Brett's Southern Crossing

My last stop in my stay in San Pedro de Atacama was to visit the world’s largest copper mine, the Chuquicamata mine in northern Chile.  The mine is located just outside of Calama, about 1 hour away from San Pedro.

I began to get somewhat obsessed with visiting this mine.  It appealed to me initially for two reasons.  First, I had seen the mine on a show on the Discovery Channel called “The 10 largest holes in the world.” It featured pit caves, mines, canyons, etc and this mine was one of the largest.  Second, during my two months at Universidad de Belgrano we watched The Motorcycle Diaries twice to practice reading Spanish (the subtitles).  During the movie, Che Guevara meets a Chilean couple who have lost their land to the Anaconda Mining Company, a US company which owned the mine at that time.  He watches them try to find day labor in the mine and nearly ends up in a fight with the foreman choosing day laborers.  It was one of the first experiences that caused him to adopt his communist political philosophy.  Well, that mine was Chuquicamata so I thought it would be nice to connect my trip through Chile back to my spanish courses.

My first try to visit the mine, while on my way to San Pedro from La Serena, failed when my bus arrived to town quite late and it was too late to make it to the tour.  I thought that it just wasn’t meant to be.  Then, I discovered my planned departure to Salta on a Thursday wasn’t possible because there are no busses to Argentina on Thursdays.  With an extra day in hand, I decided to make another attempt.

The tour starts with a look at Chuquicamata town, which was a company built town for mine workers that was used until just a year and a half ago.  The company provided everything from housing to schools to a hospital to a movie theater.  Now, all the employees have moved to Calama because as the mine increased in size the company town became too close to comply with environmental regulations.  They’ve also buried most of the town under waste rock, which is dumped as close to the mine as possible due to the high amount of fuel the large mining trucks use.

From there, we got a look at the equipment used to pick up and transport the rock.  Only 0.86% of the rock is copper, and the mine produces over 1500 tons of 99.9% pure copper each day.  If you do the math, this means they have to process over 175,000 tons of rock each day.  First they blast a section of earth with explosives each afternoon to break it up into pieces.  Next, a large shovel scoops rock and loads it into the back of massive dump trucks, which then carry it up to the top of the mine so the copper can be extracted and purified.  Finally, the pure copper sheets are hauled to the port at Mejillones by rail directly from the mine.

They showed us an old shovel which can scoop about 20 tons in each shovelful.  It takes 12 people to operate the shovels, and they’re the size of a building.  In the modern process they use even larger shovels can scoop 50-100 tons per shovelful.  The mining trucks carry about 3 shovelfuls of rock at a time, weighing up to 300 tons.  The mine has 100 trucks and 9 shovels and operates 24×7.  Each mining truck costs $4 million USD and lasts 10 years.  The tires cost $40,000 USD and last for a year.  I think each truck had 6 tires.  The gas tank holds 4000 liters of diesel!  The truck itself operates the wheels with electric power generated by the diesel engine.  The trucks are about the size of a small two-story house and need just one driver.

The last stop on the tour is a lookout built on the top of the mine.  It’s really amazing to see a pit 5km long, 3km wide, and 1km deep.  Each day as they blast out more earth the length of the mine increases while they keep the same width and depth.  Standing on the ridge it’s almost like being in an airplane…you can see tiny mining trucks driving along the many switchbacks in the distance.  The opposite wall of the mine is so far away they look like ants crawling along.

The only disappointment of the tour is that we weren’t able to see any of the processing of the rock into copper.  I suppose it’s no surprise, the process involves crushing the rock, water and chemical baths, high heat, etc.  Too dangerous for tourists to be wandering around.

All in all, it was definitely worth a day to see!  And it will be even easier for people in the future, we were told that our tour was the last one that needed to arrange transportation to Chuqicamata.  In the future they’ll be picking people up at the company’s headquarters in Calama.  The tour is free every day at 2pm and our guide was bilingual so anyone passing through northern Chile might want to see if they can stop in Calama for a visit.

