An Open Letter to the People of South America

Alas, my time among you has come to an end.

You Brazilians, you with your eternally green hills and all-night parties and spontaneous drumming in the streets and biblical downpours of rain and vast sugar cane fields and coconut trees aplenty and beautiful, smiling faces and overfished seas and grimy children and poor schools and unassailable helpfulness and motorcycle taxis and lobster feasts;

You Argentines, you with your decaying, opulent capital city and big passions and sparkling long-distance buses and worship of the cow and psychotic driving habits and fertile soil and dusty, high-desert villages and opulent feasts and goat farms and dry riverbeds for hiking and economic woes and lack of road signs and unswerving hospitality and love of a good yarn;

You Bolivians, you with your political clashes and marvelous, wind-scoured lunar landscapes and road blockades and wariness of outsiders and love of mayonaise and tectonic upheavals and interminable jeep rides and funny hats and freezing nights and undiscovered archaeolgical sites and lakes red and green and white;

You Chileans, you with your emotional austerity and deep, deep mines and eternal deserts and love of breakfast and jagged coastline and worship of 80s pop music and unfathomable mineral wealth and long, unpopulated stretches of highway and delicious seafood feasts;

I bid you all, each and every one of you, a fond farewell.

Iquique Redux

I made the drive from Tocopilla to Iquique in half the time the gas station attendant said it would take me, and I wasn´t even speeding that excessively. I don´t know…how many miles per hour is 247 kilometers per hour. I can never do the conversions in my head. I think it´s only like 62.

Despite how fast I was driving, until the sun set I could clearly make out the spectacular coastal landscape north of Tocopilla. Imagine the mountains of death valley plunging into the Pacific Ocean. Yeah, it´s that dramatic (see pictures below). A small part of me now wishes I´d decided to spend my afternoon yesterday reading on a beach instead of on that hill in the desert. No matter. It´s all water under the bridge now, and it would´ve been more labor intensive — nay, downright impossible — to build my geoglyph out of piles of sand.

As you can tell from the many fine images that now adorn my posts from the heart of the Atacama, I´m back at the Terrado Suites and very much looking forward to not having things drip from the ceiling onto my head and not having to beat the stale cigarette stench from my clothes every morning. Small luxuries.

I´m hitting the sack but will write more in the morning.

B

Looking Back on the Coastal Road North of Tocopilla

Looking Up at the Coastal Desert Mountains

Still Looking Up at the Coastal Desert Mountains

Inside a Mountain of Copper

I´m writing from Maria Elena, one of the last two working nitrate mines in Chile. The other, Pedro de Valdivia, is about 10km from here, southward or thereabouts. They are the only two salitres to have survived the mid-century nitrate bust that for a time devastated the Chilean economy (for more info, read my post below, ¨Marks Upon the Land¨).

I came to Maria Elena for mixed reasons. One, if possible, to secure permission to photograph the mine and plant, thereby augmenting my ongoing project on mining. Two, to witness a working nitrate mine as a counterpoint to the nitrate ghost towns of Humberstone and Santa Laura. Three, to rouse myself out of the Tocopilla-induced stupor that was engulfing my consciousness. I haven´t written much on the blog about photography — let alone the day-to-day administrative aspects of getting from place to place, gaining access/acceptance/trust, keeping your gear in good working order, lugging around 10 pounds of film, etc. — but it requires mountains of effort and drive, not to mention diplomacy, humor, patience and sometimes even money. What I felt creeping inside my veins in Tocopilla was sheer inertia, perhaps exacerbated by the fact that I´m down to my last couple of days of the trip (yes, I´m coming home a week early) and a part of me WANTS to believe that I should be winding down, preparing mentally for the long journey home on Thursday. But, as we now know, rust never sleeps. I still have film. I still have daylight. Just get off your ass and DO it, chico.

