SANTA FE SOUTH- ATACAMA SOONER OR LATER

The Santiago-Valparaiso nexus lies in the fertile central region of Chile. Below is increasing rain and cold, if not quite Antarctic extremes. Above is increasing aridity, if not heat, to extremes hardly known anywhere else, rainfall never recorded. Roofs are optional in Antofagasta. Somehow it seems strange for such dryness to exist next to the ocean, but that it does, on a cloudy day ocean, sand, and sky blending into a seamless grayness. Fortunately in Chile the sun usually comes out to brighten things up. Farther north in Peru, it seldom does. Fortunately the desert comes in stages. North of Valparaiso to la Serena is some of the most beautiful desert you’d ever want to see. Sonora’s got nothing on this. In keeping with Chile’s metaphor of a far-south California, there are wind farms climbing up the slope from the sea. Unlike California, an evening fog (?) rolls in and licks up the terrain until it whites us out briefly.

By the time the bus gets to La Serena it’s almost 6pm and we’re parked on the outskirts of town, or so it seems. This is a tourist town, but there’s not a map to be had anywhere. There’s a stall for tourist info, but it’s closed. Suburban bus stations are a bummer. You have to make a commitment to a place with incomplete information. It’s nice to hop from place to place, staying if you like, moving on if you don’t. It’s hard to know whether you like a place by looking at a shopping mall in the suburbs. That’s why centrally located bus stations are nice, though the trend is toward remote locations. That’s one thing nice about Buenos Aires, an easy walk into the center of town.

Though it doesn’t get dark until fairly late right now right here in Chile, I decide to shove on. I have to come back the same route, another unfortunate occurrence when the motto is ‘backpack, don’t backtrack’, but that’s the price you pay for your cultural intercourse sometimes. I could either hang around in Vina for a week for a film festival which may or may not be any good, by which time I’d be burnt out on the place, or take a trip and come back. I could also loop through Argentina, but extra border crossings can be laborious also, in time and paperwork and extra stamps in the passport. I get on the bus.

All night bus rides are a challenge. If you’re lucky you’ll be beside an empty seat, though it doesn’t matter that much. I’ve tried all kinds of positions, and the straight old middle of the saddle missionary position usually works best. It gets harder with age, but if you fly around, then you miss the landscape. That’s a big part of the fun, right? You can save some bucks 2. Buses may not be prompt in Chile, but they ARE pretty cheap. Unless some overexcited bus attendant plays videos all night, I can usually do almost as many hours REM as in bed, which probably says more about me than it. If there’s nothing else to do, I’ll study some Arabic; that usually knocks me right out. Don’t do that through border crossings btw. Pick another language, maybe Old Church Slavonic. That’ll f**k ‘em.

The night passes in darkness (doesn’t it usually?) outside. By the time I wake up the lush desert at Serena has become moonscape at Antofagasta. Temperatures hover just above freezing at daybreak on the road to Calama, though they’re around 70F by the time we get there an hour later. It’ll be scorching at high noon in San Pedro de Atacama, my immediate destination. Once a lonely dusty outpost on the Golden Triangle where Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia meet, this is now THE back-packers hot spot in the region. Unfortunately it’s still dusty, but now it’s hip too, with Krishna restaurants and tour guides, the whole nine yards, but not quite a first down, not for me at least. I hate it, reluctantly, this Santa Fe-in-progress. It’s a shame too, because if you could discover it early on, it’d be way cool, a picturesque stopover en route to a remote border crossing. There’s nothing a backpacker loves more than THAT.

But I have a rule of thumb: if a place has more than 50% tourists and/or tourist-industry workers, then I can’t do it. It’s a matter of authenticity, remember? I try to be open-minded, but… naah. I also realize the danger of reverse snobbery, the ‘authentic’ guy acting ‘less-tourist-than-thou’ when faced with people simply enjoying themselves. Does that change anything? Does that mean I’ll be hanging out at Khao San road in Bangkok? I doubt it. I know what I like also. I order a bowl of cazuela in a street stall up by the bus stop while everybody else sips wine or chug-a-lugs brew down with the Interzone people, best soup I’ve had in years. The prices are out of proportion here, too. I spend the night then get back on the bus. Others spend days and weeks, grooving with the groovers. But I stick to my guns- if you want to see the REAL Santa Fe, then you go to Las Vegas NM. If you want to see the REAL Thailand, then go to Laos. If you want to see the REAL China, then go to Vietnam. If you want to see the REAL Atacama, then go to…?