San Pedro de Atacama is mostly a tourist town, but it has kind of an old-west charm that makes it a nice place to stay.  Located in the midst of the driest desert in the world, the Atacama,  there are a surprising number of great tours and day trips available.

To start, one of the largest geyser fields in the world is nearby and a popular day trip is a sunrise visit to see the geysers.  They only erupt as the temperature changes from cold to warm in the morning, so a 4:30am departure is essential to get there while it’s still dark.  The desert is absolutely frigid at night, and it seems that hardly anyone is quite prepared for below-freezing temperatures.  While we spent an hour watching the geysers (here, more steam than the huge amount of water you’d see in a place like Yellowstone), while our driver cooked breakfast:  Once the geysers stopped erupting we were led to one of the pools, where bags of eggs and chocolate milk had been left.  Since the water was at the boiling point the eggs were hard-boiled and the chocolate milk was steaming hot.  By now I was frozen to the bone and this might have been the most satisfying breakfast of my life!

By now we’d been up what seemed like half the day and it was only 9AM.  The tour continued with visits to some traditional desert villages, where llamas are ranched.  The villages have between 20-100 residents.  Although we were told that in reality people primarily live in nearby cities and leave only a few people at the village at any one time to tend the animals.  The change is due to mandatory education laws for children, which are strictly enforced.  There isn’t a lot to see in the villages, but they were selling marinated llama-kebabs which were very tasty.

Even though the tour takes a while we were back by noon, so I decided to see the sunrise and sunset in the same day with a visit to the Valley of the Moon.  A driver took a group of us into the desert to a bunch of different viewing points to see both the desert landscape as well as the ring of volcanoes that surrounds the area.  The culmination is the sunset, which causes the soil in the area to glow red.  And since it was the full moon, we got a nice view of that set against the reds of the sunset.

The next day I went with a group to see some of the lagoons and salt lakes nearby.  It was a lot of driving and not a lot of seeing, but the landscape is interesting and there are a lot of pink flamingoes and other birds in the lagoons.

San Pedro has a few other possibilities.  I wanted to do some stargazing, since I’d failed to find a clear night in La Serena.  It turns out the largest tourist observatory in the world is in San Pedro…an outfit called SPACE which is actually a French astronomer with a collection of the best telescopes for stargazing that he trucks out into the desert.  The setting is perfect, with almost no light pollution, a cool desert night that prevents any thermal currents in the atmosphere from disrupting the view, and it’s a place where there are almost never clouds.  I was thwarted again though, SPACE closes for 4-5 days around the full moon because the moon’s light prevents them from seeing some of the more interesting things like galaxies and the “milky” part of the milky-way.  I don’t know anything about astronomy, but I’d like to come back someday to do one of these star tours and also see some of the big observatories.  Right outside of San Pedro they’re building the largest in the world – a huge array of radio telescopes as a collaboration between a bunch of governments around the world.

San Pedro also offers sand boarding and trips to the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, so it’s really a great place to fit in to any trip in Chile.

I’ve been asked a few times about traveling in Chile after the earthquake, damage I’ve seen, etc.  The bottom line is that during a month in Chile I didn’t see any.  I heard the Belles Artes museum in Santiago had some damage to it’s face but I didn’t visit there.

In Pucón, when we visited the waterfall, we were given a lift back to town by a couple from Concepcion who were living in their summer-house in Pucón due to the damage or destruction of their house in Concepcion.  From what I heard, the majority of the damage was located in the area around Concepcion although some places as far as Santiago were also damaged.  I didn’t visit Concepcion because I heard that the bridges were out, electricity and water were spotty, and generally the situation was focused on rebuilding.

I had also planned on trying to arrange a trip in Valparaiso to Robinson Crusoe Island, more correctly known as Archipelago Juan Fernandez.  These islands supposedly have some great scuba diving available, and it’s possible to visit by making arrangements with the Navy to go out on one of their supply ships (or you can just fly, but where’s the fun in that?).  Unfortunately, every building on the island was destroyed by a tsunami caused by the earthquake.  The story of how almost all the inhabitants were saved by a 12-year-old girl is amazing, if you haven’t heard it.

