Calama and onwards to Bolivia

Before we left the overpriced tourist town of San Pedro de Atacama there was one thing left that we had to do, I had seen a sign down town advertising a star gazing evening and after spending evenings in Socaire holding the star chart upside down I figured a bit of education was in order. We reserved another night in our crazy campsite and booked ourselves onto an astrology tour with a french astronomer who has set himselve up with a collection of large expensive telescopes in his back garden a few kilometers just outside town. What followed was a fantastic evening peering through the scopes into infinity while he explained about star signs, planets and galaxies, it was a very informative. He was also able to point out some of the high lights of the southern hemisphere night sky such as the "jewel box" etc. I felt better equipted to deal with the night skies I was hoping to see from the high mountains of Bolivia and Peru. However it was very much a case of "the more you know the less you know". I have attached a photo of Saturn and her rings that we were able to take through on of the telescopes.

From San Pedro it was onto Calama, an industrial mining city in the north of Chile. Here we managed to get a tour around Chuquicamata (one of the worlds biggest copper mines and produces some percentage 30%? of the world´s copper) provided by the generous Chilean government/ Codelco (state mining company) free of charge for curious tourists like ourselves. The main open pit was closed as they were currently increasing its size (check this out on google earth)! However we did get to visit the mines museum, the now deserted miners village (they have since all moved to Calama due to health and safety and the proximity of the mine), the south mine, called Radomiro Tomic which is still colossal in size and some of the refining process. This pit is in the photo to the left. It was mind boggling to look down into such a massive hole and see tiny 9m wide trucks climbing slowly out of the hole on their way to the crusher.

For those that like big trucks (myself included) I managed to get a photo of a broken down one with the zoom of the camera. To give scale to the operations the little flat bed truck to the left could easily fit a JCB on its back, the repair truck tending to the big one would be a head turner in Ireland. The big truck itself full of unrefined copper has a flat tyre! quit how they fix this problem when the trucks fully loaded I do not know!

We had hoped to take the train from Calama to Uyuni in Bolivia, but on further investigation we found out the next passenger train did not leave till October! Disappointed we booked ourselves onto a bus which sevral hours out of Calama overtook the goods train which had derailed in the middle of no where above 4500m, there was a crane in attendance but judging by the people standing around scratching it wasn´t big enough to lift the engine back on the tracks. The bumpy dusty bus suddenly felt much better as raced over salt flats and around smoking snow capped volcanoes and pass the odd flamingo chased by a large cloud of dust. We spent just the one night in Uyuni before catching a further bus to Potosi.

Potosi is a beautiful city in a weird surrounding, Cerro Rico dominates the town like a giant despot statue, it was never really out of sight as we tramped breathlessly around the narrow colonial streets of peeling whitewash, cracking walls, countless churches. Someone should really make a doors of Potosi postcard or book, as far as I could make out most of them seemed to be originals, painted bright colours and made of heavy timber held together with tons of metal studs with a decorative finish, to top them off they were held shut by six or seven outrageous locks a combination of old and new. We spent a couple of days in Potosi visiting deep inside the mountain itself under the care of a rather adventurous guide who led us down rabbit warrens on our hands and knees, squeezing through tiny holes on our bellies and climbing crumbling shafts of loose rubble to meet the miners themselves scratching away at a seem of zinc with a small metal pick and filling up rucksacks full of ore. We traded jokes and the gifts of fizzy orange, coca leaves and sticks of dynamite that we´d brought in the miners market previously, they wondered who would want to visit such a mine on their holidays rather than getting drunk in Santa Cruz for a few weeks! We were all very relieved to eventually see the light of day, I was left wondering about the sweaty dust covered miners who will die long before their time from silicosis if their lucky enough to survive the regular tunnel collapses that occur. In comparison to the well managed operation down the road Chuquicamata, the free for all style mining here seemed crazy, the small workings that we visited had a communal entrance but after that it seemed to be a free for all! dig like crazy and if your hole undermined sombody elses well hard cheese.

We also visited the Casa de Monades (mint) museum where over 45,000 tons of pure silver were cast into "arrobas, ingots and coins" in the first 200 years of Spanish occupation. Very interesting with much of the old wooden mechanical machines for rolling the silver were still intact, various old treasure chest with sophisticated locking methods to keep Walter Raleigh and his pirate friends out. The photo to the left is one of the countless ornate church doors and surrounds.