Considering I slept through much of the Atacama Desert on the way up, I figure to go back in stages, seeing what I missed. I already saw a bit of Calama already, so go back straight to Antofagasta. This is copper country. Statues in the Calama pedestrian mall are made of the stuff, and the rail yards are full of it, hammered into crumpled sheets. They only found the stuff after the phosphate trade dried up. I don’t know why it took so long- the hills around the area have a distinct greenish tint. Prices are up, stolen electric wire a big problem now, and the area is prosperous. Antofagasta is more expensive than any place I’ve been yet in Chile, with the possible exception of Santiago. It’s got plenty of bars and strip clubs for the mine workers. It’s even got ‘sexy’ coffee. Huh? It sounds like a trap. Have these people been reading my blog? These are daytime girlie joints with apparently a different set of rules than the nighttime alcohol-based ones. That sounds good to me, though not as weird as the ‘sexy breakfasts’ in Montreal. But there is something even more interesting here- gypsies, a whole family of them occupying the town square.

This is an anachronism and a dying way of life, the act of Gypsies being gypsies. They panhandle and perform little rites and shuffle around bugging people, but other than that the only thing that distinguishes them is their long flowing cheap printed dresses and a general attitude of listlessness. I want to know more, but not TOO much. I know these people’s reputation for sticky fingers. I don’t want to get ‘gypped’ by Gypsies; the idea is to get a piece without losing my fleece. So I let the lady approach me and do me up a little love potion. I need it. She takes some magic powder and asks me for a little piece of paper to wrap it up in. Then she asks me for a banknote to lay it on. I know what you’re thinking, me too- I’ll never see that note again. She does a few ‘repeat-after-me’s, then asks for a larger bill. I get the picture and start to leave. Feigning insult, though I’m sure she’s had much worse, she settles for another small bill and finishes the encantations.

We’re good and I’m outta’ there, she even suggesting I should consider a gypsy woman. Yeah, and they should consider bathing. As I walk away I notice a familiar smell. B-O? No, it’s the magic powder wafting windward, the distinct smell of… guess what? Curry, turmeric, the essence of India with a human vector, mobilized and motivated. Do the Gypsies know that’s their ancient home? They spoke another language to each other besides Spanish, but off my radar. What’s their story? Do they even know? Theirs is an emigration unlike any other, Jew Chinese or Inuit, bound together by ancient ties and uncertain logic. They’re famous even where they never reached. Tarot cards in Thailand are known as ‘gypsy cards’. I wonder why they didn’t head east.

The Long Way Home from Africa to Thailand

This trip as a whole has been basically a salvage operation- initial shock, kicked while down, and arduous comeback. Maybe I was unfair to Africa, with unrealistic expectations. After all Thailand has its share of unsolicited guides and scammers, too. I’ve just long learned how to deal with them. But nothing was what it was supposed to be, just the opposite usually. Africa being dirt poor, it should have been dirt cheap, right? Not quite. That lack of development means that any development will be very expensive. What kind of role model is France anyway, with its monopolies and protections and labor strikes? Paris is retail incarnate, a boutique country for those with time and money. Ironically and conversely Marseille is very reasonable, as if the industrial revolution never really arrived in the southern ‘old’ Europe. Rome certainly has none, but it makes up for that with millions of tourists. Others aren’t so lucky, or unlucky, depending on your point of view. The industrial revolution was not pretty, probably the reason it caught on first in Britain and only later on the continent. Artisans working in their workshops are certainly more romantic than sweat shop assembly lines.

In another example of misplaced expectations the picturesque villages I expected to see in Africa seemed even more so in rural Spain, especially between Madrid and Zaragoza, almost even more African in fact. Those spires look less like Christian steeples than Islamic minarets, and villages seem to be perched high on hills for protection in a futile feudal world. The houses themselves are mud inspired, like negative space, something carved out of block rather than something erected from components, something more feminine than masculine. This would seem to be the connection between the adobe pueblos of northern New Mexico and western Africa including Morocco. The word ‘adobe’ after all comes from the Egyptian via Arabic and Spanish; so did the building techniques I think. The original Indians had to use rock or we would hardly even know of them after five hundred years, like the dirt ‘Indian mounds’ of the Mississippi Culture. Mud’s good but not that good. I suspect the true adobe pueblos of the northern Rio Grande were of later design. Of course the buses all pass these places by, just like they do in Mali and Morocco, so one is left largely to one’s imagination.

