The Atacama Part I

I have been to a lot of incredible places and had many unforgettable experiences on this South American Adventure of mine, but all great things must come to an end and the end of my trip has finally come. But not before one last big adventure.

Mountain Carie will argue this point, having had probably the most moving experience of my life while out trekking at the end of the world in November and, in February, having fallen madly, desperately, incurably, heartbreakingly in love with Antarctica, but Science Carie thinks that I saved the best adventure for last.

I spent three weeks in the Atacama Desert. The Atacama Desert. THE Desert of deserts. A desert stretching 100,000-130,000 km² (depending on how it's defined), about the size of the entire state of Virginia, across northern Chile, Argentina, and southern Peru.

Marsscape in the Atacama

Sandwiched between the glittering beaches of the Pacific Ocean and some of the tallest, baddest mountains on the planet. Long considered the driest place on Earth (the ice-free McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica are actually the driest, but I’m sort of reluctant to count anything in Antarctica as being on Earth). There are places in the Atacama where rain has never been recorded. And it’s been a desert for millions of years. The Atacama is peppered with active volcanoes, spewing geysers, immense salt flats, bizzare shallow lakes—some of the most extreme environments imaginable. It’s Mother Earth’s badass, mean, absolutely non-nurturing, stab-you-in-the-eye-socket-and-steal-your-lunch-money side.

It’s an astrobiologist's dream come true. It’s Mars on Earth.

It’s a place this geobiologist has dreamed of visiting ever since I first read a paper about how, although the soil in the direst parts of the Atacama are essentially sterile (unlike everywhere else on Earth) since life needs water and water is absent, there are cyanobacteria partying it up while buried inside salt crust fortresses which, because salt draws water, provides just the teeny amount of moisture sucked from the extremely low humidity in the air that lets life eek out an existence. Life living inside a salt crust. Because it’s more hospitable than the outside world. That, my friends, is badass.

Microbes chillin' in salt crust because, whatever, they like it there.

Getting there

Although technically I first entered the Atacama desert a month earlier en route to Peru, and was in her again while puking in the air over Nazca, I consider the start of this adventure to have been when I got off of a flight from Lima in the sketchy Peruvian border town of Tacna.

I had been dreading this part of my journey. Peru had me on edge ever since my welcome mugging in Lima. Up until Lima, I had led a largely charmed travel life, my experience reminding me that people everywhere are kindand nice and enjoy making human connections and are mostly to be trusted. That strangers are friends you haven’t met yet. My experiences with strangers in Peru were largely quite different. There were wonderful exceptions where I interacted with truly lovely, warm, interesting, good-hearted people. And I recognize that there are tragic reasons that things are the way they are in Peru. And I know my whole perception of the country and its people was soured by that first hour in Lima. But interacting with Peruvians felt like interacting with a bunch of ravenous thieves who would happily slit your throat in order to empty the contents of your pockets. It was stressful.

View from my hostel room in Lima

I still want to go back someday and give Peru a second chance, see more of some of the incredible landscapes there, eat more of the amazing food, and hopefully have more interactions with the Good People who I’m sure also inhabit the country. But this time a few weeks was enough. Being in Peru had me sleeping with one eye open and walking around with my hand on mypocket knife and it wore me out. So when I read warnings about how Tacna was a den of thieves and drug smugglers and that travelers should be on their guard at all times, I took the warnings seriously. And I wasn't thrilled that my travel plans for the day required:

1. Getting a taxi from my hostel in a sketchy neighborhood in Lima (and horror stories about Lima taxi drivers abound) to the airport.
2. A flight from Lima to Arequipa to Tacna (at least, I hoped, the flight would be reasonably safe? hopefully my neighbor isn't going to pick my pockets if I fall asleep?).
3.  Getting a taxi (but don’t trust taxi drivers, who are liable to kidnap you) from the Tacna airport to the international bus terminal (a den of thieves, drug dealers, and other miscreants) on the other side of town.
4. Finding a “collectivo” (= car full of strangers, hopefully ones who aren't thieves, drug-dealers, rapists, or others willing to slit your throat for a buck) ride across the Peruvian/Chilean border (entry point for narcotics smuggling, potentially dangerous), hopefully to the bus terminal in Arica, Chile.
5. At the Arica bus terminal (bus terminals being, again, dens of thieves and drug dealers, with border-town bus terminals being the worst of the worst), hopefully getting a ticket for the overnight bus to San Pedro de Atacama, if not, I’d have to find a place to spend the night in Arica (and where?).
6. If successful, entertaining myself in Arica, hopefully without getting mugged, until my 10pm bus departure (hanging around bus terminals late at night? Not safe).
7. Taking an overnight bus (hopefully my busmates, again, aren't thieves or rapists) to San Pedro.
8. Walking to my hostel, which does not show up on any maps and which I may or may not have a reservation for, in a town with no street names or addresses.

And as if all that wasn't enough, I woke up that morning running a high fever, with a splitting headache, horrible body aches, and a sinus cavity completely filled with mucus. I prayed for everything to please, please please please, go smoothly, and help me survive the next 26 hours, ideally with my luggage and virtue intact.

Miraculously, smoothly is exactly how everything went. My Lima hostel arranged a driver to the airport for me, and the pre-arranged price was fair and when he dropped me off he didn't demand anything extra (unlike how it works with every other taxi driver in the history of Peru). Check-in was painless. My closest neighbor on the flight was another young female tourist from Italy who was blissfully non-talkative, and we had a full empty seat between us. I was able to get a credential-carrying airport-licensed taxi driver to the Tacna bus terminal, again at a reasonable price, and he was friendly and gave me tips for how not to get taken advantage of at the bus terminal.