In terms of how my aforementioned motivations for driving to Maria Elena were rewarded…

One: I made it pretty far through the gauntlet before my aspirations to shoot the mine at Maria Elena were crushed. After being redirected to five different offices at the mine over a span of 90 minutes and getting laughed at by guards who found the idea that I would want to photograph the mine preposterous, I finally got the name of the woman who makes the sole decisions about who is granted access to see (and/or photograph) the mine and who is not. (For personal reference later, her name is Macarena Yugovic.) Smelling victory, I confidently mounted the steps to her office, flung open the door and smiled at her shriveled, grey-haired secretary. ¨How can I help you, sir?¨ Sweet…I´m IN. ¨Well, you see, my dear madaam, I´m what you call a photographer. After being routed for an hour and a half through the mindless bureacracy of your fine organization, I finally encountered a young, butch woman in a hard hat who indicated that, in order to arrange a tour of the mine, I need to speak with a certain godlike personage who is hailed far and wide by the name of Macarena Yugovic. Could you please direct me to her office/heavenly throne?¨ ¨Well, sir,  you should know that getting access to photograph the mine is very difficult but it can be arranged.¨ Sweet…I´m SO in. ¨However, I´m sorry to tell you that Macarena is on vacation for three weeks.¨ CURSES!!! I´m so OUT. ¨Is there another career bureaucrat who can help me arrange a visit in the morning?¨ ¨No, I´m afraid not.¨ And so I left my trial a broken man, having been bested by a 78-year-old Chilean woman.

Two: Despite my disappointment about not being able to photograph the mine, I´m glad I made the drive. While Humberstone and Santa Laura are basically in ruins and Maria Elena is not, you can see a common genetic thread running through the residential areas of all three mining communities. The same wild west, turn-of-the-century buildings, the same town plans with a central square, church, etc., the same dusty desolation. The main difference is that the nitrate mine and plant here are huge. In comparison, they make the others I saw at the ghost towns look like they were made from playdough and tinker toys. While the town hasn´t changed much since the nitrate bust, the scale and technology of the mining operations most certainly have. It is a large scale, modern industrial enterprise. The kind of thing that makes you remember how small you really are…just a speck of dust next to the great machines we are capable of building.

Three: After today´s adventure, I´m finally feeling Tocopilla-stupor-free. Hold it. Having heard only the bureaucratic part of my story above, you might be tempted to question my liberal use of the word ¨adventure.¨ And I wouldn´t blame you. But I have a trick up my sleeve, faithful readers, that may make some of you gasp in horror, may make others of you claps your hands in suspense, may make still others of you cover your eyes in shock and awe (or if you are my dear mother, probably all three). The trick: I explored a copper tunnel mine today. Imagine a tube three feet wide and four to five feet tall bored (or rather, blasted) into the side of mountain, ascending steeply and getting stuffier, darker, dustier and more claustrophobic with every crumbling, uneven step.

As I was driving the winding pass up from Tocopilla to the desert, I spotted some men perched on a rock ledge above the highway and figured I´d give it a shot. So I climbed up to where they stood and gave them my usual line and they were more than happy to accommodate my request to photograph the men working. And then the engineer asked if I wanted to check out the mine proper and I was like, uh, sure. So I followed the men up a ladder and into the mine. I can´t imagine we went more than a couple hundred feet in but I felt like we were in the middle of the damned mountain. Scary at the time, but in retrospect it was the perfect close to my time in the desert, to all of this talk about mining and blasting and marking the land. To be under the earth in a dark tube seeing what all the fuss is about.

And now, I depart Maria Elena for Iquique, or as far as I can get before sleep overtakes me and I dream of being a giant gopher.

Maria Elena

Top Row: Small Copper Mines in the Mountain Pass above Tocopilla; Bottom Left: Memorial to Lost Miners; Bottom Right: Dust from a Dynamite Blast

Rumblings in the Underworld

Having grown weary of the environs of my now-beloved Tocopilla, despite its offering up some sumptuously bleak industrial landscapes for my photographic brain to parse, I drove east back into the desert this afternoon. 30km of winding road cut through the precipitous cliffs and mountains that dumps you out onto the desert floor a couple of thousand feet above the sea.

Actually, it wasn´t so much weariness that drove me on as the early stages of what I´m sure is ¨desert syndrome,¨ a fictional malady coined by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman in his fine memoir about Atacama called Desert Memories. His theory is that the desert induces a kind of mania, a restlessness, a feeling of isolation that enters through the pores and melts into the nervous system. I´ve logged plenty of desert hours myself, in Mojave, across the southwest, Death Valley, etc. But this is different. Something hums under the surface: coexistent anxieties both of staying put and of going anywhere. You can see it in people´s faces.