When I went to visit the Chuquicamata Mine, which I’ll talk about a few posts from now, I went to the mine with two local residents of San Pedro who worked at a luxury hotel.  My hostel was $16 a night, their all-inclusive hotel is $2200 for 3 days.  So it’s used a bit by travelers looking for top class accommodations, but mainly by corporate groups on retreats (often US companies).  They told me that lots of groups were canceling their bookings and that the hotel was only about 20% occupied despite it being high season.  I would have to think that the state of the economy is playing a role here, probably a big one.  But one example they gave was LAN Airlines, which canceled a booked conference to move it to Argentina.  This is especially absurd in San Pedro…it’s incredibly far north and probably didn’t even feel a tremor from the quake, and even if it it did the attractions around San Pedro are the desert, which is impossible to damage!  And for LAN, an airline based in South America, it seems especially inexcusable.

My advice if you’d like to help out Chile would be to visit.  Everything you want to see is fine, and it would help to offset the lost tourist dollars from people who have been scared away for nothing.

An hour west of Santiago is the port city of Valparaiso, with a nice harbor and steeps hills skirting the coast.  I liked this city, because the houses were painted bright colors and built into whatever nooks and crannies the geography of the hills allowed.  Murals were painted everywhere, and one part of the city even has an “outdoor art museum” of murals painted by local art students.  The naval headquarters is also located here, which leads to the interesting sight of submarines sitting next to freighters in the harbor.

It’s also dirty, crowded, and sometimes smelly, but for whatever reason I liked the feel of the place…it had character!  Just north of Valparaiso is a town called Viña del Mar, much calmer and skirted by nice beaches.

My next stop after Pucón was Santiago.  I had heard a lot about Santiago from people who were heading south, and it seemed to me that people either love it or hate it.  I would probably fall in the “hate it” camp, although really that’s too strong a word.  Santiago felt very comfortable to me, and I realized that it seemed just like a big American city…say, Dallas.  Lots of new buildings with tons of glass, kind of sprawly, wide streets, everyone seemed to have a car, and fast food and malls everywhere.  It seemed like the opposite of Buenos Aires, which is older and more classical, with taller buildings, more narrow streets, everyone seems to use the bus or taxis, and with more one of a kind businesses.

Santiago Fish Market

Still, there’s nothing negative to say about Santiago.  It’s perfectly pleasant.  I had the misfortune of spending most of my time there with a toothache and searching for a dentist.  I spent all day Friday on the bus coming from Pucón, then Saturday couldn’t find any dentist open including the emergency dental clinics.  Finally on Sunday I went to an ER, and was promptly seen by a maxilo-facial surgeon, who took and x-ray and said “yep, it’s infected.”  He drilled a little hole in the back, flushed it out with some saline, plugged the hole with cotton, and told me to come back on Tuesday for a root canal.  If you’re curious, the cash cost of an hour with a surgeon in the ER plus an x-ray at a private hospital in Chile was about $130, and a root canal is $65 (for the first of 3 necessary appointments).  A few Chileans I mentioned this episode to gave me funny looks and asked why I didn’t go to the free hospital.  Both Chile and Argentina have free state operated hospitals that are by most accounts decent…I just went to the place I saw walking down the street.

In the end I didn’t do much in Santiago, so all of this combined has probably affected my view a bit.  In the end I went to the central market, which is a huge and very cool seafood market with little seafood restaurants packed into every corner of the building.  Around the edges are huge piles of slimy fish and squid for restaurants to buy from.  I stopped by the President’s mansion, which is big although kind of boring looking.  And I went to Cerro San Cristobal, which is a tall hill that has nice views of the city and lots of stairs and terraces to hang out in.

Entrance to Cerro San Cristobal

One nice thing about Santiago is that if you love it you can just stick around, but as soon as you get bored you can get a bus at any time to Valparaiso and Viña del Mar since they’re just an hour away.

