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?