So what was I seeking on this excursion? Nothing really. Something, I guess. A spot. A landmark. A logical point to get out, stretch and turn around. You see, I passed this entire landscape last night at 10:00 and saw nothing of it. Only the road materializing in my high beams and at one point the ghostly depot of trains that carry processed minerals and ores from the many mines in the area down to the port where they sail to God knows where. So I drove, and I drove, and after 50km of nothing, only power poles and dirt and rocks, I turned around.

30km back toward Tocopilla and, how could I have missed it the first time around, an actual hill. A hill in the desert. Just sitting there, wating to be climbed. I grabbed my book (Robert Fagles´ translation of The Odyssey), a blanket Allison pilfered from our flight from the states, and a bottle of water and headed out.

It was a short climb, about 20 minutes to the top where I plunked myself down in the dirt, cracked my bottle of water and read the entirety of Book 11: The Kingdom of the Dead. It was as Ulysses is conversing with Achilles´ ghost in the underworld that I felt something in my bones. I thought maybe it was my heart skipping a beat, or my imagination, but there it was, persisting, a rumbling coming up through the ground that would shake the acorns from an oak tree. Holy shit, I thought that the earth was going to open up right beneath me and the ghosts of all my old heroes pour forth and start hounding me for a drink of whiskey. And then it all passed. And then it dawned on me that what I had felt was the dynamite blast from a mine many, many miles away. What I had felt in my bones was the seismic concussion of men blowing ungodly tons of rock out of the earth. And there you have it.

And with my last post from this morning still bouncing around in my head, I descended the hill and decided to symbolically reenact those two acts of marking: mining and the creation of geoglyphs. So I began by hunting specimens of a certain volcanic rock that is quite beautiful…the perfect, unbroken ones look like watermelon seeds, almonds and robin`s eggs. Almost perfect geometrical elipses. So I prospected and mined about 20 fine samples and tucked them away in a sack to bring home. And then I made a geoglyph, right there in the desert. The next time someone flies a chopper over that spot, they´ll see a big, fat ¨A+B¨ made of rocks marking the land at the base of my hill. Who knows, maybe it´ll still be there in 1,000 years.

Now it´s 10:00 and I have to get a pizza. More soon…

B

P.S. A small celebration is in order. My last post, ¨Marks Upon the Land,¨ was our 50th blog post since we first posted at the end of June with our very rough trip itinerary (which basically got thrown out the window halfway through). 50 is a good, round number, just ask Hawai´i. Four out of five of them agree that it equals one half of one hundred.

My Private Reading Hill with Red Blanket/A+B Geoglyph

Fabulous Tocopilla

The Charming Rooms I Stayed In

Marks Upon the Land

In its blank, wasted expanse, the desert is a canvas. Under its unflinching sun, the marks we leave have nowhere to hide…

Yesterday I departed the isolated town of Mamina, high in the mountains 70km east of the panamerican highway, and descended upon Humberstone and Santa Laura, the two most intact nitrate ghost towns in El Norte Grande, the name by which Chilenos hail the vast swath of nearly rainless desert that begins a couple hundred kilometers north of Santiago and ends at the Peruvian border.

And so my day began bearing witness to the mining fields — the long, undulating, dynamited trenches cut through the crust of the earth — where from the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century Chile cast its economic lot. The nitrate boom built towns, cities, ports and roads and spawned hordes of industrial millionaires. (Think the gold rush or the railroads in California.) It catapulted Chile ahead of other South American countries in its development and essentially paved its way into the modern era.

Until, that is, a German chemist by the name of Carl Bosch perfected in 1913 the process for producing synthetic nitrate on a large industrial scale, thus crushing the Chilean nitrate industry and Chile`s economy along with it. (All because Chile`s vast fields of caliche, the rock from which nitrate is extracted, belonged more or less entirely to the British. The invention of synthetic nitrate was in essence an act of desperation.)

