Winter is starting to set in down here in the Southern hemisphere—the sky is gray, the rains have started, the mountains have snow and I’ve begun to layer. I even bought my first ever scarf today! We’ve been lucky that the winter set in especially late this year—April was completely sunny and it only rained for the first time 2 weeks ago. And I was preparing myself for a lot harsher season, but I now think it will be more like a California winter. Especially when I move to Vaplaraiso in a few weeks, a coastal city, I’m pretty sure the winter will be identical to that of Santa Barbara. But it’s a scary thought, the winter setting in and me staying for the summer—I realized that when spring sets in next year it will have been 2 years since my last spring. Which means, starting last September, my seasons go like this: Fall, Winter, Fall, Winter, Fall, Winter. I will be so ready for Spring when it comes in 2010!
I spent last weekend in San Pedro de Atacama in the northern limits of Chile. San Pedro is a tiny, rural town in the middle of the driest desert in the world (it hasn’t rained since Chile was still a Spanish colony). The electricity in the town didn’t work the first 3 days we were there, and there wasn’t a constant flow of water (meaning I didn’t take a shower in my 5 days there…). It takes about 5 minutes to walk from one side of the city to another, and most of the buildings are made from adobe. It’s a completely different world up there—everything around the city is sand. There are volcanoes, mountains, plateaus, but everything is desert. The people there are also completely different than those in Santiago—it’s a very indigenous population, and was a part of Bolivia until the War of the Pacific in the late 19th century. One of our tour guides, Christian, told us that many of the people there, and the culture in general, still identify as Bolivian. The people there looked like, well, what you’d imagine South American people to look like, not the mixed or European look of the Santiaguinos or the Porteños of Buenos Aires. The music played from the stores and restaurants there played a different tune than those I’m used to hearing—the used some different instruments, and the radio played a lot of more indigenous and Bolivian-sounding songs.
On our first day there, four of us rented some bikes and took them out a few kilometers out of town. We unexpectedly found a huge stone gate marking the start of a trail, and decided to explore for a little while. This involved some rock climbing on some steep inclines, and took us to some pretty good views of the surrounding Andes and also the two nearby valleys—la Valle de la Muerte (Valley of Death) and la Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon). When we got to our second or third peak we came to a cross that had been built with the Biblical line, “My god, my god, why have you abandoned me?” written in four languages on each of its sides—in Spanish, Portuguese, and 2 indigenous languages. The Cross looked out on all sides into the Atacama desert, and it was an awesome experience. We climbed down the mountain just as the sun set and turned all of the surrounding mountains purple and the overlying clouds a deep yellow.
17 of us in all from the Stanford program headed up to Atacama for the long weekend, and 14 of us stayed in the same hostel, taking over the entire place. The 14 of us headed out the next day, Thursday, to the Valle de la Muerte to go sand-boarding. We rented bikes again and headed out about 30 minutes outside of town into the Valley, and a few kilometers in came to sand dunes about 500 feet high, smoothly carved from the valley’s winds. We spent about 5 hours there surfing, or trying our best to surf and mostly just falling, down the dunes and exploring the overlying plateaus. In the afternoon we climbed up hundreds of meters of sand (not fun…you take one step up and 2 steps back trying to climb up steep hills of sand) to go to the top of the plateau that looked over the Valle de la Muerte. It was an amazing view and we could see on all sides of us for dozens of miles. It’s amazing how many volcanoes, mountains, cool rock formations and desert sand dunes surrounded us.
We woke up the next morning at 3:30 AM to travel to the El Tatio geyser field—technically, the highest geyser field in the world in terms of altitude. After waiting for our bus (which was 30 minutes late) we headed down on a bumpy, desert, unpaved road for 2 hours. We finally got there, 12000 feet in altitude and about 10 miles away from Bolivia, as the sun was rising and the geysers were in full force. But, wow, I have never been so cold in my life. -12 degrees celcius and I do not go well together. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed in the geysers—I was expecting full on bursts of water like I’ve seen in videos of Old Faithful, but what we saw were more like pillars of mist rising from the ground with the occasional fountain of water. It was really cool to see, especially since I’d never seen a geyser before, and it’s awesome to be able to say that I was 10 miles away from Bolivia (something about Bolivia just seems so far away and different to me), but I was expecting a bit more from it…and to be a bit warmer while doing so. But the bus stopped on the way back at hot springs close to the geysers, and I got to swim in my first ever hot springs. It took me about 20 minutes of hot-springs to get full feeling back in my toes, and it felt great (although burned a bit at times). After that we stopped at a tiny town called Machuca for a few minutes. There were vicuñas (kind of like llamas) there, a really cool church and llama empanadas (nope, didn’t try them).The ride back, however, wasn’t as pleasant. The ride back, however, wasn’t as pleasant. The altitude had given me a bit of a headache, and the 2 hour extremely bumpy road back to San Pedro didn’t really help that get better.
Atacama was a great experience. We spent the next day visiting the Reserva Nacional los Flamingos (a nearby flamingo reserve in the middle of salt flats), walking around the salt flats, going to 2 beautiful lakes about 12000 feet up in elevation surrounded by mountains and more vicuñas, had lunch in a podunk town called Socaire, picked up a indigenous woman hitch hiker (our tour guide picked her up, not me) and visited a few other small towns. We spend the night star-gazing—because there’s barely any light pollution and no humidity in the air, Atacama is one of the best places in the world to look at the southern night sky. Shooting stars passed every few minutes, the milky way was as clear as…I don’t know…milk, and it was really cool to be able to look at a completely different set of constellations than we can see in the US.
I spent the last day there relaxing. I honestly don’t remember the last day I ever had to relax. I’m always buying books to read in leisure time, but have never found that time in the hustle, bustle, stress and sleep-deprivation of Stanford. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to sit and do nothing. But I spent Sunday doing nothing but sitting in the main plaza of San Pedro de Atacama and reading a book for leisure. It was a wonderful, peaceful, relaxing feeling that I hadn’t felt in a very long time. Hopefully I’ll have some more of those great moments this summer, when I’m living in Valparaíso. I won’t be traveling on weekends, I won’t have homework during the nights, and I hope it will be a very relaxing summer when I can run a lot without the smog of Santiago and read without any homework creeping up on me. So all in all, it was a great week/weekend in Atacama, and I felt like I was in a completely different world up there, without water, electricity, smog or stress. Up next, tomorrow at 4 AM I’m off to the Island of Chiloe, about halfway between Santiago and the southern tip of Chile. It’s supposed to be an area of Chile with a culture unlike the mainland—with witchcraft, mythology, art, and architecture different from the mainland and caught in the past. I’ll be there for a few days, and then the finals grind officially begins!
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