San Pedro de Atacama
One more excursion, then the truck gets a bath.

Saturday August 11

Our original itinerary had a visit to the village of Toconce via  "the highest road in the world" penciled in for today the 11th of August. After having experienced breathtaking high-altitude roads and cold nights in high-altitude CONAF refugios at Salar de Surire and Parque Volcan Isluga, our enthusiasm for taking on more of this type of activity had diminished. 

Everyone remembered our brief stopover in Antofagasta  fondly - the warm, oxygen-rich, and fresh-smelling sea breezes - the mall with a big bookstore (that should be selling Harry Potter in English by now...).  I don't remember who suggested skipping Toconce altogether, but the suggestion was eagerly accepted by everyone. This left two extra nights on the agenda, and Anna proposed spending one more day in San Pedro de Atacama and then driving to Antofagasta one day earlier than the original schedule. Good plan. Less moving around. More time for relaxing and studying.

How to spend our final day here ? Lynn and I tromped around the ruins of an ancient Aymara village in the late morning while the kids rode bikes again. 

The ruins at Quitor are on a hill overlooking the oasis of San Pedro de Atacama. Safety and military advantage must have been more important than convenient water.

Habitacion con una vista...

Having a limited Spanish vocabulary can be dangerous... but common sense can sometimes fill the knowledge gap.  "Now why might they put a sign near the edge of a crumbling cliff slightly off the path where the tourists are supposed to be walking?"

The natural forces of erosion can produce some amazing patterns, pictures, and forms.

View of the Atacaman Altiplano from the ruins at Quitor.

I picked a terrible restaurant for lunch, a transgression which I tried to repair by buying ice-cream.  Then Tom and Anna retreated to the hotel to work on school with Lynn, and I dragged Geoff to the small lot where we had been parking the truck. Along with our truck there were a few vehicles driven by hotel guests, but these were out-numbered by the assortment of mini-busses and pickup trucks that the hotel uses to transfer guests to and from the airport in Calama, as well as take them on day trips to the local sight-seeing destinations. 

After our crazy driving day up to the Geysers, the truck was dirtier than ever. In crossing several small streams, the powdery dust coating its bottom and the wheel-wells had been coagulated into a thick clay crust. A fine layer of powdery dust coated the inside where we sat, and our shoes had dragged in and deposited pebbles everywhere. The rear bed of the truck (where we put most of the luggage), was coated with a much thicker layer of dirt, as was every single piece of molding, trim, crack, and hinge in the doors. 

The hotel's pickup-trucks and mini-busses get dirty as well, and after every use their drivers spend several hours bathing and vacuuming them in the parking lot. This had not gone unnoticed by us owners of the ungodly truck. So I broke down and interrupted the afternoon nap (sleeping in his mini-bus) of one of the drivers to ask him if I could use the car washing tools on my truck. At first he thought I was asking him if he'd wash our truck, and although he couldn't quite bring himself to say "No way!"  He was clearly not inclined to offer more than a brief hose-down. He grabbed the power-washer and started squirting away - trying to make it clear that he'd be willing to do this but not much more. "No no can I do it myself please?"  (at least that's what I tried to say). Finally he understood and shrugged and said "sure!" - then happily resumed his nap.

Without the power washer we wouldn't have been able to accomplish much. Even with it, and a broom and several mops and a shop-vac, the best that Geoff and I could do was to get the inside of the truck "reasonable" and to remove enough of the outside dirt so as the truck now resembled an ordinary dirty car and not the heavily-caked catastrophe that it had been. Of course in cleaning the truck, we had made ourselves and our clothing quite filthy. I wonder how many more times we'll get the truck this dirty and how long we might have to go without the services of a handy power-washer.  It's a scary thought that I hadn't thought to consider before starting this adventure. But problems and worrying priorities change. For now, everything is fine and dandy.  We're heading to Antofagasta!

-Rolf

p.s. - dinner was fine.  Lynn declared it her favorite meal so far in Chile (and the best restaurant). I hope I am finally forgiven for being the root cause of a bad lunch.