I would say that I’ve enjoyed Argentina a little more than Chile overall, but my two favorite places so far have been Torres del Paine and Pucón, which are both in Chile.  After leaving Bariloche (Argentina) I spent a night in San Martin de los Andes (Argentina), which is a relaxed little ski resort town.  There are some parks nearby, but no good transit and since it wasn’t ski season I immediately caught a bus over the mountains into Chile to see Pucón.

Pucón is known as an adventure town.  You can white water raft, white water kayak, rappel, rock climb, canyon (rappelling down waterfalls), and do canopy tours (zip lines in the trees).  The main attraction is Volcan Villarrica, an active volcano that many people come to climb.  My timing was perfect…the guides were saying that for the past 2 years the lava hadn’t been around, but only a week earlier the volcano had become more active and lava could be seen from the rim of the crater.  Apparently only a few volcanos in the world have visible lava from the rim.  At night I could see the sulfur gas glowing red at the peak of the volcano, and the town has an evacuation alarm that is tested daily at noon along with “Volcano Evacuation Route” signs that I sadly forgot to take a photo of.

I had booked a dorm in a hostel called El Refugio.  This is a can’t-miss hostel I’d recommend to everyone.  The owner is a dutch guy named Peter who is very helpful and the hostel itself only has an 8-bed dorm, a 6-bed dorm, and a double room.  It’s one of the smallest I’ve stayed in, and with only 14 people it had a great community feeling.  We all knew each other, and it helped that everyone comes to Pucón to do the same thing:  Climb Volcan Villarrica.

I spent most of the time here with Matthias, from Germany, and Sofia, from Sweden.  Peter arranged for us to use a small guiding outfit called Sierra Nevada, which was a great choice.  There are a few well-known guide companies in town that take groups of 30-40, but we always had more like 6-8 and it was a better experience that way.  The best thing was that our guides were willing to recommend not trying to climb on a bad day without charging a fee.  It took 3 days of attempts for us to make the summit, and we saw the “big” companies trying to push ahead on awful days, probably charging their full $45000 CLP fee even as we watched dozens of people being forced back by the weather.  Our guides were relaxed cool guys and I would highly recommend Sierra Nevada!  The first day we drove in a van to the base of the volcano, but the guides recommended we not attempt to climb.  It was foggy, extremely windy, and bitterly cold…a truly miserable day.

Matthias, Sofia and I were happy enough to try again the following day, but two other people from our hostel who had to leave decided to try it anyway.  As it turns out they almost made it.  The crater had too much gas around it to go the last 100 meters, and another guide with a French tourist went all the way but got very sick from breathing the gas.  Our hostel-mate seemed exhilarated by having made it as far as he did, but he described his face as turning blue from the cold and being covered in snot from a constantly running nose due to the wind.  I wasn’t looking forward to trying again at this point.

But our guides felt the weather would be better the next day, and so Sofia, Matthias and I got up at 5am to try again.  This time when we arrived the guides seemed happy with the weather and the look of the gas hanging over the peak, and we rode to the base of the volcano again.  We set up our gear and started to climb.  It was a bit windy and cold, but manageable.  The first third of the climb follows some chair lifts installed in the base of the volcano, which operates during the winter as a ski area.  It was miserable, very steep and on a lot of loose dirt and gravel so that with every step I slid back halfway.  We took shelter in a small building at the top of the lift to rest and have a snack.  But our guides weren’t happy, they told us the wind had shifted direction and was holding all the volcanic gas at the peak.  We could continue if we wanted, but they didn’t expect us to reach the top.  We waited for an hour to see if the wind would shift again, and then returned to the bottom to try again the following day.