What`s the big deal with nitrate? Well, it happens to serve two very important functions. One, it is an excellent fertilizer for crops. Two, it is a critical component of explosives. (Again, as Allison would point out, we see that the endeavors of agriculture and war are forever intertwined.)

When the demand for Chilean nitrate disappeared, so did the mining towns and infrastructure that supported the industry. By the 1950s, all but two of the nitrate towns, called ¨salitreras,¨ were abandoned, the mining companies evicting the worker-residents and their familes, many of whom resettled in Tocopilla, Iquique and Antofagasta or other scattered desert settlements.

What remains is a devastated landscape stretching hundreds of miles along the interior of the desert and the shells of Humberstone and Santa Laura, which are now considered patrimonies of humanity and are protected by the Chilean government. All the other towns were scrapped and looted decades ago, and the possessions of the residents of those towns still show up in flea markets throughout the north (Allison and I witnessed this phenomenon with our own eyes in Iquique).

The experience of visiting those ghost towns was haunting. Humberstone specifically got under my skin. Mind you, everything is in a severe state of disrepair, but I spent hours wandering through the town, visiting the theater and the church, and photographing huge lathes and other machines in the wood and machine shops. And then there are the enormous steam-powered turbines in the ¨casa de fuerza,¨ the power house, the heart of this once-great industrial beast. There they sit in sad repose, collecting dust in the dark and crude spanish-language graffiti. ¨Victor chupa el culo.¨ Nice to see that American youth aren´t the only ones with their heads up their asses and no respect for their history. But then again, considering the environmental misery wrought by the nitrate mines, I guess it´s only just that their ghosts suffer such small humiliationsat the hands of some anonymous malcontent.

I left Humberstone and Santa Laura in the late afternoon with another kind of human mark on my mind: geoglyphs. ¨El Gigante de Atacama,¨ The Giant of Atacama, is the largest prehistoric antrhopomorphic figure in the world. There in the desert he sits, drawn by indigenous tribes in sinuous lines of rock on the side of a volcanic hill over 1,000 years ago. The great desert god, staring up at the sky and across the horizon. Wanting to see for just a moment what a god sees, I hiked to the top of the hill and stood above his head and saw the downward curve of the hill and then the flat, sandy plain of the Atacama stretching to the mountain range to the west that, once crossed, plummets to the Pacific Ocean. While there were more unwelcome marks all around me and El Gigante — 4×4 paths cut over the hillside, clearly threatening the integriy of the site – I was utterly alone in that place and could not hear the drone of a single tire on the highway several miles away.

Ah, the highway. That damned, god-forsaken, townless, gas stationless, moonlight-drenched desert highway. But for that story, you`ll have to read my post from last night entitled ¨Rust Never Sleeps.¨ (Which, by the way, was cut short because as I was typing, the old Greek owner of the hotel (called ¨Hotel Atenas¨ — how original) returned and inexplicably started beating the kind hotel manager with a billy club in the lobby, shouting ¨maricon¨ at him and chasing him into the street, never to returm. Needless to say I wrapped up my post posthaste and made a bee-line for my room.)

So here I sit, in a computer cubicle that unnervingly resembles a confession booth, still in Tocopilla, one of the ugliest industrial port towns you might ever have the misfortune to visit save maybe Baku harbor in Azerbaijan, which my good friend Bruce photographed several years ago with his usual postapocalyptic panache. If my ¨plan¨ comes together, I`ll spend today and tomorrow in Tocopilla and the desert to the east using up what little film remains and, if the photo gods smile upon my endeavors, visiting Chuquicamata, Chile`s famous (and infamous) open pit copper mine. At 2.7 miles long, nearly 2 miles wide and 2,800 feet deep, it is the world´s largest. Marks upon the land, indeed.

Overview of the Industrial Facility at Humberstone

Humberstone

Main Ore Processor at Santa Laura

Santa Laura

Trenches Blasted into the Caliche

El Gigante de Atacama

El Gigante´s View of the Desert

Rust Never Sleeps

It`s been a long , strange and at times tense couple of days since I dropped A off at the airport in Iquique. A more detailed post is forthcoming, but two nights in a row I`ve found myself driving very long, very deserted stretches of desert highway without much of a map and with no absolute sense of my destination.