The Tacna bus terminal was a confusing shitshow and as soon as I arrived I was mobbed by hawkers of collectivo rides, all of whom seemed equally desperate and aggressive and sketchy, and was literally pulled around the terminal to pay various fines and fees that seemed questionable at best but I had no idea what the hell was going on. I ended up herded against my will and better judgment into a car with a rotund, handsy, and particularly aggressive Chilean driver.

Please, sir, I just want to go to San Pedro.

But it all worked out. He was completely crazy, but fun crazy. The nice older Chilean couple I was sandwiched between during the hour and a half ride across the border cracked jokes with me about how crazy the driver was while he loudly belted out one cheesy Peruvian love song after another between stops when he’d roll his window down and try to convince female pedestrians to come over and kiss him. The absolutely incredible part of these scenes was that they worked! Baldness, advanced age, and a shape approaching spherical must be to Chilean and Peruvian women what height, a rock-hard set of abs, and a shiny new Porsche is to women in the U.S.

Once safely delivered to the bus terminal in Arica, Chile (which, I’ll add, looked remarkably unshaken by the magnitude 8.2 earthquake that had hit Northern Chile just two weeks prior), I made a beeline for the Tur-Bus window to see about the availability of overnight bus tickets to San Pedro. I was in luck: there was one seat left, a window seat, which is what I always prefer. And there was a special deal going on so I got the seat for significantly less than the normal price.

Ticket in hand, I dropped my giant backpack off at luggage storage, walked across the street to a seedy but acceptable restaurant to get an early dinner. The way people smiled warmly at me when they walked into the restaurant made all of the stress I had been carrying start to melt off. I was back in Chile. Where people are nice to gringas. I managed to offend the hostess at the restaurant by not eating everything—I tried to explain that I was sick and my appetite was tiny, that the food was very good but I just couldn't eat all of it—but that is an unacceptable excuse in Chile. I had forgotten, back in Chile also meant needing to bring an appetite. But I think she forgave me by the time I left.

Back in the Arica bus station, it was every bit as sketchy as I had feared and I witnessed at least two drug deals, but my luggage was safely in storage and I had my bus ticket in hand. I sat down on a flight of stairs with my head in my hands and waited the final hours before my bus. I collected my bags at the last minute, hopped on the bus, and of all the miracles that day this was the best: my seatmate didn't show up. I had the row of seats to myself. Oh, blissful luxury! I sprawled out across the two seats and conked out. Slept like a champ the whole way to San Pedro.

I was gently woken up by a neighbor who alerted me that we were getting close, and wasn't it a pretty view! Then, once in San Pedro, a nice local woman offered to walk me the mile to the hostel, since it was close to her house. And when I arrived, the hostel hostess, who was sitting out in the dusty yard, greeted me by name. She had been expecting me. Apparently the reservation had gone through; she had just not had the internet connection to respond to my emails. I had a single room, set back away from the street toward the end of the long motel-like row of rooms set off of a dusty central yard strung with hammocks and buzzing with lazy flies. My little room, with mud brick walls painted white (except for one wall painted an oddly fitting shade of pastel orange), a rattan roof, linoleum floor, and a door that swam in its loose frame, a beat-up dresser missing a drawer, a ratty little nightstand, nails stuck as coat hooks into the cracks between the mud bricks, and a tiny little twin bed piled with a dozen thin blankets, all to myself. Relief washed over me like the rain the town was thirsty for. Finally, I could rest.

God bless Chile.

Cat, shredding the crap out of a pigeon it caught right outside my hostel room in San Pedro.

San Pedro de Atacama

Since I arrived with a fever and other trappings of the flu, I spent the first several days in San Pedro de Atacama resting, which consisted of sleeping anywhere from 9-12 hours, lying in bed doing python (the programming language) tutorials (yay! fun!), watching whatever TV or movies the ultra-slow internet connection at the hostel could manage to download, and occasionally walking the 10 minutes into town to get some food. I have so rarely rested on this trip that it felt glorious.

But I soon got antsy. I was in the Atacama desert after all, a place I had been dying to go for many years, and I was not content to sit in my hostel room and be a vegetable. So even though I was still a bit sick (but on the up and up!), I woke up one morning, made a PLAN (I am OCD about making PLANS), and then spent hours wandering around town trying to find the best deals for various activities.

My first order of business: the Tatio Geyser Field. This involved waking up at 3:45 am to catch a 4:00 am bus, which actually meant that I was so worried I was going to miss the bus (since, my phone having been stolen, I no longer had my normal alarm clock and was relying on my laptop to wake me which always makes me nervous) that I got up at 3 am and proceeded to wait for the bus until 4:50 am when it finally showed up. I am decidedly not a morning person, and require a minimum of 8 hours of sleep for full mental function (9 being closer to ideal), so needless to say I was a zombie: brain-dead, exceedingly grumpy, and hungry (but not for brains, having now actually tried brain, I consider it not a breakfast dish). I attempted to sleep during the hour and a half bus ride, and failed, but quickly started to wake up once we arrived and offloaded (and got some coffee and food in me) and I saw…

MICROBIAL MATS!! Wheeeeee!!!!

Me petting a nice, green, gooey, thermophilic mat.

Colorful thermophiles! <3

Not to mention the geysers spewing boiling arsenic-laden water everywhere. Unlike Yellowstone National Park (one of my favorite places on Earth, for many reasons), there were no boardwalks and eagle-eyed park rangers keeping people from crawling all over the geysers and dunking their hands in them (incredibly, nobody in our group fell through the crust and was boiled as tourist soup…something that unsurprisingly occasionally happens at Tatio), which meant that I got to pet all the microbial mats I wanted. I went from grumpy zombie to bubbly five year old within five minutes of arriving at what was essentially Disneyland for astrobiologists.

Once the sun rose (did I mention it was freezing? It was literally freezing. Cool to see the boiling water exit the geysers, flow downstream a bit, then freeze) and everyone snapped their tourist shots, I was reluctantly dragged away, but only because the guide promised me that if I liked bacteria, I’d love our next stop.

