Dec 24, 2004
There's a reason you've never heard of Copiapo. It's the middle of nowhere. I spent last night in Iquiqui, with a Brazilian rider I met just south of Arica. We talked for hours in Portuguese, which is interesting because I don't speak Portuguese. But I nodded and said "si" a lot, and that seemed to keep him going. I think we talked about motorcycles and I have an invitation to visit him and his family in Brazil for weeks on end or he'll shoot me on sight if he sees me there. I'm pretty sure it's one or the other.
After I went to sleep, he hit the bars, and returned about when it was time for me to get up. I rode to Copiapo, and found a hotel with a room that is actually smaller than the one I spent the night in once when certain public officials alleged I had a little too much to drink. And it's expensive. Chile costs at least as much as the US for basic things, and crappy hotel rooms are actually a bit more. I guess infrastructure has it's price. You can eat the lettuce, which is my new way of evaluating the level of development in a country. There's "Can eat the lettuce," as in Chile, "Can eat the lettuce at TGI Fridays only," which is Peru and Ecuador, and "call the CDC to find out if there's a cure for what you've got after eating the lettuce," which is pretty much Central America.
One of the interesting things about talking to travelers is finding out what unique and bizarre illnesses they've picked up over the years. I learned from one traveler that you can get cholera from drinking the water in a Sudanese refugee camp. So that's not where you'll find me next winter.
Iquiqui was neat, after all the sand, which basically continues from Peru to Chile, the road winds up a mountain, then over it, and there, on a peninsula is Iquiqui, a very modern resort town, with high rises and lots of good bars and restaurants and trees and foliage, like Oz or Xanadu, an oasis of civilization in the middle of nowhere, and I was reminded of the Peruvian seaside towns, of tumbledown and windblown adobe, and at times it is hard to believe that just because someone fought over a line on a map some years past, there is such a difference in how the people live and exist.
Peru to Chile is almost as dramatic a change as Mexico to the USA. On the one side the police officer asks for a donation for the official forms you have to fill out to escape, then you have to go to three different windows in three different buildings, on the other side there is order, a list of what you need to do to enter, and helpful officials who speak with pride about their country.
There's a reason you've never heard of Copiapo. It's the middle of nowhere. I spent last night in Iquiqui, with a Brazilian rider I met just south of Arica. We talked for hours in Portuguese, which is interesting because I don't speak Portuguese. But I nodded and said "si" a lot, and that seemed to keep him going. I think we talked about motorcycles and I have an invitation to visit him and his family in Brazil for weeks on end or he'll shoot me on sight if he sees me there. I'm pretty sure it's one or the other.
After I went to sleep, he hit the bars, and returned about when it was time for me to get up. I rode to Copiapo, and found a hotel with a room that is actually smaller than the one I spent the night in once when certain public officials alleged I had a little too much to drink. And it's expensive. Chile costs at least as much as the US for basic things, and crappy hotel rooms are actually a bit more. I guess infrastructure has it's price. You can eat the lettuce, which is my new way of evaluating the level of development in a country. There's "Can eat the lettuce," as in Chile, "Can eat the lettuce at TGI Fridays only," which is Peru and Ecuador, and "call the CDC to find out if there's a cure for what you've got after eating the lettuce," which is pretty much Central America.
One of the interesting things about talking to travelers is finding out what unique and bizarre illnesses they've picked up over the years. I learned from one traveler that you can get cholera from drinking the water in a Sudanese refugee camp. So that's not where you'll find me next winter.
Iquiqui was neat, after all the sand, which basically continues from Peru to Chile, the road winds up a mountain, then over it, and there, on a peninsula is Iquiqui, a very modern resort town, with high rises and lots of good bars and restaurants and trees and foliage, like Oz or Xanadu, an oasis of civilization in the middle of nowhere, and I was reminded of the Peruvian seaside towns, of tumbledown and windblown adobe, and at times it is hard to believe that just because someone fought over a line on a map some years past, there is such a difference in how the people live and exist.
Peru to Chile is almost as dramatic a change as Mexico to the USA. On the one side the police officer asks for a donation for the official forms you have to fill out to escape, then you have to go to three different windows in three different buildings, on the other side there is order, a list of what you need to do to enter, and helpful officials who speak with pride about their country.
In Peru I went past an army base where all the guard towers were staffed by mannequins.
Today's ride through Chile was an exercise in extremes, from hugging the coast, watching waves break over rocks and long tranquil beaches, to the Atacama desert, which went through a 400 year drought recently. Your nose clears right up, and then the desert goes on and on and if you pull to the side of the road and stand for any length of time admiring the endless sand, your feet actually start to mummify. I suspect the Latin American habit of pulling to the side of the road no matter where you are to relieve yourself is responsible for at least 99 percent of the precipitation the Atacama gets in a given year.
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