2008 August 15 « a+b ramblings

Dear family + friends,

I am writing what will likely be my final post from the southern hemisphere, on the eve before I fly from one Pacific city to another….laying over, inevitably, in the Atlantic town of Miami. I am at once excited to return to my adopted Pacific home of San Francisco and more than a little sad to bring this hemispheric journey with my beloved boy B to a close. It is with those conflicted feelings that I thus write now.

How have I chosen to spend my final three nights of our rather epic travels together? You might imagine that I spent them in a wild rush to see as much of Chile as humanly possible. You might imagine, as I did on our long bus ride from the Bolivian Altiplano to Iquique, that we would climb coastal mountains, parasail along the Pacific coast, and visit the haunted ghost towns of the 19th-century Chilean nitrate boom….

I must confess that I did none of these things. Rather, I spent three days in Chile doing almost nothing at all!

On Wednesday, as a rare fog descended over the Iquique bay, Barron and I curled up in our lovely hotel room looking over the sea and watched what can only be described as B-movies from the 1980s (think Richard Greco in If Looks Could Kill). Late in the afternoon, we emerged from this cinematic haze to, as Barron would say, ¨pimp out the blog.¨After this hard-earned and utterly wonderful time reflecting on our experience of Bolivia, we walked approximately 50 meters to the hotel’s seaside restaurant, where we shared a phenomenal meal of Chilean paella and fresh fish.

On Thursday, having largely recovered from the aching joints, reptilian skin, and pounding headaches that our extreme loss of altitude between Bolivia and Chile had produced, we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast in the hotel. (I should note that our hotel has what must be the most fabulous free brunch in the known world, which comes complete with a stunning view over the Pacific ocean and the seals that play in the Iquique bay.) Sometime later, we went for a short run on the beach and then walked aimlessly in the historic center of Iquique….which sports a rather bizarre amalgamation of Wild West architecture, constructed during the 19th-century nitrate boom, and bad midcentury high rises. The gorgeous coastline here is drawn into relief by this terrificaly uninspired city planning!

After a jacuzzi, a short swim, and a bit of yoga in the room, we wiled away some more hours producing the first annual Independent movie festival of, you guessed it, our blog! This proved to be time delightfully spent. (It is hard to express how meaningful the blog has been to us, in fact. The writing and images from this journey together have been, it seems, a crucial element of the journey itself….)

Today, we had big plans….we were going to swim in the ocean and then rent a car and travel to the abandoned saltpeter (or salitre) mining towns of Humberstone and Santa Laura. The towns fascinate both of us. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I write about the Chilean nitrate boom that in many ways enabled industrial agriculture in the United States until the invention of synthetic fertilizer in the 1920s led to its demise. And for Barron, these towns are ghostly analogues of the mining industries that he has photographed in California. For me however, a visit to those ghost towns will have to wait until another trip. When I woke this morning, I looked sheepishly at Barron and asked what he would think if we spent the day reading and swimming and sunning ourselves while looking out over the ocean. Knowing that he will have 5 days to explore and photograph those deserted desert mining towns after my departure, Barron was totally game for this proposed day of laziness! So, today, once again, we stayed close to the ocean and spent our time in Chile together doing very very little.

And, after travelling thousands and thousands of miles from the east coast of Brazil to the west coast of Chile….from the southern metropolis of Buenos Aires to the northern expanse of the Bolivian altiplano…I cannot begin to express how or why four days of laziness on a Chilean beach were in fact the perfect afterword to these seven weeks of travel. In some sense, this trip reached its unbeatable highpoint (and poetic close) on the spectacularly windy shores of Laguna Verde in southwest Bolivia. What I can say then is that these four days in Chile have been a perfect epilogue to this first of journeys to South America with my faithful companion and co-author, B.

And so, with that, I bid farewell to South America….for now at least.

p.s. thanks to this time of laziness, there are many, many new photos for you to peruse below and on the previous archived pages of posts!

Degrimed, at Dinner in Iquique

Thankful NOT to Be Eating More Meat: (Clockwise from Top Left): Shellfish Paella; Grilled Octopus; Grilled Fish in Passionfruit Butter Sauce; Shellfish Stew (All from El Sombrero in Iquique)