La Serena turned out to be my destination for the evening, but first I
had to get past the game of tag played by the roadside carabineros, the
national police. Even from a distance you can almost tell by the body language
of these troops that it has been a good long while since they stopped a
large bike, and now you are "it." But although I was cruising at
a little over the limit of 100 km/hr, so I don't panic or give up
easily. There was no radar there, anyway, and the carabineros had supposedly
not shot anyone for weeks. Foreigners often get the benefit of the doubt
in Chile if they don't behave like real jerks. But first I would have to
play the game.
Now, since I used to work, albeit briefly, for a law-enforcement agency,
I think I am allowed to submit that most cops are not recruited from the
top tenth percentile of humanity, and this appears to be also true throughout
South America. Most of the carabineros do not speak anything but Chilean
Spanish, and many even have trouble reading their own language. Generally,
they are decent and among the least corrupt in all the world.
In these roadside parleys and similar circumstances I conveniently speak
nothing but English, so we have a pleasant little quandary. In this
case, as in most traffic stops, the carabineros want to see your drivers
license. For that I have a "sacrificial" item which is an expired
International license from Andorra, written in Catalan, and please
do not ask the circumstances for my having an Andorran license, si us
plau.
If I had been doing something hideous there on the Chilean highways, then
this or any other license would likely be confiscated and I might have
to spend some time at the local magistrate's office getting it back, using
the citation as a provisional license until things could be cleared up.
That is, assuming that I really wanted to hang around to get it back. Don't
ask me how I know this.
But of course I did not need to give up my, uh, souvenir
license. The "Pacos" as they are rudely called (not to their faces) just
wanted to chat, to check out the GS, and relieve some of their boredom,
albeit under the color of law. Once that was established, and the license
is back in my bag, then the Spanish starts to flow like cheap wine at a
party.
This being January and the austral summer season, the highway was busy
with holiday travelers. Along one section you are reminded of the rural
nature of much of Chile, as locals stand along the road shoulder trying
to attract your attention to the splayed carcasses of goat kid that they
wave at prospective buyers. If you were a Chilean then it might be the
sort of thing that you acquired on the way to a camping site cookout. On
this day I confess to gringo sentiments, and my preference for a cheese
sandwich.
By the time I reached La Serena (established in 1544) the crush of holiday
travelers was insane, and the place was packed. Traffic trying to get into
the interior was at a standstill. Since I needed a reasonably safe spot
for the GS the search for a room is problematic in a town where I have
neither reservations nor a decent notion of where to look. This time
the local fire station was not an option.
I had a feeling that this would be an American Express night at one of
the expensive places along the strand. And there is another game to play
with the tittering little clerks who try so hard but don't speak real English,
and it starts as I come into the reception area dressed somewhat like an
unlicensed space traveler carrying a silver helmet.
"Do you take Martians?" I ask in Spanish. That usually gets a smile,
and often a quick understanding, since there is probably nobody quite so
extraterrestrial sounding as a gringo rider with a Barthelona accent.
If not, I point to my GS "space ship" and explain that I have just landed.
This is apparently viewed as a remarkably credible possibility. Fellow
dual-sport riders intent on imitation should take note that this approach
seems to work best with women under thirty. But hey, it got me a room with
reasonably secure parking, hot water, and mosquitoes. I would have slept
in a bit longer the next morning save for the earthquake.
Yes, earthquake. La Serena has a history of getting knocked around by earthquakes.
Almost all of Chile gets battered that way. Geophysically speaking,
the oceanic Nazca Plate is continuously sliding under the continental part
of the South American Plate, which in turn tends to rise. During the course
of history that has contributed to keeping the Andes as high as they are.
For the geophysicists among my readers who wish to make corrections to
those observations, please find the email address elsewhere on the page.
The price of the room included a breakfast of coffee, juice, bread and
jam, fruit, and other recognizable items. No one mentioned an extra charge
for the 6 a.m. earthquake. I was on my way before midmorning with a full
gas tank, ready for a quick run into the desert, only to be stopped by
another pair of paper-checking Pacos. Still no damage, although these two
could have worked on their early-morning sense of humor.
Once away from La Serena, approaching the town of Vallenar, the vegetation
thins out further, and the distance between human beings grows. This is
where the famous Las Campanas observatory is located, due to the clear
air and general lack of cloud cover. However, while the recent unusually
heavy rains had damaged bridges and roads, they had brought about an excellent
season of desierto florido, or “flowering desert.” The normally
monotonous little hills of the desert were now festooned here and there
with thin clouds of yellow, blue, and purple wildflowers, and with those
the insect and lizard populations had also exploded. Later I learned that
the rainfall in the Atacama during the previous months had set historical
records, although periodic El Niño events are associated with seasons
of unusually high amounts of precipitation both in the desert and in the
higher cordillera areas. The associated historical data tends to contradict
the claims of those who maintain that human-induced global climate change
is creating these anomalies, and anyway the incongruities of such pseudoscience
populist pap is both scientifically deficient and intellectually unattractive.
