‘I’m going out to check on the others,’ I said once the shaking had subsided.
Lisa, who was either still drunk or suicidally forlorn over her rugby team’s loss, said, ‘I’m going back to bed.’ And she did, maintaining a far straighter line to it than before.
I heard voices in the hallway and found the entire family Gomez—Harris, Marguerite and their two daughters—gathered in various states of pyjamery outside the cluster of bedrooms that made up the house’s upper floor.
‘Why is the house driving?’ the five-year-old asked, a beautiful description of the grinding pulses we had just felt. Marguerite had tears in her eyes and was still shaking visibly. Harris asked after Lisa, and I explained she was back in bed.
‘She’s tough,’ said Harris, eyebrows raised in admiration.
‘Drunk actually, but how are all of you?’ I replied.
Once we’d ascertained that everyone was fine, Harris and I went off to check if there was any damage to the house. The electricity was out, and when we turned to look out the window the view stunned us both. The house was built on the side of a dormant volcano, and overlooked a valley that stretched into central Santiago. Usually the city winked and sparkled at night; now there was nothing but the occasional red flare of an emergency light. There was nothing to tell us whether a city of seven million people still stood. In the gloom around us all that was clear was that a neighbour’s house remained upright, but it was impossible to know what had happened beyond that.
Sirens started, one by one, and far below us some headlights wended their way in a serpentine fashion that made me think they must be avoiding rubble. Later I learnt that many of the lights I saw were people hastily making their way home to loved ones—it was a Friday night after all, and Latinos start partying late and finish even later.
‘What do you think is going on out there?’ Harris asked.
‘No idea,’ I said, wishing there was more light but suspecting from the sheer force of the shake that we would be without electricity for some time. The quake was the most powerful sensation I had ever experienced, and while the shaking continued I had felt more impotent than ever before. But it occurred to me now that I should go out and see if there was a way I could be of help to anyone. There would be death out there, I knew, but how much? The quake that had rocked Haiti around a month earlier had claimed over one hundred thousand lives. Images from that disaster also made me worry about looters. The Gomezes’ house is beautiful, and perhaps only the well-built homes of the wealthy would now remain standing. While I wouldn’t begrudge anyone searching for food or shelter I knew that a disaster could bring out the very worst in human nature. As Harris and I trudged back to the second floor I privately decided that the top of the stairs would be our best line of defence should anyone break in.
There wasn’t much I could do until sunrise, but I lay awake for several hours after I went back to bed. Just before dawn, there was a sound like an angry ocean, and a second later the house began to shake again. Once again, the windows flexed far more than I thought glass could, and the bed bounced as if a giant was jumping on it (though the Minke was asleep).
‘I felt that one,’ she said, waking as I got up.
‘Hard not to,’ I replied, finally agreeing with Harris that Lisa was tough, as she was clearly more stoic than I and determined to sleep through this event. I kissed her cheek and again went out into the hall and joined the family.
‘Not as big as the first,’ said Harris.
‘Nope. Don’t think so,’ I agreed.
‘How many more will there be?’ Marguerite asked.
Again, I had no idea. I knew that earthquakes were caused by tectonic plates pushing against each other until the build-up forced one to slip over, under, or alongside the other, and that Santiago sat right on the junction between two such plates. In 1960 it had experienced the most powerful earthquake since records began, at 9.5 on the Richter scale, so devastating that most of the city had had to be rebuilt. What I learnt after our earthquake was that Chile had subsequently instituted one of the world’s strictest building codes, and actually adhered to it. But looking over the darkened valley it was impossible to know how successful they had been. Only dawn would tell.
Tremors came through the last dark hours, and through the morning, triggering howls from every neighbourhood dog except the Gomezes’ loafing cocker spaniel, who for no reason apart from probable stupidity just ignored the entire affair.
With light came the discovery that the only apparent damage to the house was a gas bottle that had torn loose from some flimsy mounts and would be easily fixed. A walk through the neighbourhood showed our reprieve was no one-off miracle; apart from broken glass and zigzagging cracks in roads there was no significant damage. Only later would we find out that some of the few buildings that had survived the 1960 quake had been damaged or destroyed fifty years later, unable to take a second blow.
Within six hours of the initial quake the electricity was back on. The internet took only twelve hours to be reconnected. The local supermarket stayed shut for a day as the staff put everything that had fallen off the shelves back on (I imagined them watching forlornly each time aftershocks toppled everything off again), and the ATMs all ran out of money as people made panic withdrawals. Nevertheless, by Monday it was all systems go—stores open, banks operating, food available. I had faced greater inconveniences in Africa without any natural disasters involved.
The media was painting a different picture, however. While what we could see from our windows seemed secure enough, it was hard to get reliable information about other places the quake might have hit. We gathered around the television as soon as the power was back on and were surprised to learn that Santiago was in flames, the city destroyed; as bad as that sounded, Concepción to the south was even worse, reporters claimed.
‘They’re pretty much saying we’re dead,’ I said. ‘I feel fine though.’