Beautiful steaming Tatio at sunrise

The Tatio geyserfield

Our next stop was a hot spring, full of things like brightly colored carotenoid-rich thermophiles and massive ropy streamers of greenish brown somethings and gooey slimy walls covered in, among other things, brilliant green cyanobacteria. And we got to swim in it. I had died and gone to heaven.

Swimming with the thermophiles

Colorful thermophilic phototrophs

The guide literally had to drag me away after that. Probably for the best, since my pale self wasn't holding up too well to the sun. The sun in the Atacama, especially at high altitudes like where we were (over 4300 meters = 14,100 feet) is no ordinary sun. The Atacama has been compared to the surface of the Earth prior to the development of an ozone layer 2.2 billion years ago due to the ultra-high UV flux that fries the Atacama because of its high latitude, extremely high altitude, and lack of cloud cover. Standing around in the high Atacama is like standing under a UV sterilizing lamp (not quite, but close…). Don’t tell my dermatologist I’m here, please.

I was exhausted from all of the day's excitement, but it was Easter, and I got talked into attending the Easter Saturday Night service (didn't know that was a thing) at San Pedro's historic church. Considering that I was raised in a Protestant family I have been to quite a few Catholic services in my life, but interestingly none of them in my native language, and this was no exception. The church was beautiful with its white adobe exterior and cactus wood ceiling, but the service was an exercise in endurance, beginning with a bonfire-side prayer at 10pm and going until shortly before 1am following lots of sitting-standing-sitting-standing, badly-sung hymns, a half-assed and rambling sermon, and the parading around of a shockingly campy plastic Overenthusiastic (considering he had just become zombified following his being nailed to a cross) Jesus. I thought the whole redeeming feature of Catholicism was their masterful pomp and ceremony and perfectly executed music, and this was a sort of disaster. It struck me how utterly non-spiritual the experience was for me when I've had so many beautiful spiritual experiences on this trip--all of them while outdoors and not around a crowd of halfheartedly worshiping humans. I thanked God when the whole thing was over and I could walk back to the hostel and sleep.

San Pedro's church

My next adventure was to go sandboarding. A group of about 20 of us met outside the office in town at 4pm, were handed boards, boots, and a bar of wax, and driven out to the sand dunes in the Valle de Muerte (Death Valley…and it looked quite a bit like California’s Death Valley). The handful of us who said yes to whether or not we had experience snowboarding in powder before were set loose without lessons to go hike the dunes, strap our boards on, and hit the sand. Having watched everyone who tried it quickly faceplant as I was first hiking up I expected to have a rough first few runs before getting the hang of it, but, except for having to wax the crap out of the board before every 10 second run, was very much like boarding in really wet, heavy snow. I quickly scoped out the one jump-like object on the dune, a big rock with a conveniently-placed sand ramp, and spent the rest of our time there amusing myself with that. After the first time I hit it, a guy approached me on my hike back up the dune and after complimenting me on my mad sandboarding skills, introduced himself as a mountain guide and asked  if I wanted to go get wine with him after he got back from his next volcano trip he was just leaving on. I perked up at “volcano trip”. The next guide asked me out to dinner. I was holding out for volcano trip.

Me, sandboarding.

Video of the whole group put together by the agency that took us out.
I'm in there at 3:04, 4:46, and 8:54.

Volcano trip didn't end up materializing (sorry dudes, no volcano, no date), but I did get to see more cool stuff. My next excursion, after a few more days of troubleshooting python, was a trip out to a series of hypersaline ponds (lagunas) in the Salar de Atacama, the large evaporitic basin rimmed by mountains at the edge of which San Pedro sits. The lagunas are fed in part by groundwater, in part by the little rain that sometimes falls in this, the driest non-polar desert. Although the swimming was fun (higher salt content than the Great Salt Lake, so even more floaty), the real highlight was scoping out some of the microbial mats and colonized gypsum crusts around the lagunas. One, Laguna Tebenquiche, had stromatolite-like gypsum domes colonized on the interior by a rainbow of photosynthetic organisms in the textbook orange-green-purple spectral stratification sequence. Living in salt, using it as a safe home in this terribly arid, high-radiation environment. As someone passionately in love with phototrophic bacteria and fascinated by extremophiles, it was the most beautiful thing Science Carie had ever seen. Another place where the guides had to drag me from the scene.

I later found the one paper that has been published on the endoliths I saw. Strangely, they claim to have found Bacteriochlorophyll e in the gypsum domes, which are only produced by the brown-colored green sulfur bacteria (my favorites), but green sulfur bacteria did not show up in their DNA sequences. Suspicious.

Desert crawler used to get to the Lagunas

Selfies on the Salar

Endoliths!!!! :-D Yay!

That night I went out to see the Atacama's legendary night skies on a tour with a Canadian astronomer who also had access to a bunch of nice telescopes that were pointed at Mars (if I squinted I could sort of imagine I could see the polar ice cap), Saturn with its rings, Jupiter with its layers and moons, and some star areas of interest. It was awesome.

Telescope.

My final Atacama excursion was sort of my spiritual goodbye to South America. I filled my backpack with water, some food, and my camping equipment, and wandered out into the desert. I had spent some time looking at Google Earth and talking to locals about the area and decided on where I wanted to go. My trip was cut short by a Calama-bound taxi driver who picked me up just as I was leaving town and gave me a free ride to where my planned path left the main road heading west a few miles out. He was really nice, and after he dropped me off I felt pleased that at least my Spanish had progressed enough in the eight months of travel that I could now have real conversations with the people I hitched rides with.

I surfed down a steep sand dune to get down from the plateau we had driven up to the desert floor below. At the bottom, the ground was a salt crust, and it made crunching sounds as I walked that reminded me of walking on ice-sheeted snow crusts, the sort of “whoompf” that makes my stomach auto-drop because it hails avalance conditions. Except instead of snow, which reforms over the course of seasons, this was rock, and while the occasional scant rain in the area no doubt re-dissolves and moves the salt around a bit each year, I realized that my footprints were not footprints in snow that would be gone with the next melt, and stepped carefully.

