DAY ONE, OCTOBER 24
At 4:00 a.m. the USAC students muster before a grocery store downtown and board a bus to the airport. An hour later, inside the security checkpoint and awaiting our 7:00 flight, we ransack free samples of chocolate and coffee in the overpriced airport shop. At nine minutes to seven, we're taxiing south to the runway. I'm in the window seat, facing the black Andes and the dark-blue dawn rising behind them. Without warning, I recall the verse to "50 Ways to Leave your Lover."At the airport in Calama we debark onto the tarmac. Inside the one-building airport, the other students wait for their baggage. I borrow Murphy's skateboard and take it back out to the runway for over 45 seconds before an attendant politely tells me to stop. We take more busses.
San Pedro and environs
At a ridge we stop to examine San Pedro from a distance. 180 degrees from north to south are mountains and one active volcano, and everything on the ground is sand except the wet-green oasis, our destination. San Pedro is longer than it is wide, and vegetation which isn't trees is scrub brush. Dry irrigation ditches sport rusting sluice gates and sheep herds bleat irately at passers-by. People flourishing here before tourism arrived with enough money to be worth the trouble is not easy to picture.
At the hotel keys are doled out for shared rooms, ours lodging six. We shed our luggage and clothes, donning swimming trunks and rallying at the pool. After an abbreviated dip, we're back in our civvies and exploring the town. I book an 8:30 reservation in a stargazing group, arrange my scarf into a kaffiyeh and set off on a walk to find the boundaries of San Pedro. I stop where the road leaves the oasis and cuts into the desert for a while, then make my way in the other direction. The back road follows scrubby expanses I would hesitate to call "pasture," but wool fluff in the brush indicates that this is indeed where the sheep graze. I spend a while sitting in the shade in one of these, play my harmonica to myself and hope I'm not trespassing. After some time I return to the group, again congregated at the pool, and we wait for dinner.
Brenda makes the rounds with a cautionary announcement: "Only if you are very brave should you go out tonight and drink... a Fanta." Ours would be an early start in the morning, and San Pedro's altitude could adversely affect the imprudent, particularly in the neighborhood of hangovers. From Brenda and Luis's concern, we assume this had caused problems with groups previous.
They seat us at two long tables and bring out the meal in courses, bread, soup, lasagna, desert. As they finish, students break off for evening activities of their own organization. Finding my trip cancelled on account of clouds (San Pedro claims 330 clear nights a year), I resign myself to another walk.
At the edge of town, I can barely make out the stars, but on the way back I pass a low-ceilinged adobe building with smoke pouring from the chimney, radiating the considerable volume of a good time inside. A man lets me through the latched gate and I slide in the side entrance to order a beer. I choose a can over a bottle, for there is no tap, and the bartender looks at me sideways when I ask for a glass. I find the only unobtrusive spot I can, against the ochre-painted wall, and watch the band.
The frontman appears to be the one playing the 12-stringed ukulele, but it's difficult to tell who exactly is leading the 9-piece group: also present are pan pipes, a flute, a floor-tom drum with cymbal, a larger conga-looking instrument, a six-string acoustic guitar, an electric bass, and others with unidentifiable hand-percussion. Their current tune attracts a good deal of singing-along, and the song rises to a crescendo then falls, carried by the flute's melody.
Above our heads is a woven ceiling from which paper lanterns conceal hanging bulbs. On the picnic tables are plates of simple-looking food piled high, and flames roar in a clay fireplace in the center of the room. With the beginning of the next song, a rush of enthusiasm washes through the crowd and many leave the benches to dance in front of the band, swaying imprecisely, still singing. A small dog takes one of the now-vacant seats and watches the spectacle. After another number I ramble home to bed.
DAY TWO, OCTOBER 25
We begin the day with a visit to the Padre le Paige Archaeological Museum, a repository of Atacaman and Incan artifacts. After an hour or two of unattended milling about we visit Pucará de Quitor, a pre-Incan fort near the city. Built on a formidable hillside, the climb is arduous under the heavy desert sun, but the view from the top is considerable.
The imposing Pucará de Quitor
From there we see the Valle de la Luna and witness the effects of the climate on the geography: wide-cut swaths of canyon into which we march like ants. At one stop, appropriately monikered the "Amphitheater," our guide elicits a solid minute of silence during which we listen to the cracking of the minerals in the canyon wall. Sitting at the bottom of the imposing rock face, closed in by the surrounding canyon, I imagine standing in a giant garage below the grill of a skyscraper-sized Buick, listening to the radiator clicking as it cools off.
The ever-clicking Amphitheater
Roommates
We end the day with a slow march to a high ridge to watch the sunset, and file back to our tour buses for a sleepy ride home. Dinner is an unimposing pork chop with canned strawberries for dessert. Later, a number of us assemble blankets from our rooms and hike to the edge of town for amateur stargazing and a bit of group-singing.
Sunset at la Valle de la Luna
DAY THREE, OCTOBER 26
Our buses take us to the Chaxa Lagoon and National Flamingo Reserve, a large and rusty puddle in the middle of the salt flats. The flamingos mill about and pay us little attention. A bumpy and long ride further out into the nothingness culminates with a spectacular and surprising view as we come over a hill. Miscanti and Miñiques lagoons, high up in the altiplano shine a bright gem-blue among surrounded by the tan sand. We sit and gaze in awe, and Vicuña gallop far down at the water's edge. On the way home we are treated to lunch by USAC, stopping in a wide-open one-room community building where students are drafted to ferry plates of hot food and bus dirty dishes back and forth from the kitchen.
One of the two high-altitude lagunas
Altiplano fauna: the flighty Vicuña
We return to the hotel for more pool-lounging. Dinner is a chicken breast, dessert, jello. We scatter and again congregate at the edge of town for more stargazing, this time with a bag of communal chocolate passed around, and all agree that life could hardly be better.
It is this afternoon that David, one of my roommates, tells me of Ezra's plan to bus north to Machu Picchu the following day.
DAY FOUR, OCTOBER 27
We rise for yet another simple and fulfilling breakfast and pay a visit to a nearby home where a local explains the habits and idiosyncrasies of Atacaman life. That afternoon, David, Ezra, another classmate named Joe and I set off for the San Pedro bus station and caught the two o'clock to Calama, beginning our journey north into Peru and, eventually, Machu Picchu.
Photos courtesy of Vigdis A. Qvale and Lauren Richmond.
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