It was the worst sort of sensationalist reporting. Concepción, it was true, was far worse hit than the capital, but Santiago got a black eye, and was never knocked down. Oft-repeated footage showed the army beating a looter, but close observation showed he was stealing a television, and a woman behind him taking bread from a supermarket was given free passage. Within days I began to see a national spirit that I had never encountered anywhere else before. Chileans rallied to help their fellow countrymen, in ways small and large. Cars were painted with the slogan ‘Fuerza, Chile!’ (Strength, Chile!), and teens—who I usually (and cynically) believe are only good for pimple-milking for oil—volunteered inside supermarkets, asking customers if they would buy items such as milk formula or tinned food that could be donated outside for distribution to people in need. Normally if there is any animal that I would claim to dislike it is my own species, but in Santiago after the quake I found myself with a permanent lump in my throat at the solidarity being shown.
•
Two weeks later Lisa’s parents, at her urging, came to visit. We all felt the best way we could help was to put money into the economy and let others know that Chile was dealing with the problem better than an outsider might imagine. We drove the Minke’s parents along the Pan-American Highway, Chile’s major artery, and saw sights that staggered her father, an engineer, who was able to fully appreciate how well roads and buildings had withstood the violence, and how quickly infrastructure was being tended to.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Papa Minke said one day as we drove along. ‘I’ve never seen that in the UK!’
I scanned around for things I imagined would be unfamiliar to UKsians, such as a shower or winning sports team, but saw none.
‘There were four guys standing in a hole back there, and instead of just one guy working and three “supervising”, all four had shovels and were hard at it!’ he explained.
In the wrecked town of Linares we witnessed the greatest destruction wrought by the earthquake. Adobe houses had tumbled to the ground, and the church’s steeple was far from
plumb. Incredibly no deaths had been reported in Linares itself, but the greater Maule region it is a part of had experienced the highest toll from the quake. Despite this there was no wailing, just hard work going on. There was nowhere to stay in Linares, so we bought some supplies there and drove on until we reached Chillán. It took some searching, but we found a small hostel that was open, where the apologetic owner explained that the water service was unreliable, but offered us a discounted rate for the rooms.
We refused the discount, stayed the night, then pushed on the next morning, passing huge groups of volunteers who were busy building shelters or distributing food. This worst of disasters had brought out the best in people, and I felt a little guilty that on the night of the quake I had been so concerned about looters.
During our two-week-long tour of Chile details began to emerge of just how powerful the quake had been. At the epicentre it had registered as 8.8 on the Richter scale, with a reading of 8 in Santiago. Its effects had been felt as far away as New Orleans. The city of Concepción had moved a staggering three metres from where it used to be, Santiago twenty-seven centimetres. Even Buenos Aires, on the other side of the Andes, had shifted four centimetres. South America’s tail had wagged, making maps of the world subtly wrong. The quake had been so violent that the Earth had shifted slightly on its axis, shortening the length of the day by a fraction of a second.
The only way I could conceptualise this was to think of a picnic blanket laid out with food, glasses and drinks, then wondering if I could drag it twenty-seven centimetres without anything falling over. Imagining it that way made me realise how incredible it was that anything had stayed standing, and how lucky we had been.
The Family Minke and I carried on with our travels into regions that geography had spared from any damage. We attracted many stares along the way; at first I attributed this to us being the first tourists people had seen in weeks, before realising that as a group we probably looked like a lesson in genetics. Papa Minke is a slim but commanding six foot three, Mama Minke comes in at a statuesque five-eleven, and the Minke herself fits evenly between at six-one. My five feet nine presumably made me look like their pet koala.
It was my second time to some of the regions we visited, but this time around I was able to look at them with fresh eyes. Whereas when I first arrived in Chile I was disappointed by its civilisation and order, now I realised how selfish my earlier disappointment had been. I would never wish poor living standards on anyone, but I had been a little disappointed in how developed Chile was. Bolivia had felt more like the South America I expected—ramshackle, fetid and berserk—while Chile felt more like an outpost of Europe. I could not begrudge Chileans their advancement, and seeing the way they had dealt with the savage blow of the earthquake I now admired and respected the people of this country enormously.
But the most important lesson for me had come on the very morning of the quake, as we sat eating breakfast, bread toasted over a gas grill while we waited for the electricity to come back on. Without Chile’s economic development things would have been so different. I had the Minke with me, and my feelings for her grew stronger every day. But I also had Harris and Marguerite and their brood, as close to family as we could be without sharing DNA, and seeing them safe and unharmed made me very, very glad.
Fuerza, Chile.
Getting High in Bolivia
Sometimes travel can be testing but the tests bring great rewards. At other times, though, travel is like testing your breath by getting someone to kick you in the nose. That was how I felt after getting off a flight from London that had come to Santiago via Dallas, with little time to do anything other than wash off the travel sauce and brush my teeth before getting onto a bus scheduled for a twenty-three-hour trip to San Pedro de Atacama, a small town close to the Chile–Bolivia border in the world’s driest desert.