Salt. Salt salt salt.

Volcano and gypsum crusts.

I wound my way around a salty riverbed that crunched underfoot. The going was much easier than I had expected, so I was moving way too fast for my plan, which meant that I would soon enter the protected Valle de la Luna in which I knew I was not allowed to camp, so I turned 90 degrees and headed into the labyrinth of ravines that makes up the Cordillera de la Sal, spending the next hour picking my way slowly upward. Eventually I arrived at the top of the Cordillera and, walking along a ridgeline, found the perfect spot with a view of the Valle de la Luna and the two other Cordilleras. It was exposed to the wind, but the views were unbeatable. So I set up camp, which meant I laid my tent out on the ground as a tarp with my leaky sleeping mat (post-repair attempt #20) on top of it and my big fluffy sleeping bag on top of that, since chance of rain was exactly zero.

I snapped a bunch of photos and read a bit while watching the sun go slowly down. I got hungry, and pulled my dinner supplies out of my backpack, and that's when I noticed that my stove was missing from my mess kit. Given that dinner was supposed to consist of spaghetti and soup and all I had was dry noodles and powdered soup, no stove meant no dinner. Luckily I had brought lunch for two days, so I made myself an avocado sandwich and munched on half of a bell pepper while I wondered where my stove could possibly have run off to (I later found it in a grocery bag back at the hostel). The sun set behind the cliff that marked one end of the Valle de la Luna, and I curled up in my sleeping bag to watch the stars come up.

Sunset, as viewed from my Spot.

My spot.

But long before stars, it was the wind that came up: first a breeze and then a howl. I decided to move camp to a calmer spot out of the wind, and quickly before twilight gave way to the black of a moonless night in the desert. I found a spot down the hill a bit tucked into a shallow gully. The gully was narrower than my sleeping mat, so after laying down the tent again as a protective tarp over the sharp crystalline edges of gypsum that made up the gully's walls, I folded in my leaky mat and burrowed myself with sleeping bag into a sort of camping taco.It was surprisingly comfortable, but I couldn't sleep.

The high altitude, cloudless skies, and remoteness made for quite a night sky show. First came Jupiter and Saturn and Mars accompanied by a handful of other bright stars. Then, as the sky faded from gold to purple to black, I was able to spot Orion, the Southern Cross, the stars of the Zodiac, and then the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds. The moon was below the horizon, but the sky seemed almost bright for starlight. I watched satellites race each other across the sky, saw several shooting stars, watched as Scorpio crawled its way slowly up from the horizon as Orion chased Leo below it. When I looked directly overhead such that the dark masses that marked the cliffs that were my home for the night disappeared, I could imagine that I was floating in space, spinning slowly as I watched the stars punctuating the blackness of the universe.

Stars starting to appear at twilight.

Our planet is quite a spaceship, and we are lucky to have it as it zooms at 67,000 miles per hour in circles around the giant, glowing nuclear fusion reactor that powers the machinery needed to maintain the activities of the spacefaring organisms that it houses. Our spaceship, the reactor it orbits, and unknown hundreds of thousands of other spaceships that range in size from too small for a human to ride (but fine for a microbe) to over 300 times the size of ours, are, in turn, zooming around in a massive collection of other power plants, many of which have attendant spacecraft as well, some of which may or may not have passengers we would recognize as living. We are all together as a group racing other groups of varying configurations and sizes outward, ever outward, from the heart of our universe where all matter began.

As someone who grew up wanting to be an astronaut (a dream that grew out of my elementary school dream of wanting to be a "scientific engineer at NASA," whatever that means but which, young Carie would be amazed and proud to know, is pretty damned close to what I actually am now), the thought struck me that getting into a little metal capsule to spin like a flea around the stunningly beautiful and brilliantly comfortable life-supporting spaceship that I'm already traveling on wasn't so much more exciting than what I'm already doing.

But wonder gave way to philosophical terror as it always does when I look too long at the stars and think too hard about how I am just a tiny and transient sack of water only 0.00021% as old as the universe. That as precious and amazing as this life I have is, it will be over soon, long before I have seen even a significant fraction of my own spaceship, let alone understood it, let alone seen, experienced, or understood the rest of our vast, vast, and mysterious universe. That everything I value and experience and want and am is only a flash of electrons being transferred among atoms in a particular configuration that allowed me, for a brief and wonderful moment, to exist. And that I, and everyone and everything I know and value except the universe itself, will cease to exist. According to the belief system I was raised in that's all okay because I posses an immortal soul that, when I die, will float up to some alternate existence that it supposedly came from, having grown in empathy and wisdom or at least amused itself for a time during its brief adventure on Earth.

It's a nice thought, but small comfort on a starry night.

Milky Way snapped from my sleeping bag on the Spaceship Earth.

Timelapse videos from the night camping in the desert

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More Atacama photos up on the Caridaway Album

The Long Road North Part V: Crossing the Antiplano on the Bus to Lima

Video of the journey

Day 1: The Creeps

I woke up early to be at the bus terminal in Jujuy before 7am. I was groggy, having spent the night on the wiggly top of three bunks in an overcrowded and poorly-ventilated hostel dorm room with Argentine and German party animal roommates who kept me up most of the night. I had my 6am revenge, but it didn't feel as sweet as sleeping would have.

