Sunday, September 05, 2010

Easter Island Eclipse Trek - Day 4

WE'RE OFF ON THE ROAD TO SANTIAGO

July 7th, 2010
Yeah, we may have been on the road again, but we sure weren't singing about it like Hope and Crosby. In truth, Santiago was still two days away. It was Wednesday morning and we were up early. We knew that we had a long ride ahead of us. It was at least an 8 hour journey by bus to Putre, Chile, a former mining town turned tourist destination. The road ahead, while rather bleak looking on a highway map, gave us some unexpected surprises.

(Click on any image to enlarge)

The Altiplano, at an average of 12,300ft (3,750m) in altitude, is kind of like a transition zone between the Amazon rainforest to the east and the Atacama Desert of Chile to the southwest. It is where we'd be spending the majority of our day traveling. After leaving leaving Lake Titicaca and El Alto behind, the road opened up before us and lead across an often-times desolate place. There wasn't much in the way of greenery; it was July, winter in the southern hemisphere, so most everything was dry and brown. Only a few earthen homes dotted the landscape. The two things that were constant were the blue sky overhead and the snow-capped volcanoes.

After about 3 hours driving we made a pit stop at a gas station-cum-curiosity shop. Several people wandered off to a row of questionable little buildings that posed as restrooms. A few were made of corrugated tin siding. Others were made of stone. All were about 5x5 ft square. They reminded me of the 'hot box' in the Paul Newman classic, "Cool Hand Luke". And they looked like the kind of place that would be the perfect home to black widow spiders or psycho killers. Of course it cost money to use the facilities. About the equivalent of $1 USD per person. I think the owners pocketed the money 'cause it sure wasn't being used on up keep.

Inside the market were the typical roadside things you'd expect to find at a U.S. truck stop: postcards, stamps, t-shirts, drinks, snacks, etc. Inside the foyer was a curiosity cabinet. It housed numerous items. Most were jars which held dead lizards, snakes, spiders, etc. There were also things like animal skulls that wouldn't fit in the jars and sat alone on the shelves. But the best part was what was sitting atop the cabinet de curiosidades - an 'actual' Chupacabra skull! Well, that's what the label said. And having never seen a "goat sucker" for myself, I had to take their word for it.

The outside of the market was just as strangely decorated. We made a game of pointing out all the oddities we spotted. There were Halloween-type spider webs, giant rubber spiders, hooded masks from the "Scream" movies, and movie posters in the windows from Frankenstein and The Mummy, just to name a few. None of us knew quite what to make of it. It was all just so surreal.

The next stop was about 50 miles from nowhere. The terrain had become hillier and had more brush than previous areas. Here we encountered shepherds leading their flocks of sheep around. But that wasn't the main reason for our stop. We pulled over to get a closer look at earthen structures meant to house the dead. In a plain sort of way, they reminded me of Gaudi's Church of the Holy Family (Sagrada Familia) in Barcelona, Spain. Both the church and these mummy chambers gave me the eerie impression that they were growing out of the very earth around them. And they seemed to be everywhere you looked. (Earthen burial chambers in eastern Bolivia)

We didn't tarry there for long as people were getting antsy with hunger. As we climbed aboard the bus, there was a run-in with one of the local women. She was angry with one of the Dutch girls. As we pulled away the tiny, ancient woman picked up a potato-sized stone and tossed it at the bus; it struck the side with a dull thump and bounced off harmlessly. Later on I heard a third-hand account of what had transpired. I'm not certain of what actually happened, but my understanding is one of two things took place - the woman was angry because she thought the Dutch girl was taking her picture without permission OR she was angry because she wasn't paid for letting her picture be taken. In either case, our traveling companion insisted she never took the woman's picture. I wasn't sure what was happening when it transpired and from my seat in the back I took a picture out the window of the old woman in the center of the kerfuffle. She had a lot of character and the shot makes a great portrait, but after wrestling over it for some time, I've decided not to post the image.

It wasn't long after we re-boarded the bus that we were climbing back out again. Our stop: Stone City. There were no odd gas stations or creepy lavatories here. There wasn't a single man-made structure in sight. Stone City gets its name from the unusual rock clusters that fill the region. The way they stick up out of the ground and are bunched together gives them the appearance of buildings. This was where we had lunch, among the rocks and desert shrubs. The view was absolutely astounding to behold; immediately around us, the desert, and in the distance, Nevado Sajama, an extinct stratovolcano and the highest peak in all Bolivia.

