High Plains Drifter

Current location: Cordoba, Argentina

Miles to date: 14,943

I never expected that: Parrots in the desert

There’s a show on some cable channel or other – I think it might be the Discovery Channel – where, using a super slo-motion camera, ordinary events are replayed to the general astonishment of the watching public. The point the programme makers constantly reiterate is that even the most mundane of occurrences look incredibly different when slowed right down.

It’s a bit like ordering a coffee in a restaurant in Argentina. The process is familiar, although slowed down to such an extent it becomes fascinating, unusual even. This is a country where – unless you are behind the wheel of a car – it is definitely unseemly to rush about.

Lunch – usually some kind of slow roasted meat – is taken at a leisurely pace, and is promptly (if that’s the right word) followed by a siesta. And as for dinner, don’t expect to hear the gong much before 11pm. Invited to an asado – a traditional open fire barbecue – I was ready to knaw my own arm off by the time the first course of meat finally put in an appearance sometime just before midnight.

You can see why they like to take their time. This is such a massive country, something like the eight largest in the world, that the mere thought of tracking across its vast open spaces, with its endless skies and its far, far horizons, is enough to make you pull the covers a little closer to your chin and think “later, later”.

Legendarily, Ushuaia in the south of the country is closer to Antarctica than it is to the capital Buenos Aires. Or take the far north west. This is the point where Argentina bumps into Chile and Bolivia, huge salt pans and endless deserts making a mockery of the borders supposedly dividing the countries. Up here there are more llamas than people, and what people there are have a distinctly Andean look about them.

Sitting in a freezing adobe hostel at 4,000 metres, with frozen salt lakes outside and an endless chilly blue sky wrapped over you, the fashion boutiques and coffee houses of chic Buenos Aires don’t even feel like they are part of the same planet let alone the same country.

It is a land of high plains between the two ranges of the Andes, crossing from the world’s driest destert on the Chilean side of the mountains – the Atacama – to the deep red gorges and giant cactus forests on the Argentinian side.

The high plain has little vegetation – just some spikey clumps of grass that look a bit like spinifex – but it’s enough to support a food chain of sorts. More numerous than I’ve ever seen them are the protected vicuñas, small and skittish, like a cross between a deer and a camel. As well as grazing the grass, they also drink from what looks like tiny salt lakes, that is when the sun finally gathers enough strength in the middle of the afternoon to melt the top layer of water.

There is also a kind of fox in the high desert that looks more like a coyote with a brown underside and a dark, black stripe at the top of its coat. Somehow, ducks have found a way to survive on a thimbulfull of water up here and flocks of smaller birds, like sparrows, are constantly swooping over the road in search of God knows what to eat. It’s certainly too cold for insects.

No people can live on this part of the high plain. Agriculture is impossible and it is forbidden to kill and eat the vicuñas. Instead, from San Pedro de Atacama – an outpost of the Mundo Gringo with its internet cafes, tour companies and wholemeal bread – 160 kilometres to the Argentinian border post there is no sign of human habitation except lonely, windblown Ruta 27.

I don’t know what you have to do wrong to find yourself posted to the Argentinian border  but despite the fact it is clearly the Siberia of South America the people who work here are professional, polite and efficient. Getting into the Republica Argentina – as the countless signs, flags and paintings on the road tell you - is very, very straightforward. (Sensibly, the Chileans do all their border paperwork back in San Pedro. It’s weird being allowed free reign of a country having officially checked out but at least it saves a few customs officials from the most mundane posting of their careers.)

The first town in Argentina is Susques. Along its dry, dusty freezing streets it’s hard to see where the desert ends and the town begins. With an altitude more than three times the highest point of the UK – Ben Nevis – this is not a place for rushing about, either. Thankfully there’s nothing to do except put on every item of clothing you own and lie in your refrigerator of a room until it is acceptably late enough (8pm, in my case) to get under the covers and call it a night.

