Chañaral, Chile

Hi from Chañaral! In Chile, we´ve been traveling on the Pullman bus line, which has very nice service complete with a sandwich and soft drink at lunch time. From Iquique to Antofagasta, we rode on the top level of a double decker bus, in the very front! That was a nice view. I´m reading an Isabel Allende novel, La Ciudad de las Bestias. It´s easy to read while riding through the Atacama desert, because there are no curves in the road, and very little to look at!

We are eating lots of soup here, especially seafood soup! We´ve eaten tons of seafood that we can´t name, in Spanish or in English.

Chañaral is a tiny little village on the coast. When we arrived, we walked down to the beach where we met our new friends Ricardo and Sylvia, from Santiago. Ricardo is an engineer for Codelco, the local copper mine that´s owned by the Chilean government. He showed us an expanse of greenish sand on the beach, and told us that it´s caused by pollution from the mine.

Since the 1910s, the mine was owned by an American company, first Anaconda and later Andes. They had a canal that brought the tailings down to the beach in front of Chañaral. The tailings contained that greenish contaminant, which settled all over the beach and in the ocean. The tailings were mixed with sand. Eventually, so much sand and tailings were deposited that they raised the beach, causing the shoreline to move away from the town of Chañaral. Now, you have to walk across the greenish expanse of sand to get from Chañaral to the beach. The contaminants killed off all of the marine life. This contamination went on until 1970, when Salvador Allende nationalized the mine and it became Codelco, owned by the Chilean government. Codelco continued to dump contaminants in the same way until 1990, when they changed to a new and supposedly better system. Now, the marine life has come back but the beach is still heavily contaminated.

Another local told us that a lot of people die of cancer aroud here, and that Codelco built the decorative lighthouse that is above Chañaral in order to appease the local people. The lighthouse is nowhere close to the shore and is supposed to draw tourists, but I don´t think it draws very many.

Sylvia is from the southern tip of Chile, Punta Arenas, and is descended from Croatian immigrants. Sylvia and Ricardo offered to give us a ride back to town, and ended up giving us a tour of the area. We drove toward Pan de Azucar park until we could see the island from the distance. We saw cactus (so there actually are a few plants in the Atacama desert!) and a dried plant that´s like a wooden coil. Then Sylvia and Ricardo invited us to their house for a delicious meal of toast with fish, avocado, scrambled eggs and fruit! They live in Barquito, an area of housing built by the mine. They are only here part of the year, and their main residence is in Santiago. Sylvia sometimes stays in Santiago, and sometimes comes to Chañaral and paints beautiful ocean scenes.

After dinner, Ricardo and Sylvia gave us a tour of Barquito. Barquito is mining housing built when the mine was American-owned. It was segregated. The American workers lived in one section which consists of individual houses. The Chilean workers lived in another section, more barracks style. All of the housing is built of Oregon Pine, brought from the US and unusual here where there are no trees and people build of stone, cement or adobe. Termites are devouring the Oregon Pine. Now, the mine has few employees because it subcontracts everything to other companies. So the mine sold the housing, and the houses are mostly owned by individuals now.

Ricardo and Sylvia drove us back to our hotel (and the downtown area where a street dance happened to be in progress -- and the band was staying at our hotel) but not before loading us up with good food including canned fish and herbal tea. After spending all of our time with each other lately, it was nice to spend the evening with another couple, and to make new friends.

Today we went to Pan de Azucar National Park, in hopes of seeing penguins. We weren{t able to see the penguins, but we did see jellyfish! I´ll post pictures of our day at the park later, but the connection here is too slow. Tomorrow we leave for La Serena, where we plan to spend a couple of days before heading south to Valparaíso and Santiago! In Santiago, we´ll visit my friend Olga from the World College!

Meanwhile, my mom did a bit of research on the Uros islands, the reed islands that we visited in Peru. Here is what she found: Wikipedia says: The Uros Islands were built for defensive purposes. If there was danger (probably from invasion?), the islands could (with difficulty) be moved to a safer place. There are 42 islands in the group. Each island lasts about 30 years before it rots away, and they keep adding new reeds to the tops constantly as the undersides rot away. There are about 3000 members of the Uros tribe, but most live on the mainland, and only a few hundred live on the islets now. The Uros were a pre-Incan tribe. They traded with the Aymara tribe on the mainland, and then interbred with them, and finally abandoned their language (about 500 years ago) and spoke Aymara. Then they were conquered by the Incas. Of the 42 islands, 10 are tourist showcases. About 10 families can live on each of the larger islands, with only 2 or 3 on each smaller one. They do not reject technology (hence the sheet metal buildings you saw!). They have elementary school on the islands, but must go to the mainland for higher learning.

Imagine moving your island!