In the wildest science fiction scenarios, if the countryside were ignored, it could conceivably cease to exist. Once we’re accustomed to boarding the plane, closing our eyes, then waking up in some strange place, then how do we know that we really traversed all the distance between? One account of Australian aborigines relates how every piece of the landscape has a story associated with it. The researcher was overwhelmed when driving across that some landscape, as the speech was too fast to follow! What if the world were vertical, not horizontal? How would you know if you didn’t physically experience the distances and relationships between your points of measurement? Such scenarios seem absurd, but form the premises of many Hollywood movies of the past decade, The Matrix trilogy possibly being the best example. Like the best conspiracy theories, none of it can be disproved, and that’s the beauty of it, and the danger. By the same token, the most successful scientific theory ever, quantum mechanics, is totally foreign to common sense, and it has been proven over and over and over. Prime time on TV was once devoted to a theory that the moon landing was a hoax, and those people are not stupid, however misguided. I got sucked into the notion myself, for a day or two. But the transition from reality to fantasy is rarely shown in the movies, nor is the act of conspiracy ever revealed in real life. Both depend on a leap of logic to retrofit the past to fit present circumstances. I’ve lost friends to the warm fuzzy logic of Conspiracy. You can’t rescue them. You can only maintain communication and an arm outstretched. It’s up to them to grab hold, or not. They tend to think that we’re the ones who need help. Moral of the story: maybe common sense can’t always be trusted, but solid evidence and double-blind-controlled testing can; and don’t get so lost in a buzz-box that you forget to experience the world for yourself.

But the reason I stopped in Spain anyway was so that I could speak the language in case I needed emergency medical care. Well in Barcelona everybody knows Castellano, but only grudgingly use it, if they’re local. Welcome to Quebec. Catalan is the big deal, and you could get lost if you can’t read it. Appropriately it falls somewhere between standard Spanish and standard French in the spectrum of Romance languages, so it’s not impossible, at least to read. If a local makes you for a tourist, though, he could refuse your Castellano. If some trinket vendor’s got a language erection and wants to stick it in your face, then he’ll do that, to gain the upper hand so to speak. Welcome to psycholinguistcs and ESL, the empire as a second language. So much for Spain feeling like home because of the language; home is more complicated than that. Still I’d rate Spain as probably the coolest place to be in Europe right now, experiencing a renacimiento after decades of Franco’s strong-hand darkness. A cheap country doesn’t necessarily mean a good country, though, right? Right, Mr. Prez? Still, Spain is not too expensive, about like the US. Hostales will even give you the full set of keys, so you can come and go as you please. In Marseilles they lock the doors before midnight. In Spain, the party’s just starting at midnight.

I didn’t see many Gypsies in Europe this time, just one group camped with all their belongings at the Barcelona bus station, giving new meaning to the word ‘furtive’. What’s Europe without Gypsies? In Spain they toss the word around a lot, mostly in connection with Flamenco music, a la ‘Gypsy Kings’. Those guys obviously speak a dialect of Spanish, not Roma, though Iberian gypsies are apparently of Roma ancestry, originally at least. Flamenco music and dance has obvious connections with Arab culture and song; they did have significant cultural inter-mixing over the course of seven hundred years. In Spain flamenco bands are a dime a dozen, but the Gypsy Kings had a hit. That’s the difference. In Senegal a Gypsy Kings video on TV was titled ‘salsa’ music. That sounds like a line item cultural mutation. In East Europe Gypsies are not so highly prized culturally. There are lots of them, and for the most part unassimilated. They’re despised. Music could possibly be a selling point for them, as it is for many cultural minorities. This is one good thing about world music. It might just save the world, if it can save itself. Global warming and over-population can ultimately be solved; it’s just a question of time. Racism is the one problem that can’t be solved by controlling emissions, exhaust or otherwise. It can only be solved by intermixing, culturally if not otherwise. This is the role of America, both north and south, a test tube for societies and environments in turbulence. Europe doesn’t know the half of it. When is the last time Chinese New Year and Carnaval fell in the same week? It should have been a riot. It wasn’t. It was quiet. The parties were elsewhere. Where would be a good place to experience both Chinese New Year and Carnaval? I’d vote for San Francisco.