Tonight I drove all the way from the nitrate ghost towns of Santa Laura and Humberstone to the industrial port town of Tocopilla, about 350km to the south and then due west another 50km. Figuring I had plenty of gas in the tank, I bypassed the station a few miles south of Santa Laura with the idea that I`d gas up somewhere down the road. After 100km and no station, not even a building with a light on in the endless waste of desert, I was annoyed. After 150km, I was nervous. After 200km, my intestines had worked themselves into a very snug sailor`s knot.

I cruised into Quillagua, the only village between where I started my journey and where I had a vague inclination I`d end it, riding on vapors. My ¨tank empty¨ light had been on for at least 30 miles. At least. And what do I find when I get there? Nothing. No service station. No friendly faces. Just a dark village. And just when I`m about to turn around and head back, I see a light on down the street. I inch along, not wanting to get my hopes up. Sure enough it`s a mom `n` pop shop…with the door open…with stuff on the shelves. Actual commercial goods. I hop out of my sputtering car, walk inside and basically beg for gasoline. Turns out that the proprietor has some…that he´s willing to sell me…for twice the amount I`d pay at the pump. F#$k it!!! Who cares!!! It`s GAS-O-LINE. I pull my car around and the old guy comes out with 3 milk jugs full of good `ol fashioned petrol. Now I see why we fight wars for the stuff because without it life is a BITCH, believe you me.

So with that, I climb back inside what I`m now certain is the least fuel efficient Toyota this side of existence and go on my merry way…back into the eternal night of the Chilean desert.

Consider this message proof of divine providence…and remember, when in doubt, get gas when you can, you IDIOT.

Signing off….

B

View from the Mountaintop Above Iquique

The Place in Quillagua Where I Bought Gas

¡To the Batcave!

Gentle Readers,

You haven´t heard from me in days, at least not in words. Since Wednesday I´ve labored, and labored some more, to enhance your multimedia blog experience. As I prepare to log off one final time from my workstation at Terrado Suites and take Allison to the airport — where she will fly from Iquique to Santiago, Santiago to Miami and Miami to San Francisco — I´m filled with awe and wonder at the experience of our grand adventure. Allison has been my constant companion, tour leader, photo assistant, comic relief, ¨desert bootie dance¨ partner, sounding board, life coach and so much more.

Knowing the major changes that will occur in our lives (and life together) when we return back to San Francisco, the moment feels poignant. Terrifying and exciting all at once.

I swear to god I´m not making this up: as I´m writing this, the 60s song ¨If You´re Going to San Francisco¨ just came on the hotel´s cheeseball PA system. Damn. Now I´ve got goosebumps and a single tear running down my cheek. What more can I say for now?

More from the road…

1st Annual Independent Film Festival

We´ve taken further advantage of our hotel´s sweet-ass business center to produce a series of short films that rival any of that swill they show at Sundance. Just click on the images below to launch each film.

Off the Reservation

Off the Reservation 2

Free Range Goats

The Quieter Stuff of Travel

Bat Out of Hell

I Smell the Sulphur and Feel the Wind

Grey Coastal Day + High-Speed Internet = New Photos

That´s right, I took advantage of the aforementioned in our new home in Iquique, Chile to retrospectively insert new photos into old postings. Just scroll down to see some of the things we´ve seen since we experienced the now-infamous power cord debacle in San Juan. Once you get to the bottom of this page, you can click back to the first archive page and find new photos there too!

I´ll keep updating over the next couple of days so that by the time we leave Iquique, you´ll be able to see images that illustrate Allison´s superb posting below about Bolivia.

More to come!

Back from the Dead…Like Lazarus, Baby!

Calama, Chile (08.12.2008 ) — Well, we´ve been to hell and back and lived to tell the tale. Driving seven hundred miles through the endless Bolivian desert, enduring two nights of minus five degrees farenheit (as in thirty-seven below freezing), sleeping in two unheated mud huts, witnessing eighteen thousand-foot volcanic peaks, bathing in one thermal hotspring, and bracing against a constant, howling wind that would strip a penny from a miser.

Consider this brief transmission confirmation that we made it through Bolivia in one piece. Now we´ve gotta run to catch an overnight bus to Iquique. Our full report is forthcoming!