But now, on the last leg before Copiapó, there was the heat. The
hair-curling, oppressive, pizza-oven heat of the austral summer. North
of Vallenar it caught up with me, draining all my energies. A nap was what
I needed badly, but there was no shade nor place for this. Instead, the
solution was to make a point of stopping frequently to sip a little water
or take in a tepid soft drink from an isolated truck stop. Imagine California's
Death Valley in August.
Copiapó,
and its history and geography
Copiapó itself is a small oasis city, but sufficiently important
to investigate. Human occupation there predates the Inca empire, and while
a few traces of the old Inca roads and other sites can be found, most other
traces of the earlier indigenous peoples have vanished. Today visitors
find it hard to believe that at one time Copiapó was one of the
most important and technologically advanced cities in all of Chile, in
fact one of the busiest in all of South America, and it enjoyed the first
railroad, telegraph, telephone, and gas works in the entire country. Equally
amazing is that the direct descendents of Francisco de Aquirre, one of
the original conquistadores of the Sixteenth century, still live in or
around the city that Francisco established. Don Francisco de Aguirre
brought viticulture to Copiapó, with the first grape harvest in
1551, and even today the grapes of the region are considered some of the
best in Chile. Aguirre is also credited with founding the oldest continuously
occupied colonial city in South America, across the Andes at Santiago del
Estero, in Argentina.
One of the characteristics of Copiapó that makes it unappealing
to the passing visitor is that very few buildings are more than a single
story. The reason, of course, is due to the dangers of earthquakes. In
1918 more than 20% of the buildings were totally destroyed. The surviving
ones were mostly those made of imported wood. As a result, the city's interesting
older buildings are those that reflect distinct English architectural styles,
including the "English Neoclassic," owing to their 19th century origins
and the importation of personnel from the US and Britain to develop the
local mining operations. The better construction materials (that
is to say, those associated with resisting earthquake effects) had to be
brought in by ship and then overland. Among those were “Guayaquil Cane”
(which was not a cane but a bamboo) and “Oregon Pine” (which was neither
a pine nor was it from Oregon).
The city owes its existence to the river, and out there in the wasteland
a river is such a rare thing that a settlement seems inevitable. When the
first Spanish arrived, thinking they would introduce irrigation, they were
surprised to learn that the Incas had already installed a sophisticated
system for river diversion and cropland watering. And that is not the only
amazing technological aspect of their occupation. Upstream from Copiapó
is a place called Viña del Cerro, a copper smelting operation developed
by the Incas and now a national monument. It is perhaps one of the best
preserved of any Incan site in Chile in spite of the inevitable looting
by artifact hunters that has gone on over the years. Ore was transported
using llama pack trains, and the Incas took advantage of a very windy site
to place their smelters. This created a rudimentary form of "blast furnace"
since the prevailing strong winds accelerated the combustion of the fuel
and increased furnace temperatures. To visit this place you need to travel
up into the Sierra del Titiritero, about 50 miles up the Copiapó
river.
Whether in Incan times or in recent history, that river has not been a
constant. In some years unusually heavy snows in the cordillera and
rain in the local watersheds have caused flooding that seriously damaged
the basin and transportation systems. That valley provides the only significant
food-growing resource for the region, and when floods covered the crops,
there was no food for pack animals and precious little for the population,
a situation which nearly brought famine to Copiapó until a railroad
line connected it to the rest of Chile. But most of the time the river's
flow has been something to be rationed. The scarcity of water not only
created a special sort of government and body of law to deal with it, but
also set up peculiar social divisions.
The reason for the rarity of rivers in the Atacama is twofold. First, rainfall
in the Copiapó area is only about one inch a year, and it shows,
but it must be remembered that in the region north of the city the rainfall
is dramatically less. Secondly, moisture from the rain and snow that do
fall in the high Andes has a tendency to sink very quickly into the porous
ground, absorbing a lethal concentration of salts and other materials.
And here the Andes comprise two parallel ranges, forming an intermontaine
basin, and there are very few transverse valleys to allow the basin to
drain toward the coast. This high-altitude basin between the ranges
is called the Puna. It is here that the snowmelt and outflow of high springs
tends to accumulate in huge salt pans called salares. Where permanent
lakes do form, the chemical soup provides unusually brilliant coloration,
usually blue-green hues, in contrast to the Andean flamingos that can sometimes
be seen along their shores and shallow waters.
Reason enough to risk a visit.
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