My bus was not at the terminal when I arrived, but I was early enough to not be concerned. My bus wasn't supposed to leave until 7:50, but the woman who had sold me the ticket had insisted that it was important for me to be there by 7am, so 7am was when I was there, although it wasn't clear why it was necessary to be an hour early for a bus that, no doubt, was going to show up 2 minutes before departure like every other bus in Argentina ever. When 15 minutes later the bus still wasn't there I got concerned enough to ask at the ticket window, where they told me that I needed to go to another bus station a 10 minute walk away. Why the hell hadn't they put that on the bus ticket?? But I walked over, sweating hard with my giant backpack through a not-particularly-appealing neighborhood. I had been warned about rampant theft in the area and felt helpless with all of my stuff. Fifteen minutes of walking later and there was still no sign of a bus station. I asked the one guy who happened to be out on the street, who pointed further down the road. Cursing under my breath I kept walking, and found nothing. Another guy pointed me back in the direction I had just come from. There had been no buses, no terminals, nothing. But back I walked until, sure enough, I spotted a building with the name of my bus company painted on it, but it was boarded up. There was no bus, were no people, no signs of life…this can’t be right, I thought.

Waiting for the bus

I hailed a taxi back to the main bus terminal and asked again. The guy swore that the boarded-up building was where I was supposed to go. I made him promise twice that if I waited there, my bus would come and get me. He insisted that I was going to miss the bus if I didn't hurry, so I got another taxi back and sat down to wait, sitting alone on the sidewalk in front of the abandoned building on the sketchy street that was empty except for a few men occasionally staggering by reeking of piss and alcohol and making lewd comments as they passed me.

The 7:50 bus departure came and went. So did 8:00, 8:15, 8:30… I started to think that I should go back and give the guy who had promised me I needed to wait there hell for making me wait in a weird place and miss my bus, or make him call the bus and insist that they pick me up at the main terminal where I felt much safer waiting. The whole situation made me really uncomfortable.

I was about to leave when a vehicle drove slowly by, stopped, and started to back up. I wondered if it was maybe a company representative come to inform me that my bus had exploded and wouldn't be coming or something…that or life was about to get unpleasant. I discreetly pulled my Swiss Army knife out of my purse and unfolded a blade. I wasn't sure just what I planned to do with it, it was handy enough for slicing avocados but not exactly a knife-fight worthy blade, but figured a knife was better than nothing on that street. The van pulled up to where I was sitting, and a man leaned out the window.

“Hoooola,” he drawled.
“Hola.”
“Como estas?” 

I wasn’t smiling and was wondering how I’d be able to get proof that the guy was from the bus company, and decided that I wasn’t going to get in a vehicle with anyone I didn’t recognize, and I didn’t recognize this guy.

“Que necesitas?” I asked. What do you want?
“Are you sleeping here?” He asked me in Spanish. Oh great, he thinks I’m a streetwalker.
“No. I’m waiting for my bus. It’s coming soon.”
“No, honey, your bus is late! I will drive you where you are going.” To Lima? I thought. Right.
“No, gracias. I will wait for my bus.”
“Do you want a cigarette?”
“No.”
“Coffee?”
“No.”
“Oh come on pretty girl, come get a coffee with me.”
“No.”
“Just a coffee, come on honey, I’ll take care of you.”

I turned and looked him straight in the eye and said evenly,

“Déjame en paz. Leave me alone.”

He laughed, put his head back in his window, and started to inch the van forward, then stopped again and stuck his head back out the window and made kissing noises at me.

I stood up, knife in hand, and yelled,

“Fuck you, get the hell out of here. Go!”

He left.

Angry and shaken I was gathering my stuff to hail a taxi after an hour of waiting on the street, when suddenly I saw my bus come down the road. It didn't look like it was going to stop, so I walked out into the road and blocked it from passing. Sure enough, after the driver yelled at me and I yelled back and showed him my ticket, it was my bus, and the driver pulled over, threw my bags in the hold, and let me on. I was in a sour, sour mood but I’d be spending the next two days on this bus with this driver, so I figured I should at least try to be nice.

My bus ticket

The bus was full, which was disappointing. After all that time being the only one waiting for it I had hoped it would be a quiet ride, but apparently everyone had gotten on somewhere earlier down the road. There was a guy who had sprawled out across my seat, and I politely asked him to vacate my spot. He was my seatmate and I would spend the next two days smelling his BO, but he ended up being a sleeper, and I was grateful at least for that. Be it plane rides or bus rides or car rides or any rides, I like seatmates best who don’t talk. Ideally ones who don’t smell either, but I’ll take smelly over chatty. I settled into my seat for the two-day journey, then got up to make myself some oatmeal that I had cleverly thought to pack myself, since I hadn’t had breakfast yet. I got back to my seat and realized that, although I had paid for a good seat, my seat was broken and didn’t recline. At all. This was going to be a long 2-day ride.

The drive was scenic, but I had been on the first three hours of it already, so I pulled out a book and read, a book on the history of the Inca Empire.

It looked pretty much like this for 49 hours, except when it was dark.

Usually on these long bus rides I alternate between my Kindle and my laptop and snapping photos with my camera, but after that morning and all the warnings I had heard about thieves in the region, I didn’t trust anyone, and didn’t want to advertise that I had valuable stuff with me. I did shoot some videos with my GoPro, but I kept it strapped to my wrist at all times, and figured if anyone touched it, I’d punch them and scream bloody murder. A tougher target than someone knifing open one of my bags to pull out my camera or laptop. I chided myself for being so paranoid, for behaving differently than I would have in the south. In the south, passengers on the buses were usually European or Israeli tourists. It’s not that tourists don’t steal stuff, but there I was always one target among many. On this bus, I was the only non-Spanish speaker, the only person who didn’t look like they could be Peruvian, and I stood out. On other buses, people smiled at each other and shared snacks. On this bus, I got on as the last person on a full bus, a white girl with fair hair in a sea of dark faces who looked at me not with the warmth and friendliness of the south, but with frowning and suspicious, “what is she doing here?” looks. I’d smile at people, and they’d glare back at me. When I’d turn around to look behind me, there’d always be half a dozen eyes on me, the whole trip, night and day. It was creepy.

