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.