The Empty Quarter

There was once upon a time an eccentric Englishman called Wilfred Thesiger who, in the early 20th century traveled Arabia and Central Asia exploring places not well known to Europeans. He was much taken by marsh Arabs who used to live in the deltas of Iraq and he made heroic camel crossings of the least populated parts of Saudi Arabia, a place so devoid of life it was known as the Empty Quarter.

We have been driving the desert since southern Ecuador three months ago and before we came here I had no clue how empty and arid and devoid of life this long Pacific coastline would be but we are drawing to a close. By Monday night we hope to be in Valparaiso where we are assured greenery is abundant, and I feel it’s about time.  

Sitting at the wheel of the Promaster in relative comfort watching the sand flow by at fifty or sixty miles per hour I cannot in any way compare myself to the pioneer desert traveler to whom I referred to above. If you read his books you’ll understand why I am in awe of his strength and self confidence; we follow the smooth black ribbon through a land that is certainly desolate but reasonably well traveled.  

However it’s impossible not to think of the great explorers who came before especially when the romance of travel inspired you to leave home and explore for self places unknown to you. I’m certainly not the first here but this is my first time here and no matter how indirectly my reading of the stories of Wilfred Thesiger, Dame Freya Starke, Sir Richard Burton and Gertrude Bell have inspired me. I think of them in their wildness and aloneness and mad faith in their ability to persevere and it gives me in my comfortable van, pleasure to be in an empty arid beige place, like them but not among them. I am not a pioneer. 

I am nothing if not a paradox so it was with a little sadness I saw signs of life at last in the sand. But first we had one last day of pure Atacama. 

I am very fond of the frequent rest areas, simple rectangles of asphalt at intervals on both sides of the PanAmerican Highway and equipped with nothing more than trash barrels but they are an excellent place to pull over and stretch your legs. 

Layne slept on in bed as Rusty and I explored the surface of Mars. 

You can see why NASA comes here to test space exploration vehicles. The photograph above was inspired very loosely by this one below, firmly down on Earth:

There are no clouds in the sky to speak of here, except as you close with the coast and see the cold ocean air mix with the warm desert air to create the usual Pacific Ocean marine inversion seen all along this coast of the Americas. Here we have a study in brown,  a beige van in a beige desert. 

Then at last we crossed what had once been the southern border of Bolivia. This was the northern edge of Chile before the Pacific War of 1879. Now it is the edge of the Atacama Region of Chile which hardly corresponds to the size of the Atacama Desert itself. 

And slowly green stuff appeared, mostly in washes where there were signs of some moisture once. 

It was still a long drive to Bahía Inglesa where we hoped to find a decent campground. I have been unable to discover why it is called English Bay but I do know it has a population of a few hundred in the village and it has a reputation for crystal clear waters, white sand and good swimming as well as all the usual water sports. 

But first more desert.

We got our first glimpse of the ocean at Chañaral another of those mysterious place names I’d never heard of as I had no knowledge of Chile’s geography before driving through it. 

And then we had an hour of Big Sur type swooping and winding along a roiling Pacific Ocean crashing on volcanic black rocks just beneath us. 

This is low season, Spring has just sprung in the southern hemisphere and these summer homes are not in use at the moment. Summer vacations start around Christmas. 

Home sweet home for the night, cold sandy and windy, an almost empty vast campground. $15 for hot showers and a picnic table with power outlets and even a barbecue grill. It was a normal campground at last. 

In a few weeks when summer hits this place will be packed. As it was we found one intrepid traveler last seen in Arequipa Peru. 

Jurg and Anya and their four wheel drive Ford Ranger were trying to cross the Andes to Argentina to meet some friends but late snowstorms have closed almost all the passes across the mountains. Their choice after their first failed attempt was to wait or make a 1200 mile detour through Bolivia so here they were. Surprise surprise! The photo is the one I took in Peru at Las Mercedes. 

The sun set, the wind was cold so we all did gathered in a sitting area behind a wall and with alcohol to warm us we got up to date on each others’ travels. Jurg has lots of experience driving South America so he scared the pants off us talking about Patagonia the fearsome exposed plains of the southernmost tip of South America.  

We braced ourselves for endless strong winds to come, cold slashing rain, gravel roads, no fresh food and miles between gas stations. It sounds like Alaska on steroids. I did notice the watering for the palms here just to remove me this oasis is in a very dry desert.  

Jurg left early to see if the Carabineros (Chile’s national police)  had opened the pass, hoping snow ploughs had done their work while we shuffled around taking hot showers and so forth. 

It was warm in the sun but cold in the breeze off the ocean. It was hard to remember this place is a fancy summer resort with sun tanned bodies, swimming and frolicking in salt water and so forth. 

We got going for La Serena a seaside town hopefully on the edge of this  interminable desert. Friday was another long drive hence the delay in posting on this page. It’s been tiring. 

We passed this well known resort called Domo for obvious reasons and I got the feeling traveling in a comfortable van is decidedly the way to go for me. 

More desert with a four lane highway…

We had one last cock up when we accidentally passed the last gas station for 180 miles and found ourselves drifting into the last dozen miles on fumes. I hate doing that but once again we got away with it and arrived at El Huerto (The Garden) an hour before dark. The young Germans preceded us as they never stop for lunch or to admire art…

…or to buy locally grown olives. 

Google Maps took us through the rather run down beach town of La Serena to its smaller and more fancy neighbor of Coquimbo, where our campground was located. 

And this is why I’ll never be an explorer like Thesiger. A full service campground, $30 a night with hot showers, potable water faucets (I love Chile) and a spacious shaded campsite to ourselves. As usual it was just us and Florian and Cora. 