Late afternoon rolled around and we had not been fed. I wondered when they were going to bring something to eat or stop for us to get food, since I hadn't brought anything to eat other than my one packet of breakfast oatmeal. The multiple border crossings make having a food bag on the bus impossible as any food would be confiscated. Besides, my ticket read “con servicios” which means “we will feed you on the bus”, and I figured that would be good enough. At around 3pm we stopped at the Chilean border. In the three hours that we were stuck waiting to get our papers processed I could easily have walked to the nearby gas station and bought something to eat, but we were sternly told to not leave the line, and I assumed bus food would eventually come, as it always had in the past.

My giant green backpack on the border securty scanner.

My chariot for the long, long trip.

No bus food came. After being loaded back onto the bus, a woman selling egg and cheese sandwiches—i.e. everything I’m allergic to—was mobbed by the passengers and I asked the driver if we’d be eating soon. “This is your last chance until tomorrow,” he replied. WHAT?? I asked him again to be sure, explained that I was allergic to the only thing she was selling, and she had just sold out of sandwiches anyhow, that I had no food with me, that my ticket said “con servicios”, that I had nothing to eat. He was unsympathetic. I asked if I could walk to the gas station to buy something. He said no. Low Blood Sugar Carie muttered something obscene as tears welled up, and I skulked back onto the bus, slumped down into my chair, and resigned myself to a night of trying hard not to slice the arm off of my seatmate to grill for dinner.

Luckily there were some distractions from my growling stomach. Movies, as usual. Unusual was that most of the movies were not horror movies, which I was grateful for. My creepily staring busmates were scary enough. Ronan, some heist movie that I didn’t watch, Hangover III, Fast and Furious 7 (Really? There have been 7?), Rocky 7 (Grudge Match), Lone Ranger, a surprisingly not-completely-terrible movie by Sylvester Stallone about an undercover narcotics cop hiding out with is daughter in Louisiana, some terrible-looking movie with Vince Vaughn, and then a disturbing movie based loosely on the even more disturbing true story of an Austrian girl who had been locked up as a sex slave in some creep’s basement. In the movie, the guy was a stranger who had kidnapped her as a child, he waited until she came of age to start raping her, and kept her locked in the basement—except when he chained her to his bed—for 10 years before she escaped. In the real life story, the rapist was the girl’s own father who started raping her when she was 12 and kept her locked up in the basement with her seven children/half-siblings for 24 years before she escaped. That night I had nightmares about the bus driver yelling, "Obedéceme! OBEDECAME!!" (obey me) while I was locked up in the luggage hold.

And I dreamed of food.

Day 2: Welcome to Peru

I woke up dizzy the next morning, having not eaten in a full day. Breakfast didn't come. Neither did lunch, making 30 hours with no food. I slept a lot. We crossed the border to Peru, there was no food at that border crossing. I looked. I did make some friends, though, after one middle-aged woman approached me while we were waiting in line and asked if I understood what was going on. Thinking she was trying to help me, I smiled and thanked her and said I did. She thrust her papers upside down in my hand and asked if I could help her fill them out. At first I was confused. She spoke Spanish, I didn't, and the forms were in Spanish, why did she want my help? Then she started pointing to the lines as if trying to read them, but they were upside-down, and it dawned on me that she couldn't read. So I sat down with her and went through and filled out her forms for her, and just when I had finished, there were three other women waiting. I helped all of them with their forms and waited with them in the customs lines to make sure everything was okay. From then on I had people on the bus who smiled at me. Apparently the people on the bus had decided that the gringa wasn't so bad after all.

Welcome to Peru! After 7 months in Argentina and Chile, I finally made it to another country!

Finally in the mid-afternoon we stopped at a weird mud-gated building that looked like an abandoned warehouse from the outside but was a sort of restaurant on the inside. I elbowed my way to a spot in the line (one thing I had learned after two border crossings with these people was that an unwillingness to use elbows will get you left behind and unfed) and gratefully accepted the blocker-elbowings of a few of my new woman friends to keep my spot, and when I got up to the cashier I asked the women to help me order Lots of Food because I was really hungry. They were happy to hook me up with the best of hearty Peruvian Fare, and when the meal came it felt like the best meal I’d ever had. It helped that, having been starved of spice for the past 7 months, Peruvian food was legitimately flavorful. It also helped that I was famished. The women sat and ate with me, and made it clear that I was now in their protection. I was grateful for it.

Later that evening, we stopped for dinner, and I felt like my whole world was Food. It was glorious. I was in Peru. And I had food. Life was good.

Finally! A meal! Also, Pincapple and Orang.

Back on the bus, people smiled now. Maybe they had been hungry and grumpy, too. It was like being on a bus in Chile, only whereas in Chile people are warm and kind and welcoming immediately, my Peruvian busmates had taken significantly longer to warm up to me. Now that they had though they were all smiles and jokes and curiosity and advice and niceness.

I slept much better that night.

Bus rest stop bathrooms

Day 3: Arrival in Lima

The bus arrived in Lima six hours late. Six hours. Nobody seemed surprised. I didn't mind, since that meant a daylight versus a 4am arrival, giving me more time for bus sleeping, which I had now been at long enough to have worked out the optimal arrangement of baggage to produce a sleeping nest that sort of passed as comfortable. The Lima bus terminal, once we did arrive, was beautiful—an airy, glass-encased building with security guards posted at the entrances checking bus tickets, which seemed like a good sign at the time, but in reality belied the chaos outside.

My morning in Lima quickly got quite exciting. Continued in The Long Road North Part VI: Lima

The Long Road North Part IV: Salta & Jujuy

After seven months of travelling in, out of, and through Argentina, my final stop was its far north.