Taking a Rest

The third day was do-or-die for all of us, everyone wanted to continue moving and we weren’t going to stay to try for a fourth attempt.  When we got up at 5am again things didn’t look good.  There was wind whipping through the trees outside our hostel and it seemed to us that the situation would be as bad as the earlier days.  Fortunately our guides knew better and told us that conditions looked great and they were very confident that we’d reach the top that day.  We were still skeptical but we rode to the base of the volcano and were shocked to find that it was absolutely calm without so much as a breeze.  It was even possible to hike in a t-shirt, whereas the earlier days had required as many layers as I could put on.  Since the wind was absent, the ski resort was running their lift and we had the option to skip the first 400 meters of vertical climb (for a fee).  None of us were too proud not take advantage.  From the top of the ski lift we climbed several hours up the volcano until we reached the beginning of the ice and glaciers.  We put on our helmets and crampons, and the guides taught us how to use our ice axes for extra stability and to stop a slide in case of falling.  From there we took another few hours of climbing on the ice and finally reached the crater.

Sofia says "we made it!"

It was really a spectacular sight.  Every few minutes bright-red lava would shoot up from inside the crater, bubbling and splashing against the sides.  There was a slight breeze carrying the sulfur gas away from the crater, so we were able to stay as long as we liked.  It was barely even chilly, despite the fact that we had ascended 1400 vertical meters.  I thought back to the guy who had pushed on to the top the first day, turning blue, covered in snot, with people getting sick, and was very glad we had the time and patience to stay and follow the advice of our guides.  Most people have no trouble getting to the top the first try, so I would definitely recommend Pucón!

The return trip to the bottom may be the most fun of all.  Instead of hiking back down to the end of the snow/ice line, we slid down halfpipes worn into the steeper hills, using our ice axes as rudders and brakes.  It was like extreme sledless sledding, and I began to wonder why you can just go to ski resorts to sled!

Matthias, Sofia and I did one other amazing thing while we were in this town.  Our first day we tried to climb Villarrica we wound up returning to our hostel by mid-morning since we didn’t even start to climb.  We were looking for another activity, and Peter (the hostel owner) mentioned a waterfall he knew of that we could hike to.  It was definitely an off-the-map type of place that wouldn’t make it into any guidebook, and the instructions were roughly like this:  Take a taxi collectivo to a certain road, walk 2km up the road until you find the gate of an abandoned housing development.  Hop the gate and walk to lot 17, then look for a little trail into the woods.  Head down the trail until you see a horse fence.  Climb the horse fence and follow the ravine until you find a path heading down into it.

This kind of local knowledge is unbeatable and it turned out to be amazing.  When we got to the bottom of the ravine, we found a little semi-circular sheer rock cliff with a waterfall at least 150 feet high crashed down into a pool at the bottom.  The walls of the cliff were covered in intense green moss and vines.  I’ve never seen anything like it, and I loved that it seemed a bit like a secret, just for us.

While in Ushuaia I met an Aussie girl named Lauren in my hostel, and we decided to head to Puerto Natales, Chile to hike one of South America’s most famous places, the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine.  The park is named after three large spires of rock that form three of the mountains in the area.  There are two well known hiking routes here:  The first is a 5 day hike called “the W” which is named after the shape of the route on the map.  “The O” is a 9 day circuit that includes a loop around the back side of the park, connecting the ends of the W.

After a month in Patagonia, I was really looking forward to this since I hadn’t yet done any camping.  The toughest part about backpacking for a long period is that you never have the right gear.  I don’t have warm enough clothes for very cold places, I don’t have cool enough clothes for very hot places, and I definitely don’t have room for camping gear.  Torres del Paine is great place to visit for a true Patagonian experience.  You need gear for very cold night temperatures, warm day temperatures, wind up to 70+km/hr, and frequent rain.  But many people go to Torres del Paine and it’s possible to rent anything necessary in Puerto Natales.

Lauren and I started by going to a talk that happens every day at 3pm at a hostel called Erratic Rock.  This may be my favorite hostel I’ve ever stayed in – amazing staff, the best breakfast in South America, and just a really great atmosphere all around.  In addition to the hostel they also have a guiding business for rock climbers and rent gear.  But they’re best known for “the talk” which provides advice on all the logistics for going to Torres del Paine (routes, food, gear, etc).  We wanted to leave the next morning, which turned out to be a tight time schedule.  By the time we rented gear, packed our packs, shopped for food, and made arrangements for luggage storage it was time to get to sleep.