I have high hopes we will see more greenery on our way to Valparaiso on Monday.  

The Hand Of The Desert

While continuing to travel in the company of Cora and Florian we have been putting miles under GANNET2 and now find ourselves catching our breath for a day about 300 miles north of Santiago -“Saint James”- the capital of Chile.

I think it’s safe to say all four of us are a little tired of the endless beige of the Atacama Desert, so by common consent we pressed on to get out of that Martian landscape.  Not all of it was flat boredom as we did have  mountains and valleys to look at and we all enjoyed the perfectly smooth PanAmerican Highway which allowed us to use cruise control and set the speed at 60mph, so easy was the driving.  I took it off on windy sections where the set speed forced the Promaster into a lower gear and high revs but we were traveling so smoothly Layne spent much of the trip keeping her wounded leg propped up which allowed her to fall into a deep sleep as Rusty and I kept watch. Cora the nurse is keeping an eye on the healing and changes the dressings as needed. 

We used the iOverlander app to find places to camp, Cora and Layne would put their heads together and look for dog friendly campgrounds with hot  showers and not further apart than five or six Google hours on the map. 

The Chileans we met were a cheerful bunch, even the toll takers at the three or four booths we passed  ($3 each toll) had a cheery smile and wished us a good trip. A small thing but a pleasant change to surly Peru. And then I met a Peruvian who happened to be filling my tank at one of the rare desert gas stations. It seemed a miserable sand blown job but he was so happy to be out of Peru saying the country was in a deep crisis and nothing works and he was happy as a clam in the dust cold oasis in the Atacama Desert.

I love Chile, don’t get me wrong but the shortage of gas stations along the PanAmerican Highway is startling. We missed the turnoff to a gas station in a village but with 180 miles range showing in the car we pressed on to our destination of La Serena which was a big mistake. We arrived in the bustling beach town on fumes. I can’t understand why there are so few places to get gas and the ones there are have long lines. So far it (and $5:40 a gallon) are the worst thing about Chile.

Antofagasta is an industrial port city not usually in the tourist map, but we have needs hotel visitors don’t think about. 

We came looking for groceries and we found a Jumbo supermarket downtown which worked for the Germans in their low slung VW Eurovan. We couldn’t fit in the covered parking lot and street parking was packed do we set our sights on a more suburban Jumbo at the southern end of town. 

Usually u plan our supermarket visits by looking for possible parking in Google satellite and street view, though sometimes the street photo are badly out of date. In this case we were in company so we pressed on.  A gentle reminder it was to navigate my own ship at all times. 

We got the job done eventually and by ten o’clock we were ready for the desert museum which gets lots of reviews online. 

The entrance is masterfully understated so naturally with our keen look out we missed it and spent 15 confused minutes circling a vast block to get around back again to find the tiny secret entrance to this major tourist attraction. 

We needed coffee after all that and went some bus drivers waiting for their tourists to finish visiting the museum. One was Colombian and was fascinated by our van so he got a tour. He was from Cali so we had a place in common. Chile has a booming economy that attracts migrants. 

The museum celebrates the vastness of the Atacama desert and has a huge display on the mining of nitrates the main economic driver of development. 

They also celebrate the space exploration conducted in one of the least light polluted places on earth. Night sky observation is also a growing tourist attraction in the desert. 

Because total aridity of the Atacama most closely resembles the surface of the Moon and Mars NASA collaborates with the University of Chile to develop and test Moon and Mars rovers like this prototype:  

It was encouraging to watch a huge crocodile of youngsters on a field trip to the museum. Future leaders of Chile growing up in a country with opportunity: 

History fascinates me and I can’t get over the fact this was 150 years ago part of Bolivia. Arica and Iquique were in Peru and Chile took it all in the War of the Pacific. Which is why the Atacama Departmebtvin Chile is so far south in the Atacama Desert. The northern parts were named after  their capture in 1880. 

Though we had planned to visit it we had forgotten to set our Google mapping to take us there.  In the photo below is more than just desert: 

Tourist attraction alert! 

It was Thursday lunch time and we were not alone. 

We arrived as the ice cream seller got off the bus from his home in Antofagasta and I offered him a ride out to the monument where he proceeded to make some sales to a group of motorcyclists and the coach travelers. 

The hand is about two hundred yards off the PanAmerican on a rough bouncy track and how the coach made it without tipping over I’ll never know. I just went very slowly as usual.

So we milled around and took photos in the time honored fashion. 

I think after they ship back to Germany in December Cora will get a dog. 

Rusty as usual was not hugely impressed and retired to the comfort of his bed in the shade. He needs a lot of water in this climate and at every stop make sure to offer him his bowl. 

Wasn’t I surprised to see these Brazilian BMW riders wearing this t-shirt. 

They planned the whole ride for a dozen of them to do a vacation circuit from Santa Catarina in Brazil out here and back. 

Quite the club ride especially as they didn’t have a lick of Spanish. I’m going to need to learn Portuguese and I think it will be a chore. 

Even the meaning of the hand is debatable. Layne found  a claim it was funded by the city of Antofagasta but there were no signs to that effect and I figure when a city does something like that they like to take credit for it. 

I found a claim that it is a monument to Chile’s dead and disappeared from the Pinochet dictatorship and it stands as a monument to the oppressed. You can look it up for yourself and figure what you like I guess. 

I thought the back of the hand was quite expressive but reviews say it is used as a bathroom. We found the whole place to be scrupulously clean.  

Onwards to the south and toward the sea. 

Definitely a Martian landscape. 

Not a leaf a blade of grass or a plant. 

It can’t go on forever…

…can it?