After Patagonia, visiting the high Andean desert of Argentina topped my wishlist for things I wanted to see in the country. To blame was Fernando and photos he had shown me many years earlier of stromatolites growing in shallow lakes waaay up in the Andes. My timing was off for being able to join Fer and crew on a trip up to his Stromatosite, but I was assured that there was plenty of other interesting stuff to see in the region, Fer’s former PhD advisor Ricardo even hooking me up with a detailed field guide for finding some fossil stromatolites.

So I kidnapped one of Fer’s grad students, Flavia, a friend who I had met two years prior when she was a student and I was helping teach the Geobiology course, and we set off to do some exploring.

I picked up Flavia in her temporary home of Tucumán, or rather I met her at the bus station after an overnight bus from Córdoba and we both jumped on a bus from there to the city of Salta. From there, we picked our way to the car rental agency for which I had what I hoped was a valid internet voucher for a three-day car rental—I was a bit nervous since the price I had found online was less than half what everyone else in the area charged, and I was hoping it wasn't a scam. Turned out it was only a half-scam. First, the car rental agency wasn't open when we arrived, but the hours on the door assured us that it would open later that evening. So we went to a restaurant around the corner and proceeded to order, in succession, everything on the menu only to be told that they didn't have that (You don’t even have empanadas? Or coffee? Or beer? Seriously??) until finally Flavia sarcastically asked what they did have and we both ended up with water and salads. Two hours later, we returned to the car rental agency, which was unaware of our booking but had a vehicle available and was willing to honor the price on my printout, with one exception: they wouldn't throw in the GPS unit and the extra driver that was supposed to be included in the price. I tried arguing for a discount, but to no avail. At least we had a car.

Our car (the silver one) picked up in Salta

It was my first time behind a wheel since I drove up to Portland from Los Angeles way back in August the year prior to drop my car off at my parents’ house before flying to Santiago for the start of this whole adventure. It felt good. Great. It felt great. God I love driving. Especially in places like Los Angeles and Argentina where driving laws are generally viewed as suggestions vs. rules, which turns getting from Point A to Point B is like a contest to see who has the biggest balls / can be the fastest, most cunning maniac. My favorite game. We tanked up on the way out of town (Argentina is like Oregon, where there are station attendants who fill your tank for you) and made a beeline south for Lago Embalse Cabra Corral, where Fernando’s Ricardo had said we could find road cuts with extensive lacustrine carbonate deposits, including stromatolites.

About an hour later, we found them. We had just turned a corner and exited a tunnel of trees when I saw a gleaming bank of a roadcut to my left. The color screamed carbonate, so I slowed, and sure enough I spotted resistant benches that called to me. Flavia protested that we weren't there yet, this couldn't be them, but I pulled over anyways to check it out. And it was a stromatolite goldmine. Several benches of big, beautiful, brainy stromatolites. Big concretions.  Little stromatoliltes. Stromatolites everywhere. We stayed and played for a while before deciding, since the sun was setting, to keep driving up the road and see if we could find any more.

Stromatolite!

Flavia inspecting the stratigraphy

The cool thing about this particular site is that the formation (Yacoraite) is tipped such that the road cuts across its many layers, which means that you get to drive back in time in a giant lake system (also argued to be shallow marine) as you follow the road. The stromatolites we started with were toward the top of the formation, representing the most recent deposits, formed around 68 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous (elsewhere in the formation, there are dinosaur bones and tracks, but who cares about dinosaurs when there are stromatolites?). As we took our magic drive back in time, we saw alternations between shale and carbonates, reminiscent of the Green River Formation in Wyoming where I did part of my PhD thesis work, saw some bright red paleosols, big deltaic deposits, and plenty of things that I didn't know the meaning of but was too busy driving to look in the field guide. We stopped a few more times and found more stromatolitic deposits, but the best ones were the first ones, so we eventually decided to turn around and go back. Since taking fossils and artifacts out of Argentina is highly illegal and I didn't want to risk getting arrested this time (I had to meet my aunt in Peru in a week, otherwise I might have tried it. Getting arrested in a foreign country is an item on my bucket list and getting arrested over a stromatolite would make a great story) I didn't take any samples, but my field assistant may have…

The sun went down and we set off in search of food, stopping at a cavernous but empty (bad sign? We were too hungry to care) restaurant in a tiny village on the side of the road. They had tamales. I loooooove tamales. They also had beer, although it only came in a giant 1.5L bottle and, since Flavia neither drinks nor drives, that left me with a lot of responsibility. I had a few swigs, intending to cap it and save the rest for once we had camped for the night, but was chased down on my way out of the restaurant. Apparently you can’t take an open container of alcohol from a restaurant in Argentina. This had never come up before, so I was unaware, but the waitress literally chasing us down the street made for a pretty memorable scene (it was really good beer!).

Tamales!

Dinner: tamales & beer

I wanted to camp off in the hills somewhere, but Flavia preferred a campground, deeming it safer. Not wanting to drag her out somewhere where she’d be too freaked out to sleep, I went along with the “find a campground” plan, although personally I always consider “no people” to be safer (and quieter and better for a good night’s rest) than “with people”. In the end we decided to head to the municipal campground back in Salta, which was mentioned in Lonely Planet as one of the best campgrounds in the country, spent an hour driving through what seemed like sketchy back-streets in Salta trying to find the damned place, and finally found an urban campground surrounded by the Salta ghetto behind tall barbed-wire fencing. Inside were strange toothless men and party music blaring and I wanted to sleep anywhere but there, but it was late, and we didn't really have other options, so... I drove—despite the campground manager’s wishes that we camp next to him (heeeeellll no, creeper)—to the far end of the campground which was darker (i.e., not directly under a spotlight) and semi-quiet despite the neighbors up until the wee hours of the morning drinking and chatting, set up my tent on the lawn, locked Flavia (with the car keys) into the car, shoved in my earplugs, took a sleeping pill, crawled into my sleeping bag, and tried to sleep. It wasn't ideal, but it was better than driving all night. We woke up with the sun next to what turned out to be an immense, dry swimming pool, which may have explained why the campground got such a glowing Lonely Planet report in other years or seasons. We got the hell out, stopping only for gas station pastries and coffee for breakfast on the way out of dodge.

