Blank Canvas

Calama :: Chile

If Salvador Dali’s mind was a place, this would be it.

Places: Uyuni, Salar de Uyuni, Southwest Loop, San Pedro de Atacama & Calama.

Coolest thing I did: Took lots of silly and inappropriate photos on the salt flats as you can only really do on a surface where perspective is non-existent.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Andean people had their own set of constellations (aside from the Greek Zodiac) which were based on the dark spaces between the stars rather than on the stars themselves. The celestial llama does actually look a bit like a llama.

The country between Potosi and Uyuni in Bolivia starts to resemble Northern Argentina very quickly once you’ve left town, reminding you just how close the borders of all 4 countries (along with Chile and Peru) are together. At the still torn up end of the rapidly improving road (the Lonely Planet predicted 6 hours but due to brand new asphalt the trip is now down to 4 and a half hours and shrinking) lies the frontier town of Uyuni, the last stop inside Bolivia before Chile and a place totally geared up for one thing – to allow tourists to go and look at the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s biggest salt flats (or as I saw it spelled in La Paz, salt flasts). It’s wide streets betray an optimistic future, while the roughly built houses give a closer picture of reality. The very new hotel we stayed in was obviously an owner-architect job, with staircases and walkways set up in such a way to require you to go down stairs and across a void before going up a level, reminding me a lot of a Escher painting.

The way to get to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile from Uyuni is to get on a 4WD tour for 3 days that takes you over the salt flat and then out into the desert on the way down to the border. Along the way you’ll see seven coloured mountains, desert, geyser fields, red lakes, green lakes and lots of bright pink flamingos, and spend some time in some very natural looking hot springs. It’s the crazy clash of unnatural colours that leads people to constantly describe everything as “surreal”, even though it really does lack the melting clocks and incongruous fish that you need to make something truly surreal. So I’m going to do my best to make no more Salvador Dali allusions for the rest of this entry.

The salt flats start about half an hour outside Uyuni and despite all that’s been written about them and no matter how many pictures you see of them, nothing really prepares you for just how out of wack your perception of distance and perspective goes when you’re faced with so much white all the way to the horizon. It fools camera autofocus pretty well, so you get time to spend ages lining people up to make it look like they are eating a tiny 4WD, holding the next person on their palm or (as the group I was with got creative in a toilet humour kind of way) tiny people being farted out of someone’s bare arse or being wee-ed on by a giant. The photo I liked best was the Matrix style kung fu kick the two girls in our jeep did, which managed to make it look like they were kicking each other in the face even though they were metres apart.

We stopped for lunch at the hotel made out of salt, which is probably really bad for the area but also highly cool and took our first set of photos on ground that had been tracked over by 4WDs and Jeeps almost constantly, so it was good to get away from there and out into the more remote bit of the salar, where the ground is crystallised into almost perfectly regular hexagons in all directions, some natural consequence of how salt water solidifies played out on a massive scale. With the sun low on the horizon you get a reddish hue on everything and the salt crystals sparkle in the light, giving in an almost computer-rendered un-realness. You drive towards the mountains in the distance but it seems to take an endless amount of time for them to get any closer, because you have no foreground to judge distance with.

During these tours you can expect to be really cold most of the time, with the days being short and the desert night being brutal. The accommodation is really basic so I probably spent the nights sleeping in more clothes than I have anywhere else on this trip. You can also expect to be routinely Bolivia-ed (much like being Argentina-ed, but the Bolivians seem to take an unnatural pride in just how thoroughly and unexpectedly they can screw a bit more money out of you), like when we were slugged with a $25 park entry fee we weren’t warned about. Fine, except when you’re expecting to be in Chile the next day you don’t always carry a large amount of Bolivianos with you. It’s not like you can’t afford it, but why there’s always surprise hidden costs when things are so cheap blows the mind. We were Bolivia-ed for a 15 Boliviano exit fee from the country (about $2) which seemed to just go into the border guards pockets, and because the woman at the tour office had taken $10 off us for a transfer into Chile that everyone seemed to have forgotten about we almost had to pay for that twice. Luckily we made the driver of our 4WD call Uyuni, confirm again we’d payed and then front the money out of his own pocket with the hope of getting the money back from the tour company on the way back. Bolivia is full of cool stuff to see but dealing with the Bolivians tends to leave a bad taste in the mouth.