When the sun finally does rise, bringing with it no warmth, you’re reminded why this spectral, haunting landscape will stay with you such a long time. It’s hard to convey a sense of its majesty in mere words, but the effect of rolling along in this huge emptiness, like a tiny parasite crawling along the buttock of some mighty beast, is incredibly calming.

I arrived in Jujuy – no metropolis itself – feeling stunned by the emptiness I’d experienced, and overwhelmed by the traffic, the streets, the people. Luckily I snapped out of it soon enough on discovering that Argentina has not one, but a choice of chains all serving excellent coffee. Being a civilised country, it is usually accompanied by a small biscuit or cake of some kind, and a small glass of sparkling water, the Argentinians betraying their Italian roots.

And so it’s continued. Jujuy to Salta, on the advice of the man who looked after my motorcycle all night, was taken along Ruta 9 through high wooded hills and past lakes. As a counterpoint to the aridity of the desert, this fecundity could not have been sharper. Salta to Tucuman felt like driving in England in a particularly dry autumn, brown leaves burning at the side of the road and the last of the crops in the field just starting to dry out as they wait to be harvested.

And then Santiago del Estero, slightly derided in my guidebook but a place of immense friendliness among its modern grid of streets and some of the best food I’ve had since November. The fresh pasta lunch has won a place on the eating leaderboard to your right, but the selection of treats served up in the central market only did not make it onto the list because I thought it was unreasonable for one town to hog two entries. I might yet change that.

Last, but by no means least, Cordoba. A tough, chilly, windy, six hour ride south across deserts, salt pans, plains and low rolling hills it wears its title of Argentina’s second city lightly, and without the chippy scorn of the capital normally found in second towns.

Most remarkable, for me at least, is that about 300 kilometres north of here I passed a small, simple sign in the desert which read KM 1000. This means I am less than one thousand kilometres from journey’s end at Buenos Aires. In fact, I am going to Rosario tomorrow and this will undoubtedly by my final stop on the road. After 15,000 miles I’ll be calling a halt to this odyssey and resting up in Buenos Aires for a few weeks before returning back to Blighty.

Whatever else happens, I’ll be taking my time over my coffee once I’m in Buenos Aires. After all, there’s no rush, is there?

Just deserts

Current location: Calama, Chile

Miles to date: 13,826

Job I would not want: whoever arranged the rocks in the southern Peruvian desert into those straight lines.

Of all the terrible legacies left behind by the Spanish invaders – destruction of indigenous cultures, the imposition of a manifestly unfair land distribution system, the Inquisition – by far the worst is their casual approach to breakfast.

Hispanic cultures, whether back in the European motherland or here in the various countries of South and Central America, just don’t seem to have got the news that breakfast is The Most Important Meal of the Day.

Usually, you have one of two choices: an insubstantial cake of some sort or an over-substantial full dinner. Nothing could be less appetising at seven in the morning than the only-partly thawed meatballs I was served for breakfast once. Except the rancid turkey steaks I politely declined on another occasion. Apart from bacon, I just don’t do cooked meats before lunchtime.

Or there’s the cake option, which just feels wrong. Too sweet. Not filling enough. Just wrong. Now, to save myself having to read some smartarse feedback, I know there are honourable exceptions. In northern Mexico it’s possible to get avena, a nice porridge served with chopped banana and fresh vanilla pods, sometimes also with cinnamon. Mmmmm. They do something similar, but thinner, in Guatemala and Panama, and not just in the gringo places either.

But for the most part there is little that makes me feel more northern European (for the purposes of this rant, I’m including America in northern Europe) than the daily disappointment of failing to hunt out something filling and tasty before hitting the road for the day.

Of all the countries I’ve been to so far (11 and counting) Chile is by far the worst in this regard, having taken breakfast-disdain to new heights. Here, you’re lucky if you get a thin toasted roll – just enough to remind you how hungry you are – and a cup of instant coffee from your hotel. Forget trying to get anything on the street. Nowhere opens before 11am

This blemish aside – and I blame the Spanish for this, not the Chileans – Chile is a pretty sweet deal. Here, rather than trying to run you down Peruvian-style, taxi drivers stop at the pedestrian crossing and wait for you to cross. The first time this happened to me in Arica I assumed she was just trying to lure me into the road in order to give herself a better chance of hitting me.