The giant swimming pool at the urban campground in Salta

First, we went for a romantic drive through the jungle on a windy narrow mountain road. After months of Patagonia, jungle was pretty novel. So green! So lush! Then we passed the city of Jujuy and headed for the mountains—the real ones, the Andes. Our goal: lunch in Purmamarca, home of the Cerro de las Siete Colores (Hill of the Seven Colors).  We were there by one. Flavia desperately needed a restroom, so we booked it into the first café we found, but got a familiar line: the only thing they had available for eating were cheese sandwiches. Screw that, I said, so we offered to pay a dollar to use the restroom and went somewhere else to get our food. Good thing, because we found a great restaurant that served, get this, Llama steaks. They were delicious.

Llama for lunch

Colorful wares for sale in Purmamarca

After lunch, we put the 4WD capabilities of our non-4WD vehicle to the test and explored around the area trying to get a better view of this so-called seven-colored hill. It was really impressive. I wished I had a geologist with me to explain everything, but we had left the range of the field guide (which was also in Portugese, making it a rather difficult read), and pulling out my laptop to consult the papers on regional geology I had downloaded seemed like a good way to make my navigator puke and/or break my laptop.

Exploring around the Cerro de las Siete Colores

We continued on toward the heart of the Andes up a steep half-dirt-half-paved road that switched back and forth through the desert up into the mountains. We could both feel the altitude, the air tasted different, noticeably thinner. We crossed rows of mountains, spotting snow in the distance, until dropping onto the Antiplano, the massive high-altitude plateau (the largest outside Tibet, and the visual similarities are striking) that characterizes much of northern Argentina and Chile as well as most of Bolivia and southern Peru. We drove on toward the Chilean border where we reached our next objective of the day: Salinas Grandes, a huge salt flat (the third largest in the world) that is twice as big as Utah’s famous Bonneville Salt Flat. We parked the car and walked out onto the salt flat, Flavia quickly getting an altitude headache at the nearly 3500m elevation while I felt my body responding to the low oxygen levels (“Breathe faster! Faster!”). We poked around, hoping to see endoliths, but although we did see faint colors in some of the hypersaline pools, there was no life visible in any of the crusts we saw, although we didn't have rock hammers with us to break away fresh chunks. It was beautiful, salt flats always are.

Vicuña standing guard over the Andean Antiplano

Salinas Grandes

Salt sculptor working in Salinas Grandes

I wanted to camp there, in the mountains, so we drove off on a side road until I felt like we were far enough from where anyone could see us, then turned the car 90 degrees and drove straight out into the sand rim of the salt flats, avoiding deep sand as best I could (because wouldn't that be exciting: getting my rental car stuck in a sand drift in the middle of the Andes). The little 2WD rental handled like a champ on the uneven, soft terrain. I drove toward cross-country toward the salt flat until the car was no longer easily visible from the side road. I was hoping to get closer to the rim of the salt flat, but decided not to take any more getting-stuck risks. It was a nice spot, with 360 degree views of mountains and a nice view of the salt. We were just in time for sunset. I quickly set up my tent, unpacked our dinner and a bottle of wine I had bought myself, and we sat and watched the mountains turn pink, and then purple, and then dark as we ate and drank wine straight out of the bottle (even Flavia, who doesn't drink, had a few sips). Flavia retreated back to the car, but I laid with my head out of the tent for a long time.

Our campsite in the Antiplano

Our campsite, as reflected in the bottle of wine we shared that night

The stars were out.

Not just out. The altitude, the long distance from any towns and sources of light, the dryness of the air, and the temporary absence of the moon conspired to make probably the darkest night I had ever witnessed, and the stars were like a glittering ocean overhead. The milky way was bright, and other dull celestial clouds were visible. It was hard to sleep, I was so awestruck by the show over my head. Eventually the moon came up like a spotlight, and I had to bury my head inside my sleeping bag to sleep.

I was awake just before dawn, and sat in the sand and watched the sunrise paint the mountains and salt flats with a range of pastel colors. I felt peace again, something I had been missing in the previous month of nonstop activity and travel. It’s like John Muir’s quote (John Muir has all the best quotes):

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”

Llama tracks in the desert at our campsite

The mountains have always been my cathedral, the place where I’m reminded of my soul and my place in the world. If I go too long without spending quiet time in them, I get antsy, agitated, nervous, stressed. I need them.

Eventually Flavia woke up and we ate breakfast, packed up camp (although I had intentionally parked it on top of a set of bushes, I was a bit worried that the car might have settled into the sand during the night and would be difficult to get out…it was fine), and made our way through a thick fog back down the Andes. We made a detour to stop for lunch in the scenic pueblo of Humahuaca before continuing back down to drop the car off in Salta.

The drive that morning looked like this.

Flavia demonstrating the fierceness innate in Northern Argentinians

Humahuaca

The colorful, scalloped hills of the Quebrada de Humahuaca

We made it to Salta just in time for Flavia's bus back to Tucuman, and just in time for me to wait an hour and a half for the car rental people to bother to show up so that I could drop the keys off. I thought several times of just leaving the keys in the glove box and dropping the car there for them to deal with on their own watch, but after making a dozen phone calls was finally able to wake a napping person who promised someone would be “right there”, “right there” meaning 40 minutes later. I almost missed my bus back to Jujuy, but made it to the bus station with a whopping five minutes to spare. And, of course my travel luck being what it is, I happened to be walking through the main park en route to the bus station just as the weekly pan flute circle started up, so I got a free show in on my way.

Thanks Flavia for joining me on the adventure, and Fer and Ricardo for the tips on where to go! More photos from Salta & Jujuy up on the Google+ Album.

Next stop: a 49 hour bus journey across the Antiplano to Peru.