San Pedro de Atacama

Atacama

“In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim of precedence.  The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kindships” [my emphasis] (McCarthy, Blood Meridian). 

“The desert says nothing.  Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like a bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation.  In its simplicity and order it suggests the classical, except the desert is a realm beyond the human and in the classicist view only the human is regarded as significant or even recognized as real” (Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire).

"When you are silent and you listen, you can hear the salt cracking in the afternoon sun" (Cristobal, our guide through the Valle de la Luna).

Last week, we headed up north to the Atacama Desert.  We flew into Calama, a mining town about which many uncharitable things have been said, and took a van to San Pedro de Atacama;  with a small commercial district that could easily fit into the space of downtown Athens, San Pedro has the feel of a hippy college town without the college.  This little hamlet exists because of its situation (the Spanish word is "ubicación") at the epicenter of an array of freakish geological phenomena in the driest desert in the world. 

Erica has much better pictures of San Pedro.  In the morning,
the streets are empty and surprisingly serene.

A bus drive away from San Pedro, there are thermal baths of Puritama:

The moonscape of the Valle de la Luna:

The 185-degree waters of El Taito Geysers:

The pre-Columbian ruins at Tulor (accessible by bike):

And all kinds of good restaurants and interesting people to meet.  In fact, on the first night in San Pedro we were walking down the main street and we hear "Zach!  Zach!"  Two boys from St. Paul's--another Paul and older brother Claus--are hailing our son enthusiastically from amidst the Fiestas Patrias crowds.  Their parents, Jensen and Marcela, were incredibly generous to let us tag along on their adventures.

The cliché about the desert is the quality of the light.

The desert is beautiful in its own way.  It is not my landscape; both Erica and I craved green after a short few days.  I felt like an alien in the desert. But there is a reminder of the immensity of time and one's own relation to dust, which is a good thing to be reminded, however humbling.