Just 20 kilometres south of the Peruvian border, Arica makes quite a contrast with its northern neighbour. Ordered, polite and relatively expensive the great traveller’s cliche is that Chile – and to a greater extent Argentina – is just like Europe.

It is most emphatically not. Chile maybe one of the richest countries in South America but its GDP of $13,900 in 2007 would still leave it some way short of the European average. According to my guidebook an estimated 22 per cent of the population lives in acute poverty.

There are more signs here of a middle class than in other Latin American countries – white people with dreadlocks – but that does not make it France, or Germany or Latvia.

Then there’s the landscape, which is about as far from Europe as it’s possible to get, my part especially. When you come from a pokey, cloudy island off the north west coast of the continental mainland two things immediately strike you about Chile: it seems permanently sunny, and it is vast, at least in the deserts of the north.

First, the sun. Chile is home to the driest desert on Earth – the Atacama – and the driest town on Earth, Quillagua. Ironically enough for a town famed for its lack of water, Quillagua has plenty of the stuff. I was expecting a parched, windblown stretch of desert full of people with tongues lolling out, thirstily begging water and fizzy drinks from passing motorists.

Instead what you have is brightly painted wooden houses leading to a sun baked little square, but surrounded by shrubs and trees. As its name suggests Quillagua has got something to do with water – it’s an oasis, although it is reached by crossing one of the most barren stretches of road I have yet travelled. None of its water arrives borne by English-style clouds.

If you click on the video above of the Panamerican Highway you’ll get some idea of what I’m talking about. Although that particular bit of the highway is in Peru, you’ll still be able to see it’s just a road and some desert and that’s about it (plus, the Pacific Ocean but let’s not quibble).

If I thought southern Peru was desolate little prepared me for just how empty a space northern Chile is. If you read my previous blog you’ll see I described some of the people who live at the side of the Panamericana, eking a living from whatever passing trade they can rustle up.

So although it’s a desert, and by British standards it’s a long, long way between stuff, there are still regular enough signs of human habitation from pueblitos, to fishing villages to roadside shacks, to make you feel you have not completely lost touch with the rest of the human race.

Northern Chile though…blimey. As it’s impossible to get maps of South America in South America I’ve been very much relying on the maps inside my Footprint guidebook. Not ideal, but needs must and all that. Poring repeatedly over that map, I couldn’t see any towns between Arica and Iquique, 300kms to the south.

I assumed this was wrong and that it was just one of the afectations of the guidebook that they refused to recommend any places to stay between these places. But the map – and the book – was right. You really do have to drive 300kms south of Arica to find the next town with a hotel.

Luckily, Iquique has plenty of them as it’s one of the premier seaside resorts on this stretch of the coast. Crammed onto a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the blue Pacific, it’s a place obviously trying to rediscover the grandeur of its heyday but wonderfully failing.

The principal street – and the one I stayed on – is Boquedano, which links the main shopping area with the beach. It’s a long, straight stretch of street which still has its old tram tracks, although they sadly no longer run. It also has kept its wooden sidewalk which creaks delightfully as you make your way out of the hotel in the morning, or back at night.

The street is lined with mansions built in thje early 20th century by people who made their fortune in the nitrate business, before synthetic alternatives made mining the stuff pointlessly expensive, leading to the collapse of the industry in Chile. Some of these mansions are well maintained, used today by hotels, art schools and government offices. Others are evocatively dilapidated, paint peeling under the twin onslaught of sun and seaspray.

In the desert surrounding Iquique are ghost towns like Humberstone, abandoned when the nitrate business folded and now refusing to wither away in the dry desert air. Some have become latter day tourist attractions. It’s a bit like sneaking through someone’s house when they’re not there.

