1/6/06
ARICA, CHILE

After Santiago, I meant to finish off Chile with a few marathon bus rides. Events conspired against me: a bacteria-laden churrasco sandwich in Valparaíso, overbooked holiday buses out of La Serena, New Year´s malaise, a nice beach.

Valparaíso is described as Chile´s cultural capital. Cobblestone alleys and stairs climb between brightly colored houses, and hundred-year-old elevators groan up rails on the steepest hillsides. While walking around looking at murals-- which are everywhere-- a British guy and I followed the sound of drumming up to huge, crumbling prison walls. Reclaimed by an artists collective, the ex-prison is now multicolored and half-full of sculpture and paintings hung on chains. Slack-jawed we entered a booming, three-tiered cell block where a drum corps was pounding away. The cells held easels and paintings-in-progress and jugs of thinner. Outside, people were prepping the exercise yard for a music festival. Chilean death metal and ska thundered out of there for the next two days, apparently not bothering the old ladies with baskets. Valparaíso was an easy town to like.

North from there, La Serena has 17th-century stone churches, good chicken, and not enough buses, as mentioned above. Businesses were shuttered early and I had to piece together a meal from knick-knack stalls: ice cream, stale empanadas, gross corn pie.

The next morning I squeezed onto a minibus that clattered into the desert. My seatmate was a cane-shaped old man who said he´d lived there his whole life, aiming a finger at a line of brown hills. He gave an emphatic nod and added, ¨Muy tranquilo.¨

In Ovalle the rural buses sit in a dirt lot and cook in the sun. People sit around for hours waiting for them to go. I tried hitching, after asking a laborer if I was on the right road. In the bed of a pickup and burning wind I reached El Valle Del Encanto. Carved into its rocks amid cacti and lizards are 1,500-year-old petroglyphs. The heat takes the moisture right out of you, and you start blinking your eyes and seeing glyphs in every pitted surface. A park worker refilled my water bottle by submerging it in the drum near his shed. I considered asking, "Es potable?" but was chugging away before I could bother. You have to pick your infirmities.

I took an overnight bus to Antofagasto and reeled onto a bus to Iquique. Iquique is a beach city built from nitrate mining and under a wall of desert mountains. It has palm trees and ice cream, but the surf pushes around thousands of big jellyfish. When a wave curls, you see them shooting up by the dozens. They bump blobbishly into your legs, trailing tentacles as they sliiide around. I gave it thirty seconds and exited the water in a trot. No swim in Iquique.

One last leg to the top of Chile. The Atacama Desert is drier than the Sahara, and the view from the bus was bleached and desolate. A few of the hills had geoglyphs-- like petroglyphs on a gigantic scale, made by lining up stones or by digging through a dark crust to show brighter sand underneath. The bus attendant-- the guy scampering up and down the aisle proffering cookies-- took every spare moment to ask me if the US has deserts, if we have ¨tornados¨ like that one (pointing to a whirl of dust), if I like the local cola (yellow, super sweet), if I knew how cheap girls were in Peru (two, three dollars, he said after looking around, and the older guys in front of me had by this point slung arms over their seatbacks and were confirming with nervous grins). I was glad to get to Arica.

Arica had few jellyfish, good bodysurfing, and a mellow hostel run by a New Zealand-Chilean couple. On the rooftop I got to talking with an Aussie who, it turned out, has spent the last several years hunting ruins in the Peruvian highlands. He kept his notes on his person the way other travelers keep their passports. He extracted photos of undocumented Inca roads, Wari ruins where there aren´t supposed to be any, the skin of a cattle-killing brown bear that isn´t supposed to live there, the near-inaccessible mountains he´s exploring. He stays on top of the literature, knows both academics and looters, and believes that there are tens of thousands more sites out there. He was a trove. I amended my Lonely Planet map with names and arrows: Caral-Supe, Toro Muerto, Sechín. Six months is too short a trip.

One morning I pedaled a rented bike out of town to the geoglyphs in the valleys. Most were visible from the roads, but seeing some farther off I pushed the bike up old tire tracks in the sand. After half an hour there was moonscape in all directions. I kept trudging towards the hill with the three human figures, and I came to a dune topped with spoked, concentric circles of rocks. In the US it´d be called a medicine wheel, but here I had no idea. I asked the Aussie and the Kiwi back in town, showing them the pictures. They were stumped, and the Aussie said he´d follow my tracks. Sites just poke out of the sand here. The aridity preserves bone, wood, basketry, grains, cotton. The oldest mummies in the world are from right outside Arica; they predate Egypt´s by two thousand years.

Later I realized that I drank 3 1/2 liters of water on that bike. The sun here will kill you.