Antofagasta - Chile
9/10/05
The slow pace of Santiago came to an end and the 10th day of September was entirely spent traveling up north.
We took a flight at 08:15 a.m. from Santiago to Antofagasta, where we arrived around 10:30 a.m.
Antofagasta is the major port in the nitrate-rich north of Chile, and not long ago it belonged to Bolivia. It became Chilean territory after Bolivia's defeat on the War of the Pacific.
Because Bolivia did not populate the coast and did not have the means to exploit the mines alone, it made contracts, mainly with Chilean companies. When in 1879 Chile occupied the whole of the coast, Bolivia (supported by Peru) declared war. They fought from 1879 to 1883 and at the end Chile took 350 kilometers of coastline leaving Bolivia with no outlet to the sea.
Anyway, the airport in Antofagasta was really tiny and right after we landed a windstorm began. While we were waiting in the shuttle van to depart for the center of the town, we heard that the following flight had been detoured to land somewhere else because of the sand storm. We felt lucky because for a couple of minutes, it could have been our flight!
The van left the airport and thanks to the driver's choice of dropping everyone else before us, it allowed us to tour Antofagasta for free; it is not big anyway and we saw many corners of this little dusty town.
Here is where the desert meets the sea.
The houses are colored like in Valparaiso, ...
...but it seems poorer since the only activity around it is mining.
Finally we were left at the bus terminal to get a bus to San Pedro de Atacama.
We travelled for hours and hours throughout the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert; some places are known for having never rained. Today the area is explored by the Chilean government for mining copper and other minerals, indeed the desert holds the world's largest copper mine.
All the way to San Pedro, it looked the same, dust, rocks and sand, nothing else, not an animal, not a tree, not any kind of bush or grass, not any kind of life, not any kind of nothing.
After nearly seven hours of desert traveling, we got to San Pedro at night, around 8:00 p.m.
The slow pace of Santiago came to an end and the 10th day of September was entirely spent traveling up north.
We took a flight at 08:15 a.m. from Santiago to Antofagasta, where we arrived around 10:30 a.m.
Antofagasta is the major port in the nitrate-rich north of Chile, and not long ago it belonged to Bolivia. It became Chilean territory after Bolivia's defeat on the War of the Pacific.
Because Bolivia did not populate the coast and did not have the means to exploit the mines alone, it made contracts, mainly with Chilean companies. When in 1879 Chile occupied the whole of the coast, Bolivia (supported by Peru) declared war. They fought from 1879 to 1883 and at the end Chile took 350 kilometers of coastline leaving Bolivia with no outlet to the sea.
Anyway, the airport in Antofagasta was really tiny and right after we landed a windstorm began. While we were waiting in the shuttle van to depart for the center of the town, we heard that the following flight had been detoured to land somewhere else because of the sand storm. We felt lucky because for a couple of minutes, it could have been our flight!
The van left the airport and thanks to the driver's choice of dropping everyone else before us, it allowed us to tour Antofagasta for free; it is not big anyway and we saw many corners of this little dusty town.
Here is where the desert meets the sea.
The houses are colored like in Valparaiso, ...
...but it seems poorer since the only activity around it is mining.
Finally we were left at the bus terminal to get a bus to San Pedro de Atacama.
We travelled for hours and hours throughout the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert; some places are known for having never rained. Today the area is explored by the Chilean government for mining copper and other minerals, indeed the desert holds the world's largest copper mine.
All the way to San Pedro, it looked the same, dust, rocks and sand, nothing else, not an animal, not a tree, not any kind of bush or grass, not any kind of life, not any kind of nothing.
After nearly seven hours of desert traveling, we got to San Pedro at night, around 8:00 p.m.
posted by Adriano and Angie | 5:18 AM
2 Comments:
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