Leaving Iquique is the same story as arriving. Quillague aside (no places to stay) there is very little to distract you as you travel down Ruta 5 the Panamericana until you reach Calama, more than 320 kilometres away.

Which leaves you plenty of time for ruminating on why it is Hispanic people don’t do breakfast, or why they don’t show that slightly racist Drifter ad any more (perhaps because it was slightly racist, or maybe they just stopped making Drifters), or whatever happened to Haircut 100.

Pointless ramblings aside, I have also reached a second milestone on this trip. As well as leaving the Banana Zone, I have also left the classic Pan American Highway, a road I picked up in Central America but have left to find its own way to the far south of Chile.

I’ve been heading south ever since I left Austin, Texas just after Christmas, down through San Antonio, across into Mexico and through Central America to Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. At many points I’ve either crossed the Panamericana, or have ridden along it.

But no more. This morning I left the Pacific Ocean for the last time and after lunch I similarly exited the Panamericana. I’m now on Ruta 24 through Calama and San Pedro de Atacama as far as the border. There, I’ll cross the Andes via the Jama Pass and down into my final country, Argentina, where the steaks are huge and Pampas are flat. Wonder what they do for breakfast?

You are now leaving the Banana Zone

 

Current location: Arequipa, Peru

Miles to date: 13,097

Thank you: Yes, I know my frikkin’ lights are on. They are hardwired on.

I can’t tell you exactly where it happened but somewhere north of Lima I stopped getting fried banana as part of my daily set lunch. Significant? You bet. And here’s why.

Everywhere from Chiapas in southern Mexico to the border between Ecuador and Peru, the fried banana (and before you write in, I know it’s probably a plantain) is as predictably part of the set lunch menu as  the mound of rice and the chicken leg.

I’ve probably had at least one – and often more – fried banana on a daily basis. So its absence feels like a Big Deal. Chiapas, the southernmost part of Mexico and on the border with Guatemala, is the start of the Banana Zone. Unlike the rest of Mexico it is not brown, arid and dusty. Rather, it is lush green and tropical, humid at the lower elevations and orientated more to the Mayan heartlands of central America than the rest of the Aztec Mexico to the north.

Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama are also all definitely in the Banana Zone. Green, hot, humid, jungly. And so is Colombia and – to a lesser extent – Ecuador. But crossing the border into Peru by the Panamerican Highway marks a significant change not just in the menu but in the landscape and climate.

Very quickly, Ecuador’s verdant hills are behind you. The landscape flattens out and the roads straighten. The green vegetation disappears pretty dramatically and within a few miles you are crossing the Sechura Desert where the landscape is more akin to Oaxaca or Zacatecas or Chihuahua in Mexico than any of the many countries in between.

And so this is why the disappearance of the banana is significant, for me at least. I seem to have emerged from one large and important part of this journey and gone into another, final, part. From here to Chile and over the Andes into north western Argentina it’s going to be types of desert all the way. And although there are still a lot of miles between here and Buenos Aires I cannot help feeling I’ve entered the last leg of this trip.

But it’s still a hell of a journey. Piura and Chiclayo, the two most significant towns in northern Peru, are colourful and lively oases. By contrast, between them is the Sechura Desert, as lonely a stretch of  road as you are likely to come across. They also both have attractive colonial centres and some of the worst driving I’ve yet been the victim of. After the sanity of Ecuador, it’s like trying to ride a bike through the dodgems at the fairground.

The weapon of choice for the Peruvian cab driver is the Daewoo Tico, a small metal box painted bright yellow. I don’t know whether they come ready supplied with dents from the manufacturer but I didn’t see a single one that did not have all its panels knocked out of shape by a driving style that does not recognise lanes, lights, junctions or rights of way. As a bike rider you feel especially vulnerable. It’s a relief to make it to any hotel in one piece.

Jewel in the crown of these northern colonial oases is supposedly Trujillo but I could not get out of their fast enough. Despite its well maintained main square – always called the Plaza de Armas in Peru – and its collection of cobbled streets and brightly-painted houses I always think Trujillo has a slightly manacing, unfriendly air. And it’s not just the cab drivers, although I did have to add another dent with my motorcycle boots to one particularly irritating taxi monkey who thought it was acceptable just to drive me off the road.

