We continue …. (see PC 319) ……

In my first postcard about The Atacama I mentioned San Pedro being known locally as the ‘Clay Town’. A few kilometres to the south east lies the little town of Toconao, known as the ‘Brick Town’. Unlike San Pedro’s red clay rendering, the houses here are faced with bricks and stone from a nearby quarry.

Toconao church; its door is made from cactus wood

Such is the height of the extinct volcanoes that make up the Andes range, running some 8900kms from the southern tip of Chile to the Caribbean Sea, on the Atacama plateau they are always there, on the horizon, out of the corner of your eye. (Note 1)   

One lagoon worth visiting is Tebinquinche, for it had enough water for a swim, although the salt content was so high floating was the only option! The local tourism organisation had built a changing and showering block, both essential with the heat and the need to rid oneself of the covering of salt.

We were joined on this outing by a German couple and another from France. The elderly German was conspicuous as he was 2.02m (6ft 8”) tall and naturally had played basketball!! I asked the Frenchman Pierre where he came from and he said Lyon. After the normal pleasantries I said I had recently watched the film ‘Resistance’ on British television, about Marcel Mangel (aka Marceau) and how he aided the escape of hundreds of Jewish children out of the sadistic clutches of Klaus Barbie during the Nazi occupation of Lyon. Interestingly his wife immediately said that no one talked about that time, reflecting the difficulties any population has living under foreign occupation, how whole families were torn apart by shifting loyalties and how the repercussions echo down the decades to this day.

An overcast sky meant the ‘Stars & Fire’ tour was cancelled so we missed the opportunity to lie on our backs at midnight and gaze into the heavens. By reputation the skies in the deserts of the world are wonderful. Naturally volcanoes have hot springs and geysers. Andrea and Andreas, our Berlin friends from our first excursion, went out to one, the early hotel departure time dictated by when the geysers normally gush. When they arrived it was about 0615 and -8C, but fortunately soon warmed up!

Our third venture into the dry landscape was to Rainbow Valley (Valle del Arcoiris), lying in the Rio Grande basin about 90kms from San Pedro. Our Trekana guide this time was an ebullient Argentinian called Nicholas, who had married and settled in San Pedro. Joel, who runs a leather fashion-ware company in Boulder, Colorado and his wife Elke who has an online leather bags business (www.byelke.com) were our companions.

The Rainbow Valley landscape was extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary. We went from: “Wow!”

……to “blimey!”

….. to an unspoken: “I really can’t believe this!”

The valley obviously owes its name to the various colours of the rock formations – red, beige, green, white, yellow and blue, overlaid with white salt and under a deep blue sky. We have all seen the results of a copper roof oxidising over some years, the roof developing a blue/green patina. Here it was in nature!

On the day of our flight back to Santiago, we had breakfast overlooking the Valle de Luna, before driving down into it for a 45 minute walk. It’s not often you can have some fruit, yogurt and coffee with this sort of view:

Our companions on this trip were eight Chileans up from Conceptión, just south of Santiago, for a long weekend; four of them were surgeons. Leonardo was married to a surgeon but was actually a real estate/property developer and thinking of emigrating to New Zealand. Being British my thoughts go east and around the world to ‘Down Under’. If you’re Chilean you simply look west! 

Conspiracy theorists and other nutters have often claimed that the moon landing of 1969 was faked! Well, they could easily have been somewhere here in Luna Valle, such was its dramatic mixture of craters and cliffs and dunes and aridness.

And how do you get to the Atacama? Unless you’re rich enough to fly your private jet into Calama, us mortals fly via Chile’s capital Santiago. We bookended our Atacama trip with two nights in the Ismail 312 hotel, just on the north side of Barrio Lastarria. Our first night was disturbed by a loud party across the river and shortened by the airlines requiring one to be at the airport three hours before our departure time! Drifting around Barrio Lastarria before our flight back to Rio, we recognised the restaurant that Franco took us to in February 2017 on our first trip to Santiago (PC 89)

The more I travel, the more I need to understand what makes a country tick, at least understand how they got to be what they are today and their place on the world’s stage. So having established that copper is Chile’s major export, it was interesting on this trip to learn that Lithium is being extracted from deep beneath the salt flats of The Atacama. Lithium (Li) is the least dense metal and the least dense solid element and has been used to treat depression and mania for centuries. More recently it’s become the star of modern battery development, so important in the burgeoning Electric Car industry. And by the way, it’s unlikely you’ve eaten Chilean cherries recently, as almost 9/10^th of the country’s total production, for instance some 352,000 tonnes in 2021, is exported to China.

As far as Chile is concerned, its small population of 19.5 million gives it a GDP per capita US$24,474. Compare this with its continental neighbour Brazil, with its population of 214 million and GDP per capita US$15,553, some 60% of that of Chile. (Note 2 & 3)

So pleased we now have some experience of The Atacama; a beautiful, wild, unearthly and fascinating place. I urge you to go and see it!

Richard 3^rd February 2023

Rio de Janeiro

www.postcardscribbles .co.uk

Note 1 The highest mountain, Aconcagua and 6961m high, lies in the Mendoza Province of Argentina, just to the north east of Chile’s capital Santiago.

Note 2 The United Kingdom has a population 67 million and GDP per capita US$44,920.

Note 3 Chile is ranked 58, Brazil 82 and the UK 26 in a comparative list of the GDP per capita of 190 countries.