Limbo: First week in Chile

The sun is shining and I’m wondering why? I had looked at my watch and it said 4 a.m.! Awe, yes, three hour time difference, it’s really 7 a.m. But wait, the sun is still so incredibly bright. After four months in Lima, dark had become our day and night. This was a splendid change even at the early hour.

We had many things on our “To Do” list. First was to get pesos, then back to the phone company. We discovered we had internet for a little while but then we didn’t and we were not able to make calls. I will not complain, it is still easier to deal with cell phone companies in any of the countries we’ve been to over the ones in the United States. Agenda day one: Entel, Zofri (a duty free zone), grocery store, laundry, book store.

There are countless banks here in Iquique some of them international. This was a huge mining town in the 19^th century for nitrate and copper. There are also a few abandoned silver mines dating back as far as the late 1500’s. They now have a large fishing industry that ships fish meal around the globe and in 1975 they built the “zona franc” locally called zofri. It is a massive duty free shopping zone offering anything from cars, clothes, electronics, tools, and toys, etc. As a tourist you can spend a little over $1000 US and not be taxed.

Pesos, no problemo, rate of exchange posted in front, sign clearly marking the line and cashier to get change. All that you need is a passport which we did not have with us, but, they excused it this time and cashed in our dollars. Next the phone. The same English speaking young man standing in the same place we’d left him the day before. There is still no problemo, dial 123 + country code + area code + number and you can reach anybody anywhere. OK, we tried it while standing there and hey it does work. Next, the internet, awe yes, he explained that we had been given 50MB for free and now we had to “activate” the service to deduct money from our balance to turn on the internet app. How civilised, if only we would have known that the day before….. For the rest of the time in Chile we should not have to do anything else except keep a positive balance. He said if we have anymore problems come back.

Zofri next stop. Taxi cab let us out in front of a metal store front with glass doors. Inside, is an immediate shock of surprise. There are three levels with lights flashing, singing, swirling,and pulsating every color in a prism. Corridor upon corridor there were shops. Some specializing, some eclectic. We walked and looked, walked and looked, soon undone with sensory overload. We went outside and discovered a checkpoint line requiring a ticket and passport for entry. This was the real Zofri. The front we were in was the mall, this next area was the actual duty free zone. We did not have passports on hand so we left for lunch.

We were looking for a particular book, “The Atlas Hidrografico de Chile”. Our information said that all the armada offices had them, or Chilean consulates, or bookstores. We were on the search to no avail. We did find a marine store, the laundry, and several grocery stores called “Uni-mac". We found the tourist office called Sernatur . Fortunately, one of the personnel, Aaron Baruch, is fluent in English. We were able to ask a 100 questions. He gave us maps, info, and restaurant suggestions. We had also been searching for a man named Sergio Cortez. We had read he did aluminum welding. We still wanted aluminum pipe for davits to hold the dinghy. The tourist office knew of him because he also does extreme sports tours, company name Civet Adventures, www.civet-adventure.cl

We found our way to Sergio’s and although he did not have any aluminum pipe, he was able to give us a name of someplace else to try and we booked a dune buggy trip with him for the following day. We then took a cab to the Las Americanas Mall, still looking for the atlas. There we found the Hiper Lider, (pronounced Heeper Leeder), a rather large grocery store, a Sodimac which is the US equivalent of Home Depot, and another mall. A cursory tour of all three places we left without our book but terrific goodies for dinner.

The dune buggy tour would be off road using only GPS to navigate through the Atacama desert,the only desert in the world that does not recieve any rain. The desert brings challenges that most of us would not ever want to face. There are however the extreme sport enthusiats that trek across this vast waist land on foot http://www.4deserts.com/atacamacrossing/location_culture . We would be seeing abandoned settlements from the nitrate miners as well as the mines, and vegetation that grows off the mist of the night air.

We met Sergio in front of his shop at 10 a.m. The other person on the trip was a young German man named Roberto. Sergio handed out goggles loaded our bags and away we go. We towed the dune buggy to an industrial area were we parked the van and buckled up in the dune buggy. Hats, goggles and scarfs on, sunscreen globed on, camera out and wrapped in plastic, he says we’re ready. I felt a bit like a martian.

Sergio and the dune buggy he built

Roberto

ready to ride

We did “fishtails” around turns through the valley of the dunes, skirting the sides making wakes in the sand. We topped mountains to view landscape that touched the clouds. We saw holes in the dried earth that were once the workplace of men. They would dig by had 9 to 15 ft down bracing the sides with stones and mud bricks. There they would use a bucket to pass up the nitrate they were mining. In some of these areas it looked like giant gofer holes covering the dry dismal flats of earth. There were ruins of mud brick structures, the area strewn with remains of their life there. Pieces of glass,broken dishes, shoes, cigarette papers, newspapers, some with dates back to early 1930’s.

nitrate mine

All the dirt risers are nitrate mines

Then, the cemetery. This has to be the most desolate place on earth to be buried. The immediate reaction when coming upon this is such sorrow for these people. They came here much like the men and women of the gold rush in the west of the USA. They came for the nitrate. A product that changed agriculture, bringing life to a lifeless soil. In their end, they were left there in the lifeless soil. A place that now is only found by GPS and strangers that feel the sorrow of their desolation. Not even a name on the cross markers to read aloud in respect of their memory and celebration of their life. A thorough sadness for me.

To bring us back to the gladness of the day, Sergio took us sand boarding. Roberto had never done this so it was more fun to watch and listen to him. He kept calling himself the “chicken German”. We think not, everybody is hesitant with new things. He was a lot of fun to have on the trip.

We ate lunch under a camouflage cover offering some shade in an otherwise open air oven. The wind blew hard in places causing little dust devils. We saw bones of donkeys that obviously could not make it any further.