From Potosi we then travelled to Sucre, here we enrolled ourselves into a week long Spanish course with a very nice Bolivian lady called Margot. We spent 4 hours a day for the next week in her front room learning verbs, structure and general conversations about Bolivia and its culture, Sonja´s Ireland playing cards came in handy as we were able to talk about Ireland (in very broken Spanish) with the help of fifty two John Hynes style postcard coloured pictures. While we were in Sucre, Brid and James met up with an Irish fellow Stephen who has spent the last half year working in an orphanage here, he needed a new wall built so James spent a few days gathering materials and tools we spent a couple of days hammering. We built a large internal wall with the help of lots of the boys, to create a games room at the end of their dinning room which is too big. The wall has since been painted with various murals and the room fitted out with a small stage and a ping pong table, a great success apparently.

San Pedro de Atacama

After a 48 hour journey from Pucon travelling roughly 17 degrees of latitude north we were mighty relieved to arrive in San Pedro de Atacama in Northern Chile. James and Brid are in town and pick us up from the bus, its great to hook up with them again and after setting up camp in the local camp ground or "halting site" as Jim and Brid have dubbed it. Its Good Friday and all sorts of Chileans have arrived with arm fulls of booze and we settle in for a long night!

The next day we rent mountain bikes and explore the local fort on the hill, cycle through the Quebrada del Diablo (devil´s gorge) and back again wilting under the high altitude sun, we retreat back to the campsite for a late lunch and shade. That evening James and I head off on the bikes through the Valle de la Muerte (valley of death, pretty scary names!) and catch up with the girls at a view point overlooking the Valle de la Luna (valley of the Moon) to view an amazing sunset and enjoy some outrageous sandwiches.

We then organise ourselves to a place called Quebrada del Nacimiento a few miles outside a small town called Socaire, this was reccomended to us by a Chilean climber in Bariloche. Getting there with no car involves a late night bus bringing us deep in the desert darkness for a couple of hours, getting out in a small frontier town, hiking half an hour up the hill and pitching a tent. The next morning we hitch the remaining distance along a dirt road into the nothingness to the climbing gorge situated at 3500m above sea level. We´re giddy with excitement and altitude when we get there and the climbing looks amazing but by the time we pitch the tents and climb two easy routes we´re all suffering with sore heads from the height!

The next week is spent cooking, eating, sunset admiring, star gazing and panting our way up wonderful volcanic rock in the gorge. We had read that you could climb one of the local volcanoes in a "challenging day from the gorge", this will be great fun we thought naively! So we got up at some unreasonable hour and hiked off across the desert with a rucksak full of water and a sun hat in great hope, 5 hours later having reached over 4500m, incurred a bad headache and having got less than half way up the hill we gave up! Back to the safety of our little gorge, shade, games of chess and pasta tuna dinners we thought!

The bus leaves Socaire three times a week we were told at 6am so after 5 nights in the gorge we hike down to town on Saturday and camp on the outskirts, after a small reconnaissance in town we discover that the bus leaves at 4.30pm on Sundays. We lie in bed the next day (Sunday) and potter down to town after eating the last of our supplies and sit and wait in this little town dwarfed by the massive expanse of sand and rock that smother the cluster of houses. We wait some more, James plays cards "snap" with the local children while Brid supervises a games of draughts. Its Sunday and as the afternoon passes the local drunks have now passed the chatty stage and are wondering what were doing there and why were not from Barcelona! we pack our bags and try to move on but by this stage he's fallen asleep on the pavement. We talk to more friendly locals who tell us there's no bus till tomorrow at 6am, with no food left I begin to get worried and knock on doors and manage to buy sufficient grub for one more beautiful sunset and cold starry night.

We catch the bus the next morning, luckily for us as daylight saving has kicked in while we were away, however spring falls back here so were an hour early rather than late.

Back to San Pedro for showers (of the hygienic rather than inclement type!) and we manage to catch the last night of the circus where juggling, spinning plates, aerial acts are interspersed with a hilarious clown called Luppi.