We started early in the morning with a bus to the park, which takes about 2 and a half hours.  From there it’s possible to hike the W route from east to west.  We wanted to hike west to east, so we immediately took a catamaran across a large lake to the opposite side of the park, and began our trek by hiking 5 hours to Campamento Grey.  This is a really beautiful hike along Lago Grey (Lake Grey), finishing at the start of Glaciar Grey which stretches back into the distance as far as the eye can see.  Parts of this route were extremely windy, strong enough to knock you over.  The campsite was busier than I expected – at least 25 tents and roughly 50 people spent the night there.  Chunks of glacier ice that had calved off the glacier float past the camp at the lakeshore, and we spent the evening cooking dinner and chatting with a pair of Americans, a pair of Aussies, a two pairs of Brits.  It took a few tries, but we even managed to pitch our tent with all the poles inserted correctly!

Day two started by hiking the same route as day 1, then continuing east to Campamento Italiano (about 9 hours total).  This campsite is located at the entrance to a valley between two mountain ranges, and as we began to set up camp we realized we would be seeing the same people in camp each day.  By the end of the trip we had made a bunch of really great friends!

Most of day 3 is spent without a pack.  The idea is to hike into the valley and climb up to a mirador with great views of the towers one one side and Cerro Paine Grande (a Cerro is a hill or mountain) on the other side.  Despite not having a pack the hike is very steep and a good challenge.  The round trip took me 6 hours, and we still had to hike another 2-3 hours to hike with our packs to the next campsite called Campamento Los Cuernos.  We also had a late start in the morning, which put our arrival at the camp around dusk.  We resolved to get up earlier the next day so we could arrive with time to spare for a change.

The fourth day is the longest hike, at around 18km.  We got off to a rough start by having to double back to camp for a forgotten item after 1 hour on the trail.  Then, Lauren was having a lot of knee pain so we took it easy on our pace.  We reached our final campsite, called Campamento Torres near dusk again despite heading out at a decent hour in the morning.  The hike was again beautiful, but the last 1-2km I began to feel pretty queasy in my stomach.  Our friends Emily and Jane had somehow managed to score fresh bread and eggs from one of the refugios we passed (cabins you can stay in for a fee, if you don’t want to camp) and we began to plan a feast although I was not feeling well at all.

Well this turned out to be an omen, because about 20 minutes later Lauren puked for the first time and shortly afterward I did too.  We had either food poisoning or water poisoning, and were up all night vomiting.  Thankfully the Conaf ranger was very helpful and let us spend the evening in his warm cabin, giving us tea and tang between each bout of vomiting.  Eventually I was so tired I had to sleep, so I went to the tent and crashed.  Lauren ended up sleeping on a couch in the ranger’s room.  In the end, I think I threw up 6 times and Lauren maybe a dozen.  I’ve had better days!

The next morning I was actually feeling pretty decent.  That morning the plan had been to get up an hour and a half before sunrise to climb up to a mirador and watch the sunrise over the towers.  We obviously didn’t do that, but neither did anyone else because the weather was poor and it had rained during the night.  We managed to drag ourselves out of camp for the 2.5 hour hike out of the park just in time…when we arrived it was only 15 minutes before the minibus was scheduled to arrive for us.  I’m not sure if we could have done it without energy from a few packets of tang donated by an English couple we had been cooking with in the evening.

Getting back to town and having a nice hot shower was amazing.  We tore down our gear, got cleaned up, had a nap, and then met a big group of people from the trail at a restaurant for dinner.  And by this time I had essentially not eaten in 2 days, plus hiked almost 30km!  It was possibly the best meal I’ve ever had!

All in all, despite the fact that we got so sick that last night Torres del Paine is what I would recommend most from all of Argentina and Chile.  Just make sure to rent trekking poles, they’ll save you from ending up on your rear more times than you can count between the steep rocky terrain and high winds.