The real problem with Trujillo is that it feels like a rip off. The hotels are overpriced and undergood. You always have to check your change (in one place, they tried to give me Colombian colones) and you’re never quite sure if what they are telling you is correct.

But there’s one good reason to praise Trujillo: the weather. South of here is one of the most unpleasant meterological phenomenons (try saying that after a couple of beers), the garua. This is a blanket of low cloud and fog that obscures the sky for eight months of the year and keeps temperatures unpleasantly low, and makes driving through it hazardous.

Not only do you have the depressing daily sight of grey skies – I had enough of that in London – but its much chillier than you have any right to expect from a desert. It makes the journey south from Trujillo for 1,000 kilometres an unpleasant grind. Here the Panamericana follows the coast, sometimes in sight of the Pacific, sometimes not, through what is rightly known as the coastal desert.

It’s a lonely, windblasted place of dunes, rock and rubbish. Not only are plastic bags blown freely around in the wind but for three metres either side of the road, virtually along its entire length, is a collection of plastic bottles, crisp packets and used nappies jettisoned from many of the passing buses by passengers too lazy to bother looking after their own country. If the grey, freezing mist were not bad enough, the sight of all this idly-tossed crap is a depressing spectacle.

Astoundingly, many people choose this stretch of road to call home. Scattered along its length are squat dwellings, usually what looks like floor matting converted into walls and held together with black plastic sheeting and hope. There is no running water. There is no electricity. People in these shacks subsist by providing all the services you’d expect to the transient population of bus passengers and truck drivers from food to all other human needs. Outside one, through the mist, stood a woman of a certain age, overdressed for the time of day and underdressed for the weather. The service she was providing was obvious, but weird in the middle of a desert.

Halfway through the grey soup is Lima, capital of the nation and scene – according to the local paper – of 64 per cent of the country’s car accidents last year. I could believe it. Where other towns have poor drivers, Lima also has poor drivers, but a greater volume of them. It was not a place I was looking forward to but surprised myself by staying in the middle class enclave of Miraflores, a pleasantly upmarket part of the city with not one but two – heaven’s be praised – branches of Starbucks.

They don’t do Starbucks in the Banana Zone but here the familiar green, white and black logo was a guarantee that whatever else might hapen to me in Lima, at least I’d be able to wash it down with decent coffee. On one afternoon the sun finally broke through the garua so it was possible to sit watching the Pacific crash on the shore, sipping a cafe del dia. Almost civilised.

Thankfully, two hundred kilometres south of Lima the sun finally wins the battle and the garua is left behind. It’s still the same coastal desert – with still the same piles of roadside rubbish – but somehow the bright blue sky and the warming sun meant it was all a bit easier to live with.

In this desert is one of the nicest oasis towns I’ve been to. Huacachina looks more like the middle east than middle Peru. Basically a collection of hotels and restaurants overlooking a small lake, it’s surrounded by huge dunes – one of them in nearby Ica, at more than 2,000 metres the largest in the world – which it is possible to climb up and sandboard down, if you’ve got the energy. After six months of sitting on my backside on a bike I did not have the energy.

And finally Arequipa, which rivals Cusco for the title most complete colonial town in Peru. It’s certainly got better weather than Cusco – 365 days of sunshine – and a more stunning setting, with snow-capped mountains and a volcano visible from the Plaza de Armas. Having been to both I reckon Cusco has the edge in the colonial competition but in the bright morning sunshine and with nothing on the agenda more dramatic than a bit of wandering, some photographing, and lunch it’s a pretty good place to wile away a day or two.

I’m not expecting fried bananas. That’s all behind me now. In front is more desert, then Chile, last country on my journey south before I take a sharp left and head over the Andes to Argentina, assuming the roads are not blocked by snow. Not quite journey’s end, then.