I’d been in London to promote my last book; after a fortnight of wearing ironed clothes and shoes that shone, I immediately felt more at ease in rumpled T-shirts and battered sneakers. Despite how remarkably comfortable and clean Chilean buses are, I rarely sleep on them, but as this one lurched away from the terminal my eyes began an inexorable droop, and soon I was drooling onto the headrest of the unfortunate passenger beside me.
A few times that night I woke, slurped, apologised, then fell asleep once more, but on the whole I had a not unpleasant trip, waking properly as sunbeams pierced chinks in the drawn curtains, and passengers got up and queued for the loo at the back. I went to stand, but found that I no longer had any joints in my legs. After more than forty-eight hours sitting down on buses and planes, my knees had apparently left me for a younger man, and only unlocked with a noise like a giant crushing rocks. Outside, the view had changed from Santiago’s sculpted lawns and office blocks to true desert, a place where rain was so rare that a few drops could wash away roads that weren’t built to deal with moisture and would have been deadly—if anyone actually lived here.
Anyone, that is, apart from miners. The road swept past occasional mining operations, the tailings piled in pyramids that evoked the men’s Inca ancestors, strange mineral colours swirling through the rock like ice-cream toppings.
Finally reaching San Pedro, I acknowledged the tightening of a headache, that had built as the bus climbed through the desert to this mountain town. Headaches rarely afflict me except on mornings after red wine. This was no hangover though, and it was paired with a shortness of breath. San Pedro sits at just under two and a half thousand metres, so the oxygen content is significantly lower than Santiago at a mere four hundred and fifty metres, or London, which cruises along at sea level. With protesting lungs I trawled the town for the hostel I was booked into, scanning local maps seemingly designed to baffle visitors and lead them past every possible place but the one they were looking for.
When I finally found the hostel I was surprised that the Minke wasn’t there waiting for me. She’d been booked on a bus from Argentina, where she’d spent the last two weeks viewing its wine regions. Eventually she arrived, accompanied by a local man on a bicycle. ‘We met at the bus stop,’ Lisa told me, ‘and he insisted on helping me find the hostel.’ She shot me a remarkably articulate glance that said, ‘No, I am not picking up stray human beings; he wouldn’t leave me alone.’ The man clearly suffered some powerful delusions (perhaps a life with little oxygen had taken its toll), and while twitching, insisted that the town was not safe, and that it was a combination of New York and Miami. (‘Have you been to either?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied, confirming what I’d suspected.) He seemed to want to offer his services as a guide, or bodyguard; while one of his eyes rolled in random directions I politely refused his offer, and thanked him for helping the Minke. Once he’d wobbled off on his bike I was aghast when Lisa said she wanted to press on the next day into Bolivia. She had had a hellacious journey that had included a three-hour wait at the Argentinian border, but was eager to keep moving. Meanwhile I was all for some R&R.
‘You can rest when you’re dead,’ she pointed out, and even though it felt like that state might come about sooner rather than later I agreed to the plan.
So the next day, still tasting airline food between my teeth, I trudged with Lisa to a tourist office and booked a three-day trip into Bolivia. We’d been warned that many of the operators who offered this trip were shonky, but a friend had recommended one company and it was with some relief that I saw there was a little tread on the tyres of the four-wheel-drive Toyota LandCruiser we boarded later that morning.
There were six of us plus a driver in the LandCruiser, which had incongruous T-Rex decals on the windscreen. In this chariot we would wend our way over the Andes into Bolivia, then across the world’s largest salt flats to a town called Uyuni.
We had a near-disastrous start. On the outskirts of San Pedro we cleared immigration procedure to exit Chile, then headed into no-man’s land where we climbed, climbed and climbed some more, the dry landscape punctuated by occasional bursts of mineral colour and
the even more unlikely sight of high-altitude springs with lurid green and red algae, speckled with the pink of feeding flamingos. Then, just as incompatible with the surrounds, we sighted a solitary shack, and beside it a flagpole from which the brightly coloured Bolivian flag snapped in the strong wind. All we had to do here was get our passports stamped and carry on, a simple procedure in most places. There was just one problem. The Minke.
‘What is this country?’ the border guard asked in Spanish, looking at the Minke’s passport. Lisa had written ‘Gales’ on her form, the Spanish word for Wales. She explained that it was near England, and was part of the United Kingdom, like Scotland.
‘It is not a real country,’ the guard said, crossing out ‘Gales’ and writing ‘Inglatera’ beside it.
Of course, the Welsh and English, despite being neighbours and ruled by the same parliament, have a contentious history that includes acts of colonial bastardry by the English that have not been forgotten by the Welsh. Calling a Welshman English is not the greatest insult imaginable, but may cost you some teeth if the Welsh person in question feels sufficiently aggrieved by it. As the Minke straightened to her full and imposing height, I started to fear we might just see the inside of a Bolivian jail before the day was out, so I grabbed her and said, ‘Choose your battles.’
She glared at me.
‘Of course Wales is a real country, he just can’t be expected to know that, what with Bolivia not playing rugby,’ I said.
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