This is the crazy thing about the country. You could travel the whole thing by only dealing with gringos, as there is almost a parallel tourist infrastructure overlayed over the top of the country which is run by ex-pats. These tour companies, transport lines and hostels tell you all the costs up front, provide English speakers to guide you and most importantly are highly reliable. Nearly every one of these companies has a Bolivian run equivalent (or in many cases imitator) where you can expect to be thoroughly Bolivia-ed at some point in your dealings with them.  You may want to support local business, but that is almost certainly going to have your tour cancel without telling you or have you sailing down the World’s Most Dangerous Road on a bike with suspect breaks. Read into this what you will.

I had originally decided not to do the North of Chile at any point on this trip but I was glad to pass by the perfect snow covered volcano cone that marks the border and find myself on a paved dual carriage way marked with readable road signs. It’s stark how big a change you’re confronted with by going from South America’s poorest country to its richest. It’s a border crossing the Bolivians think shouldn’t exist, with the Atacama being one of the prizes the Chilean’s won off Bolivia in the 1800s War of the Pacific, turning Bolivia into a land-locked basket case (though to be fair, Bolivia would still have it if they didn’t suck so much at wars) and when they region stopped making Chileans rich from nitrate mining and went on to making them rich from copper mining that only rubbed salt into the wounds. I don’t like making generalisations about a whole people, but mentioning Chile to Bolivians tends to turn them into surly, angry arseholes. They still seem to blame Chile for their poverty to a certain degree.

San Pedro de Atacama is the first town of consequence over the border and despite there being no paved roads you can tell almost immediately you’re no longer in Bolivia. The menus are about 3 or 4 times expensive, hostel beds are maybe triple the price and the streets aren’t paved with garbage and wee. SPdA is a nice little town to spend a few days exploring the surrounding countryside, and despite not feeling the need to see salt flats, geysers or flamingos again, there was a still a lot of unique things Bolivia didn’t have to keep you interested.  We spent a day riding mountain bikes out to Laguna Cejar (thank God the desert is totally flat!), which is so dense with salt that you float effortlessly in it, much like the Dead Sea. What is different is there’s a two inch layer of freezing cold water that sits on top of the lake, under which is bath warm water that seems  to be the bit that makes you float. You can actually see the line where the thin water on top hits the thinner, saltier warmer water, but it also means that when you put your feet up for the classic floating effortlessly photo you have to do so with most of your body in freezing cold water. It was pleasant to be at neck height (so your shoulders were warm but your neck was cold) but you kind of had to psyche yourself up and count to 3 before you let your ankles float to the surface, you squealed like a little girl, your picture got taken and then you forced your feet back under to the warmth. It was a very different experience, floating in the water, looking out to perfectly flat land in all directions bumping up against the snow capped peaks of extinct volcanoes on all sides.

The other big day trip was out to the Moon Valley and the Mars Valley, both named because their landscape looks like you’d imagine the surface of those celestial bodies to look like. The Mars Valley is also blessed with a high black sand dune which attracts people wanting to do a bit of sand-boarding, but after two other goes at sand-boarding on this trip I didn’t really feel I needed to spend the money on a 3^rd. Instead it was nice to sit on a ridge out overlooking the Moon Valley and watch the mountain range that includes the volcanoes light up red once the sun had set.

The Atacama desert is blessed with some of the clearest sky in the world, and over 320 cloudless days a year, so it’s become ground zero for land based telescopes. Several agencies are building a radio-telescope array that is going to dwarf anything else on the planet and many others already exist. This also makes it a good place for us tourists to go out and gaze into a telescope at night. The company we went with had invested in building an observatory with a moving dome and 150x computer controlled telescope so we got to take it in turns gazing at mars, the moon and big clusters of stars, including the cluster of millions of stars that live inside the Southern Cross, but which are basically invisible to the naked eye. My favourite was looking at Saturn with it’s rings and three of it’s moons visible, which almost looked fake the view was so perfect. It was interesting to have the guide explain how to use the Southern Cross to local south no matter what time of night it was, something the Canadians and Americans in the group might not find interesting or useful but I kind of did.

The trip from Uyuni and all the stuff around SPdA marks the last full week of my 6 and a bit month tour of South America and I felt like I unintentionally saved some of the highlights for last. I’m writing this in a café in the Calama airport, about an hour’s drive from SPdA and I have a couple more hours to wait for an afternoon flight back to Santiago, where I began the trip all those months ago. I’ve already got myself booked into a nice hotel for 3 days and the end of the trip is more real by the fact I now know every bus, plane and bed I’m going to be in until I land in Sydney next Tuesday afternoon (it’s already Friday!). I plan on doing basically nothing touristy this time in Santiago, and instead trying to get myself into a head space where I can contemplate returning to The Real World.