...which is essentially what we are doing.
We arrive in San Pedro in the Atacama desert on Saturday. As the plane wheels overhead, coming in to land I stare out of the window at an expanse of desert like a rippled brown sheet, dust rising from it like mist. Calama is a small patch of flat dust with some buildings on it and although it is a reasonable sized town it seems somehow temporary, as though the whole thing could be folded up and packed away, to be reconstructed somewhere else. In the bus as we drive from Calama to San Pedro the mountains rise red and burning, capped with incongruous white slivers of snow. The ground we drive on is flat, sandy and scattered with bleached plants and dust devils. The whole landscape has a feeling of being unreal, like a set in a play, or an imagined other works in a film. It's as though some creator has made this section of the universe for fun, but failed to add touches of reality, so that it is like a rather unrealistic set piece.
San Pedro, when we arrive, feels rather similar, though the artist feels rather more human here. It is a natural oasis, seized upon by early settlers and now developed into a tiny, dusty 'one horse town' apparently existing purely for the sake of the tourists. German, American and English voices dominate and the tiny centre of town has tour operators in rows, punctuated only by restaurants and artisinal gift shops. The vendors of these various services seem to be actors, laid on for the visitors, and if it weren't for our hostal, placed as it is slightly outside of town, I might wonder if anyone really lives here.
As it is, our hostal is in a row of residental buildings, and we walk towards town past an incredibly well maintained football ground, some small local restaurants and a market. I am a little relieved, here, to see local faces and hear Spanish voices.
If I have made this out to be a sort of fakery, it really isn't, though there are clearly a fair amount of tourist related purposes and structures here. It is more that the whole place, with its unbelievable landscapes and dusty, laid back, dreamy atmosphere, freezing at night, baking in the day but still managing to be oddly cold in the shade, simply feels like a drifters fantasy, a sort of half asleep dreaming. The altitude helps in that it gives me, at least in the first few days, a sense of unnatural doziness and a soft headache, throbbing gently and rather lazily between my eyes.
Through a mixture of fate and design, we spend the first week here, more or less drifting ourselves, like the slow dust devils and the dogs that live, sleepy and wild, on the open spaces. We have been warned to take things ready for the first few days at altitude, though we are more or less alone among the other travellers, who do not generally have the time to do so. The rest of the week happens mostly because the tours we need to take us to the more inaccessible landscapes which are the reason we are here, are more easily booked for the following week, as the random snowy spell on the mountains recently is causing some of the passes to be, well impassable.
We have blogs to write and the atmosphere lulls us into a sort of drugged, relaxed existence so we sink into it and become the sort of traveller we have met before, lazing gently for days without any obvious sense of urgency. It's refreshing, and feels a little as though it is the sort if experience San Pedro requires. A dash through the various tours and then off into the salt flats might somehow waste this laid back marvel of a piece of world.
The hostal is particularly friendly and we finding ourselves making friends and, once I am over the initial few days of vague altitude sickness, drinking wine in the evenings in the little courtyard of the hostal, wrapped up in blankets against the frozen evenings. It's a pleasant existence. If it wasn't for the fact we have things booked in Bolivia I could quite happily get stuck here.
This blog, therefore, is the backdrop to this week, and I will upload specific entries where there are days or events which are worthy of their own comment.
And so, we bum around. In fact, to be entirely honest, we bum around taking drugs.
I will clarify. Altitude sickness can threaten the enjoyment of this landscape, not just in San Pedro, but because the really breath taking landscapes which we want to see next week are even higher. A lot of travellers suffer and I am determined not to. The local antidote is something called 'coca', made from the same plant that is used to make cocaine. Coca has a tiny amount of the substance which forms cocaine, though contains no actual cocaine, which requires much processing. The leaves have properties which cure or alleviate the symptoms of altitude sickness. I spent the first few days chewing coca toffees, saving the actual leaves to make tea with when we visit the highest altitudes next week. So they are totally safe and not cocaine related at all. In fact its a herbal remedy which has been taken by adults and children alike for centuries. But if I say that it rather ruins the effect, so I will bend the truth just a little and make out like a proper desert junkie.
So yes. I am bumming around in the desert taking cocaine.
My mother will be proud.
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