Tuesday, 8 May 2018, en route Copiapo to Antofagusta by Turbus.

Our last night in Copiapo was memorable after being invited to join the host, Leonardo, and his wife and eleven year old daughter, an employee of his who lives in one of the cabanas and a young couple who I think are another daughter and her fiancé. We dined around a large table on what I think might have been risotto with diced frankfurters mixed in and enjoyed more Chilean red wine followed by pisco (which was superior to the cheap one I’d bought to sample and which I’d describe as simply wine that had been put through a still to extract the alcohol). It turned out to be a late night with much hilarity and animated conversation in Spanish amongst the guests, which I enjoyed despite not being able to follow much of what was being discussed. It’s probably just as well we booked our onward coach before tea! We all finish up outside trying out my new “toy” which everyone is impressed with – the green light beam cuts through the atmosphere and can be seen easily as a spot on the mountainsides across the other side of the city. I’m impressed!

Leaving Copiapo by the same route we travelled yesterday to Cladera I notice things I didn’t yesterday – like a huge boulder the size of a house perched precariously on a steep rocky hill adjacent to the highway just waiting for the next earthquake to dislodge it and send it crashing down onto a passing coach full of tourists, so the “road kill” statistics can be adjusted and some international news story headlines created. Where there are no hills it is alluvial plains with huge olive groves, probably easily visible on google maps satellite view just West of Copiapo – I’ll look later. Acres of disused hot houses with the ripped and dust covered plastic sheeting hanging loose in the breeze probably also visible on Google maps. Although it’s hard to imagine it, Copiapo was not long ago flooded by two metres of alluvial flooding after particularly heavy rain in the surrounding hills brought thousands of tonnes of the mining tailings into the town – the kind of story you often see these days on TV news channels (climate change at work??).  Copiapo was also the town closest to the San Jose mine in which 33 miners were trapped for 69 days before being rescued – a miracle. They might have become just another mine disaster statistic here, where lives are so cheap, except for the fact that the then president of region (?) needed a ratings boost and committed to the rescue in order to boost his popularity with the people!

As we leave Caldera on the Pan America Highyway (route 5) North toward Chanaral we hug the Pacific Ocean and a pipeline on our left while there is nothing but desert with occasionally a shanty town littered with abandoned vehicles around it on our right. There are empty window seats on both sides of the coach so I hop back and forth to get the best views, spending most of my time on the left side pining for the chance to get into the beautiful water for a dive as the rocky foreshore slips by. Headlands look snow capped, white with hundreds of years of accumulated guano and frequently a cross defines a place where yet another life has been sacrificed to the sea. I don’t think many Chileans can swim. A small insignificant bay harbours a large ore carrier ship which is being towed slowly to its berth by what looks like an old underpowered tug boat. We then suddenly turn away from the coast and start heading across the Atacama desert proper. People with a lot of time on their hands have very laboriously written large messages with rocks on the sloping sand of the dunes along the highway (pleading for rain, maybe, or water??). I know from the documentaries I’ve watched on TV that there actually is life here in the desert, but if I didn’t know I’d swear it wasn’t possible. There’s no sign of any living thing – not even a tiny scrubby bush. Only evidence of human habitation in the form of tonnes of plastic waste strewn everywhere that is close to a shanty town. I spot two Condors riding a thermal above a desert so utterly devoid of life I wonder what they survive on – maybe there are lizards that live underground during the day and venture out at dusk? I thought I saw a road kill hare on the coast road but that was a long way back. The coach is constantly climbing higher through the desert and I wonder at what point we’ll start suffering altitude sickness! Suddenly we’re heading steeply downhill and back on the coast at Taltal where we stop at 2:45pm for ten minutes and I grab some sushi and a bottle of water to keep me going until we reach Antofagasta at 6:30pm. The bus has filled and I’ve lost the opportunity to swap sides to get the best views so it’s the right hand side from here on (thankfully the seat next to me is still vacant so I have somewhere to put my “manbag” and laptop when I’m not writing. Huge scree slopes run down the precipitous high mountains adjoining the highway held back by rock filled groynes, for the moment at least, and the different colours of the rock (pink, grey, white, purple, yellow, orange and black) adds some interest to the “scenery”.

Again, we suddenly turn East at Paposo and begin a terrifying climb up the side of the Andes and I recall all the news stories I’ve read about coaches that have lost their brakes on these roads and gone over the side to certain doom. The only reassurance I have is that the road is well paved and the bus a modern Mercedes Benz. Even the 600 horses are struggling to pull this baby up this incline at not much zes than 30 kph! Eventually we plateau onto the top of the desert and for a while turn off the paved road and travel along bulldozed road (which will become the Northbound lanes of the four lane route 5 in due course) for some distance before re-joining the paved two lane road. A few miles further on we pass a long, sealed airstrip with the usual threshold and centreline markings and a couple of wind socks – but not a sign of any buildings or terminal in sight. Just a lonely airstrip in the middle of a huge desert! Strange! Not much further on the desert sand is covered with hundreds of thousands of rocks of varying as though some giant has sprinkled them there from outer space. Some wag has painted one remarkably cube-shaped one like a huge dice! We arrive into Antofagusta half an hour early at 6pm and use Uber (they say ‘oover, here) to get from the bus terminal to the AirBnB which is a long way from the city centre, I’m pleased to say (the city looks decidedly dangerous). After a tea consisting of yet another completo and a mug of beer I return to my AirBnB which looks nice and clean for a well earned rest. Catch up again tomorrow! Ciao.