Chile and the Atacama Desert

 

 

 

Well, it's day 7 of our cruise, and I am posting for the first time.  We have been having a fabulous time aboard the Silver Spirit, but it has not been the stuff of blogging.  The biggest news until recently was that we won the first bridge tournament of the cruise and joined a very fun Trivia Team comprising friends from Great Britain, South Africa, Brooklyn/Miami, and San Francisco.  We have enjoyed reconnecting with friends, Jill and Michael, from Bristol, GB.  We had such fun with them on our trip to Australia and New Zealand, and we have picked up just where we left off.  Now to the travelogue. 

Arica, Chile

We were in Arica on Wednesday, February 26.  We  had a great view from our room veranda of the port's official greeter, and of El Morro, the site of the decisive battle between Peru and Chile in the War of the Pacific.

Port Greeter at Arica, Chile

El Morro at Arica, Chile

Atacama Desert

On the afternoon of February 26, we realized a long-held dream:  touring the Atacama Desert. Our conveyance for the journey could not be described as drab.

Our Bus for Atacama Tour

We drove east for several hours of viewing the world's driest dry desert.  The scenery is varied---not much of the flat, sandy land I expected, but lots of hills and mountains, valleys, and pink, red and white nitrate veins in rock walls.. We learned that Chile's main export was once nitrates, particularly saltpeter.  We saw saltpeter--which looked like black rocks--from the bus as we whizzed along on a beautifully paved road.  The Atacama Desert is said to be littered with now dead but once thriving nitrate-producing towns, but we did not see them.  Today, NOAA uses this desert as a test site for its Mars experiments.

We only saw a sliver of the 41,000-square mile desert.  The desert temperatures varied from 30 C (about 86 F) at the start of our trip at 3 p.m. to 19 (about 68 F) at 8:15 p.m. or so when we left the desert.   

Valley of the Moon, Atacama Desert

Atapucha (road markers) near Valley of the Moon, Atacama Desert

Atacama Desert near Cobda

My favorite spot in the desert was where we viewed a series of statues by Chilean artist, Juan Diaz Fleming.  The sculptures are a paean to the Amazon people who created a unique Chilean culture, despite the barriers posed by desert and mountain geography.

Church, Woman, Man

Uterus

Codpa

Midway through our 6-hour exploration, the village of Codpa appeared in a valley below a particularly steep turn in the road.

Cobda

As you can see, Codpa has some green in its landscape because it is located in a fertile (but narrow) valley.  Its 100 or so full-time inhabitants include farmers who grow produce for other towns in the Atacama.  We were treated to local delicacies--pintatani (the very worst red wine either Dave or I ever have tasted, quinoa, and dried guava.  This town, a traditional place of rest for Arica, is being promoted as a tourist destination.  There are petroglyphs from ancient people on nearby rocks, a church built by the Spaniards during colonization, and a one-room museum with the only public bathrooms in town. I will remember Cobda for  the charming mural painted by a member of Chile's voluntary national service corps of young people who have graduated from college in the past year, a beautiful stone wall, and a darling dog who followed us everywhere and never begged for a handout.  

Codpa Building Wall Decorated by National Service Student

Stone Wall in Codpa, Chile

Codpa dog