HIGHLIGHT OF THE DAY: Seeing a massive HAND in the middle of the Atacama Desert
BUYS OF THE DAY: 10 chicken nuggets for an afternoon snack for 2.20AUD from the supermarket
WORD OF THE DAY: BERNIE: It’s sad we are going to bed before the kids (playing around the camp site) to which replied KATE: Yeah they are just on holidays – this is our life……
DISTANCE TRAVELLED: 781KM
We leave the dust bowl of San Pedro de Atacama and we are a little sad. The dusty little town grew on us, even after all the dust storms and wind that blew dust through absolutely everything yesterday; it still had a charm about the place.
It is so COLD at night time and so hot during the day which is what you would expect of a desert town. The second the sun rises though the whole temperature changes. This morning we are leaving before the sun is properly up, so we still had to don some ‘winter’ clothes for the first few hours on the road. A couple of us even had blankets over our legs to keep us warm. These clothes were all discarded quite quickly once the sun was high in the sky and the desert conditions kicked in.
The scenery today is desert, dry, dusty, desert dry and dusty. It was flat and arid for the first few hours and little sign of life, except wells where trucks were parked filling up with water, but we are still in in the middle of nowhere. During the 19th century the desert came under control of Bolivia, Chile, and Peru, and soon became a zone of conflict due to unclear borders and the discovery of sodium nitrate deposits. After the War of the Pacific, in which Chile annexed most of the desert, cities along the coast developed into international ports, and many Chilean workers migrated there. With the guano and saltpeter booms of the 19th century the population grew immensely, mostly due to immigration from central Chile. In the 20th century the nitrate industry declined and at the same time the largely male population of the desert became increasingly problematic for the Chilean state. Anarchist and communist ideas gained currency among the mine workers, and protest spread throughout the region.
The Atacama Desert again became a source of wealth from the 1950s onwards due to copper mining. The Escondida and Chuquicamata porphyry copper mines are located within the Atacama Desert.
The desert has rich deposits of copper and other minerals, and the world's largest natural supply of sodium nitrate, which was mined on a large scale until the early 1940s. The Atacama border dispute over these resources between Chile and Bolivia began in the 19th century. Now the desert is littered with approximately 170 abandoned nitrate (or "saltpetre") mining towns, almost all of which were shut down decades after the invention of synthetic nitrate in Germany at the turn of the 20th century. It was strange to see all these abandoned buildings, but there is nothing to stay out here for if the main industry collapses. Literally nothing. It would be a difficult life out here, even with the boom. There is nothing to stop the dust storms from coming through; no vegetation, no trees and I certainly couldn’t see any animals except maybe a single bird in the sky.
4 hours into the drive and e hit some BIG industry. There were massive concrete plants, massive mining trucks and equipment and industrial plants that I had no idea on what their main source was. But it was still dusty, dry and yes we were still in the desert. It really wasn’t even a town as such, just all industry with big chimney stacks and blowing white and black stuff into the air. It was like we were on a different planet driving through here; on a few detours due to roadwork’s so we probably saw more of the town than we normally would. It was weird I saw an Xstrata sign at one of the sights. That was one of my corporate clients back home. I couldn’t imagine any of my guys working out there. I rekon Biloela or the Gladstone sites would be a walk in the park compared to this life. What a shit hole!
The main highlight of the day was ‘The Hand’. If you look at South America tours that go through Chile, you will definitely have seen ‘The Hand’. It is pretty random and is located in the middle of nowhere with nothing else around it, but I think that is part of the attraction. The only downside was that it had a lot of graffiti on the ‘palm’ but I guess you are going to get that anywhere on such a monument. The Hand in the Desert was created in the early 1980’s by a Chilean Sculpture named Mario Irarrazaal. It is made out of iron and cement and sits in the middle of nowhere in the Atacama Desert. The sculpture was created to signify the horrifying human rights issues that the Chileans have dealt with in the past with the hand emerging out of the sand. It was pretty impressive that is for sure. There also seems to be a bit of a trend that people have started to write their names in rocks around the area. There is a flatter gully to the side that must have had 50 names of all sizes written, it looked pretty cool, but we were pretty pressed for time, so after getting a group photo with The Hand it was time to hit the road again.
We leave the High Andes today as we descend back to sea level, no need to ask Mark what the altitude is anymore, which is a little sad as I liked to annoy him with this question each day. So after 4 weeks above 3500m, give or take a few days, it was time to hit some warmer weather and get out of the damn Andes. As much as I enjoyed my time all the way up here, above you all, it was time to get back to ‘land’. We probably won’t get above a 1000m now for the rest of the trip.
We are back on the Pan Americano Highway which is a network of roads measuring about 47,958 kilometers in total length. Except for an 87 kilometers rainforest break, called the Darién Gap, the road links the mainland nations of the Americas in a connected highway system. According to Guinness World Records, The Pan-American Highway is the world's longest "motorable road". However, because of the Darién Gap, it is not possible to cross between South America and Central America by traditional motor vehicle. The Pan-American Highway system is mostly complete and extends from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in North America to the lower reaches of South America. It passes through many diverse climates and ecological types, from dense jungles, to arid deserts, to cold mountain passes. Since the highway passes through many countries, it is far from uniform. Some stretches of the highway are passable only during the dry season, and in many regions driving is occasionally hazardous. Famous sections of the Pan-American Highway include the Alaska Highway and the Inter-American Highway (the section between the United States and the Panama Canal). Both of these sections were built during World War II as a means of supply of remote areas without danger of attack by U-boats.
In some stretches it is straight as a nail for 100’s of kilometers, okay maybe not 100’s but as I look out the window it goes on as far as the eye can see. I try and take photos from my window as we are travelling and let’s just say I am getting some ‘creative’ shots. I have noticed more today also the shrines that are beside the road. We have seen these all trip, but today there just seemed to a lot more than usual, which is a little strange as the road it so straight, but I guess people are more prone to losing concentration or fall asleep when it is so easy and they have lost their lives in the process. The shrines all vary in size and what they have done with them but at the end of the day they all mean the same thing whether it was a wreath on a small monument or some of them were quite elaborate to the extent of being fenced, chairs, bigger monuments etc…..it’s the same message and a memorandum to someone who has lost someone they have loved. Seriously I rekon there were over a hundred that we saw along the highway today. The rock writing traditional also continued along the section of the highway with some of them high up on mountains to smaller ones right by the road. It does look cool and sound cool that we are travelling on a stretch of the Pan America Highway!
The afternoon was spent just hauling Rosita and us to our final destination Bahia Inglesa. We did have a supermarket stop 20 minutes before arriving at a place called Caldera. Now I have said this before but this was a ‘super market’. It had trolleys, and proper check-outs, and a deli and a bakery and it was a real ‘supermarket’. It is just a shame that I didn’t need to get anything, it seems like such a waste. Kate and I decided to stock up on some toilet paper and I bought 10 chicken nuggets to get us through till dinner time from the pre-cooked section and they were delicious!!!We have been told that there is another mall/supermarket stop tomorrow as well at La Serena, so anything I ‘think’ I need I have another chance tomorrow.
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