I felt was too long at a spot in the desert referred to as art rock. I’ll summarize Vincente’s long-winded explanation to say that the rock had been a meeting place of tribes with things to trade a thousand years before. Parts of the rock that we climbed on were incised with pictures of animals and even a human with his hands crossed in the air.
The sun was getting low as we entered Rainbow Valley, so called because of the colors of its rock formations. Their predominant color was brown, but there were sections of green that for some unexplained reason are called platonic rock.
Vincente led us up a narrow opening between rock walls to a place where water had smoothed the sides of a chimney open to the sky. He called it the Chocolate Waterfall, although it was dry.
On our drive to the valley, we passed a herd of domesticated llamas, some of which had colorful ribbons attached to their heads to indicate their owners.
We also saw a couple of guanacos that look like larger vicuñas. They are wild and not easy to spot. And we saw a wild donkey. Donkeys were once brought to this place where salt was mined and then abandoned, as some were in Death Valley in the U.S.
Before starting back to San Pedro, Vincente set up a table and placed juices and wines on it along with various nibbles. There was a kind of dip containing mayonnaise and added flavors. I loved dipping dried sweet potato chips into that mixture. There were homemade cookies of different kinds, my favorites flavored with ginger. Toasting Rainbow Valley with white wine, we celebrated the end of the afternoon.
Saturday, March 23. As I sat in the hotel lobby at 6 in the morning, I asked myself why I had signed up for this final tour instead of sleeping later and resting until it was time to leave in the evening. I could have lain by the pool, sipping a cool drink. Instead, I was picked up by a guide named Maurice and driven with others a long way over the high plateau to see the steam rising from the hot springs below the earth’s surface.
Geyser tours leave San Pedro extra early so that the steam on the geyser field can be seen better before the sun gets too high.
Maurice was as well-versed in the geology of what we would experience as were his fellow guides. With us, were Jeremy and wife Anne from yesterday’s tour, as were an elderly couple named Ian and Marti from Melbourne, Australia. We made up a friendly group and shared conversation on different subjects.
On that early drive in the dark, we saw Venus, the morning star, just on the horizon before sunrise. It inspired me to sing the lines from a 1960’s pop song: “I’m your Venus; I’m your fire, at your desire.” Jeremy recognized it.
The geysers of Chile’s high plateau don’t explode with the force of those in Yellowstone like Old Faithful. During our visit we saw only one rise a couple of meters. Yet, boiling water emerged from several as we walked around and took photos.
There was beauty in and around the geyser field and in the landscape we passed through on our return. I asked Maurice to stop a couple times so I could photograph the colors of the low mountains we passed.
We made a breakfast stop on the way back to San Pedro that was excellent. The company that arranged all the tours specializes in providing a food experience for each tour. Our breakfast included rolls that we used to make sandwiches with ham and cheese. There was fruit, butter, and jam. I drank tea made with the hot water from a thermos. Everything was delicious and sitting in the warm sun on comfortable folding chairs, I was in no mood to leave. Alas, I did leave that evening on a flight back to Santiago’s airport from where a taxi drove me an hour through the night to my next destination.