Chilean Travel Blog - Atacama Desert (9 Jan 2018)

Had it not been for WOM’s CEO, or Tio Wom as he is affectionately known in Santiago, we would probably have missed a visit to the Atacama, the ‘desert’ in the north of Chile between 6,000m high volcanoes and the coastal strip that is more (in-)famous for mining copper and sodium nitrate or Chilean saltpeter (an ingredient for fertilizer and gun powder).

Our mental map for what is known as a ‘desert’ is probably highly defective and skewed by images of the Sahara – but again we were not prepared for the richness of sights and variability of landscapes that the Atacama had to offer.

Geologically interesting and telling, the desert lies between two mountain ranges, the Cordillera Domeyko and the Cordillero de los Andes, both created when the Pacific tectonic plate (Nascar) started to dip below the South American tectonic plate and hieved up thereto ocean floors to the surface, effectively trapping a large body of water between the two mountain ranges (all of this some 20-90 million years ago).  As a result, Chile has to this day large amounts of seismic and volcanic activity (incl. an 8.8 Richter scale earthquake in 2010 and the 8.2 Richter scale earthquake in 1906 that destroyed Valparaiso).  That body of water has evaporated, and the valleys have accumulated mineral riches and effluent from the mountains over the years, making northern Chile one of the world’s richest mining areas. 

‘Salpeter’ was discovered here in the early 19th century (by a German immigrant), and was partially to blame for the Pacific War between Peru/Bolivia on the one hand and Chile on the other hand (supported by Britain), won by the latter in 1883, which – as the spoils of war – annexed these lands from Bolivia, laying the ground for the saltpeter-and-subsequently-copper-based export wealth of modern Chile; British interests took 70% of the monopoly profits initially.  (Ironically, it was another German, Fritz Haber, the winner of the 1918 Chemistry Nobel Prize for inventing a method to create a synthetic substitute for saltpeter, who thus disrupted another Chilean success story.  Production dropped from 2.5m tons p.a. at USD 45/ton and employing 60,000 Chileans in 1925 to just 0.8m tons p.a. at USD 19/ton, employing a mere 14,000 Chileans by 1934.)

Copper took over from salpeter as the leading export commodity of Chile, produced since Inca times but largely expanded and industrialised in the early 20th century, when, inter alia, the Guggenheim brothers of the US became large investors in 1911 in Chile’s (since nationalized) largest copper mine, the Chuquicamata located right next to Calama/the Atacama.  It is so toxic that workers are not to be in employment there for more than 7 years, and all of the staff accommodation has been moved 20km to nearby Calama.  Nowadays, the deep waters below the salt flats (‘salar’) of the Atacama, which run to 1.5km of depth near San Pedro de Atacama, are mined principally for lithium, a key battery ingredient, with 40% of the word’s reserves estimated to reside there.  Environmental pollution and violation of indigenous peoples’ rights are topics thrown up that the casual tourist only perceives tangentially.

What takes your breath away, leaves you gasping for adequate words of description, and lets you fuss over the impossibility to adequately capture the depths and contrasts and beauty and sheer scale of the visual impressions by photographic means, are the otherworldly effects of this geological history on the landscape.  Just a few highlights from our too short stay to whet your appetite:

·       Salt, rock and dune formations in the Valle de la Luna (valley of the moon), which reminds you of Armstrong’s words:  ‘A small step for me, but a huge step for mankind.’  Unfathomable beauty.

·       Flamingos in the salt flat reserve of the Salar de Atacama.  The Chilean type dances to stir up the ground and the small shrimps that it feeds on, and is thus said to be dancing salsa … fighting for living space among both ever more tourists and the smartfone/e-car driven demand for lithium.

·       Lagoons of immense tranquility and beauty at 4,200 metres altitude beneath the Miscanti and Miniques volcanoes, only 50km away from the Argentinian border, with protected llama-family relatives, the vicunas, roaming its shores.

·       Geysers in the shadow of the Tatio volcano (= the old man that weeps), a mere stone throw away from the Bolivian border.  Arriving when it is still pitch dark and at several degrees below zero, to seeing the sun rise over the bubbling and spouting hot geysers, to dipping in the natural ponds amid dozens of Brazilians, Argentinians, Chileans, Europeans, Japanese and Americans.  Otherwordly.

To experience the geysers at their maximum level of activity, just before sunrise, one needs to get up at 4am and drive the two hours up to 4,300m of altitude. The drivers give the impression of either having done an all-nighter with pretty tourists in the salsoteca, chewing too many coca leaves, or having impersonated the seismic and magmatic energy of the geysers.  Like in Mad Max 4 with Charlize Theron leading the pack, we race across the altiplano in pitch black conditions at breakneck speed, being overtaken on the left and the right. 

Christian Morgenstern's poem comes to mind, which in my time all German school kids had to learn by heart (an oxymoron-filled poem that really does not translate well but includes the image of a car full of odd people racing across a dark moonlit surface):

Dunkel war’s, der Mond schien helle,
schneebedeckt die grüne Flur,
als ein Wagen blitzesschnelle,
langsam um die Ecke fuhr.

Drinnen saßen stehend Leute,
schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft,
als ein totgeschoss’ner Hase
auf der Sandbank Schlittschuh lief.

Chileans are rightly proud of their land, and of its beauty and variety.  As the secret is out and global tourism swoons, they are also conscious of the need to manage, to preserve and to restrict. 

PS:

[Ignacy Domeyko was a Polish immigrant to Chile.  A friend of Polish romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz at Vilnius University, he fled Russian-occupied eastern Poland after the unsuccessful Polish 1830 uprising against Russian rule, and via studies in Paris arrived in Chile, where he became a key contributor to geology and a range of other disciplines, serving inter alia 16 years as rector of Chile’s preeminent Universidad de Chile.]

[Fritz Haber was as tragic a man as his double-edged invention, which could be put to both peaceful use – fertilizer – and to martial use – gunpowder.  An agnostic Jew, convinced German patriot and lifelong friend of Albert Einstein, he welcomed WWI in 1914 and led the German chemical warfare division, competing against a French Nobel-Prize winner on the other side.  He was the architect and key culprit of the 1915 use of chlorine gas in the Second Battle of Ypres (April/May 1915) with 67,000 casualties; his first wife, who had converted to Christianity before wedding him, and was reportedly a pacifist evidently not in agreement with his unethical application of science to warfare, used his army pistol to commit suicide after an argument in 1915.  His department at Berlin University developed Zyklon B in the 1920s; and several of his family perished in the Nazi concentration camps.  He was ostracized by the Nazis in 1933 and fled Germany, dying on his way to Israel in 1934.  Annual production of synthetic nitrates today is said to amount to some 100 million tons or 40x the 1925 Chilean export levels, greatly aiding global agricultural yields and mitigating against famines.  Yet his reputation will be forever tarnished by the unreflective dual use of his path-breaking invention.]