Sitting atop rocks and boulders we dug into box lunches provided by the tour company. Each kit included 2 pieces of cold fried chicken, an apple, and little desert snacks. At this point in time little cliques had begun to form. The Dutch family pretty much did everything together, apart from the rest of the group. They were tight-knit and kept mostly to themselves. There was also a small family traveling together. They too had little to do with everyone else. The couples did this as well, but often interacted with the clique I was in: the solo travelers. There were 4 or 5 of us and by the end of Day 1 we had bonded. We had so much fun talking and laughing all the time that by and large we did everything together as a group from there on out. (Lunch in Bolivia with the volcano Nevado Sajama as a backdrop)

Alongside the highway at the entrance to Stone City was a very colorfully decorated stone marker. Sadly, this was one of many we'd see throughout our travels on the roads of Bolivia and Chile. It denoted the spot where a loved one had perished in an accident. Some of the ones we saw were merely little piles of stones with a cross atop it or even just a wooden cross pounded into the ground. Others were like this one, with flowers, feathers, beads, and other items attached.

Although the landscape was rather boring and barren, we did see some wildlife, including pink flamingos and vicuña, a wild camelid related to the llama. At one time the vicuña population had dwindled down to 6000 in 1974 and they were declared endangered. Their numbers have since swollen to 350,000. Even so, they are still protected to this day. They are quite nervous and flighty animals with highly sought after wool and will bolt away at the drop of a hat (literally), so seeing them in the wild is a rare treat. We were fortunate to see large herds of them two days in a row. (Wild vicuña at the foot of Nevado Sajama - click image to enlarge)

Hours had passed since we departed the Inca Utama Resort by Lake Titicaca and the group was getting as fidgety as vicuñas. We circumnavigated Nevado Sajama and another pair of volcanoes, then we left Bolivia behind and crossed over into Chile. This was an ordeal that took quite a bit of time and caused frayed nerves. Step 1) Get off the bus and march into a hot, hallway crowded with truck drivers also making the border crossing. Step 2) Wait for what seemed an interminable amount of time in said hallway while customs agents fiddled with papers. Step 3) March across the border on foot, dodging between tractor-trailer rigs and retrieve our bags from the bus. Step 4) Fill out more papers, then let uniformed officers rummage through OR scan our luggage (their choice).

It was here that I was stopped. Small items made of straw which I'd purchased on our first lake outing were being called into question. A reed boat about 6 inches in length was what caused much suspicion. Smaller items (including even smaller reed boats) were okay, but I was told the large one had to be left behind. They thought it might be used for smuggling cocaine in the hollow of its body. Since I hadn't declared it (it wasn't a fruit, vegetable, or wine so I didn't think I had to), I was pulled aside and perp-walked to a small office. I had to fill out the paperwork again, this time signing something that said I knowingly brought illegal products into the country. I was near the back of our group and almost everyone else had gone. I didn't know if anyone had seen me pulled away I was getting nervous that the moment I signed the paper I'd have cuffs slapped on my wrists, but they let me go with a warning. They didn't take anything lightly; I found out later that the reason they were so strict was they had made a HUGE drug bust just weeks before so they were on high alert.

By now it was late afternoon and we still had some driving ahead of us. Our bus pulled into the little mountain pass town of Putre around 7pm and the temperature had dropped considerably. We were told to brace ourselves as the nighttime low was expected to settle down around 5ºF (-15ºC). Putre is a former mining town that was reinventing itself as a tourist location. For as high in altitude as it was (11,400 ft/3500m above sea level), becoming a full-fledged tourist spot was still a lofty goal. Putre didn't seem to have much to offer in the way of things to see and do. The entire town was *maybe* half a mile across and boasted 3 hotels, a hospital, and a cemetery. That was about it.

The buildings which housed our rooms were simple rectangular dorm-like structures with about 8 rooms each. These were scattered about the terraced property and their numbering system had no apparent rhyme or reason to it. The rooms themselves were dark and dingy; I get the feeling that the cold kept any crawly critters away. A small electric space heater was our only source of warmth. Jeff and I kept ours on the Low setting, so by morning our room was probably a balmy 40ºF inside. Dinner was quite interesting. We assembled in the dining area of the main hotel building where they had placed several tables into a giant squared-off U-shape. Here, too, it was cold. You could see your breath indoors. It was chilly enough that even the locals who served us dinner were bundled up in hats, gloves, and heavy down jackets.

Like the dinners at Inca Utama, we had a choice of what we would like to dine on. Our choice that night: Chinese food. And there wasn't a variety of things to choose from, only the one item, doled out of a 20 gallon pot, a noodle/soup dish with chunks of meat. The meat being guanaco, a cousin of the vicuña and llama. The vegetarians in the group had to make do with any energy/snack bars they happened to bring along for hikes. Tom, one of our fellow trekkers said that that dinner in Putre was "one of the most Kafka-esque travel experiences" he'd ever had. There we were, in a remote village high in up in the mountains of Chile, having Chinese food for dinner in a former mining town. It was all very incongruous and funny, though I felt bad for the vegetarians who probably went to bed hungry that night.

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