Going to Extremes

by Nick Middleton

  More coca leaves hit the ground, followed by a round of pisco. By this time I was glad of the opportunity to spill some of the firewater before upending the glass down my throat. Felicia was busy twisting more bits of coloured wool into the fleece of the chosen beast and produced a needle with which she gave the llama a couple more ‘earrings’ to go with the pair it already had.

  ‘The llama must be dressed well for its journey to the spirits,’ Donato explained as he delved into his pocket and produced another plastic bag. This one contained brightly coloured confetti and we all sprinkled some on to the llama’s back. It felt particularly strange for me since the last time I’d done this was at a non-llama friend’s wedding.

  Momentarily, the llama was calm, quietly taking in all the fuss being made over it. Meanwhile, its fellow llamas all around the compound had cleared a respectful distance around their compatriot. They were totally unconcerned, and a couple of them began to mate about a metre from the sacrificial beast. At that point, the distance didn’t seem quite so respectful, but I decided there was a certain symmetry in the conception of one llama taking place right next to another that was about to be dispatched.

  Decorated and dressed in its Sunday best to meet the gods, we hauled the chosen llama towards the corral entrance where Zahel sat on it. Despite the herd’s apparent lack of concern, I had been uneasy at the thought of killing one of their number right in front of them. It was a relief when Donato pulled the willowy tree trunks away from the entrance, ushered the herd out and prepared to do the job in camera.

  We manoeuvred the sacrificial animal to the entrance and, still holding the beast in the dust, lined up on one side. This was to make way for its soul to fly to the sun when the body was dispatched.

  Felicia produced a knife, which Donato sharpened on a handy stone. He knelt on the animal’s neck and it gave a final vain struggle as the blade sliced across its throat. A spurt of blood splashed across my face. I saw green bile and was almost overcome by the foul stench as the animal continued with its last fight. Donato was poking the knife deeper into the gaping hole in the animal’s neck as the blood poured out, aiming to sever the spine as he’d explained to me beforehand. This would cut any sense of feeling so that the animal would not die too painfully. But now that he was actually doing it, I had my doubts. The llama was still putting up quite a fight. It made me realize that if anyone ever cut my throat I wouldn’t die instantly. The llama didn’t.

  Like the ceremony that had led up to this moment, the wielding of the knife was all very matter-of-fact and mechanical. Donato rolled the llama over onto its back and cut into its chest. There was a huge cavity in front of me, deep and dark, like a hole in the ground. The blood inside wasn’t red; it was a dirty clay-type colour.

  Having been in namby-pamby, I like nice furry animals mode up to this point, my perspective changed the instant the knife sank into the animal’s torso. As soon as Donato cut into the chest, it looked like meat and I no longer felt that I was caught up in a murder. It seemed more like I was participating in the proper management of the herd, and anyway, I was hungry.

  The heart was huge and still pumping in the cavity, despite the fact that the animal was dead. Then Donato squeezed it, cut it out and put it on a white enamel plate held by Felicia. The heart continued to beat as it lay on the plate and we all had to sprinkle more coca leaves ceremoniously over it.

  Covered in sticky leaves, the heart was taken up the stony hillside to a small fire and placed there to have more leaves sprinkled on it. As wisps of smoke carried the llama’s soul towards the sun, we all had to shake hands and hug each other as the final part of the ritual.

  Then we set about skinning the carcass.

  T W O

  By any standards, Collahuasi is a huge operation. More than US$3 billion have gone into getting it up and running as the world’s fourth largest copper mine. Being situated in the middle of nowhere, some 4,500 metres up in the Andes, meant building everything from scratch. A new power line had to be constructed and 14 wells sunk to supply the mine’s water requirements. Six thousand workers were involved in creating a purpose-built town to service the mine, but before they could start work there was the small matter of putting up somewhere for these workers to live. They built fuel-oil storage depots and maintenance shops, office buildings and operational buildings, laboratories, warehouses, a hospital, and a truck shop. Oh, and a permanent camp for 1,800 employees. A new pipeline takes copper concentrate down to a whole new port facility on the coast, along with a new 220-kilometre road that links Collahuasi to the Pan-American Highway. I’d followed the new road briefly on my journey up from the llama killing field the previous day. The mining engineers are confident that Collahuasi has a lot of copper. The mine has a projected life of 100 years.

  The guy who escorted me around, Luis, drove a brand-new red Toyota pickup with the code number 007 on the door. It summed up Collahuasi perfectly. The whole place was like a James Bond film set. My accommodation was better than a five-star hotel, with a bed slightly smaller than a football field and a lounge where I was served with cheese and biscuits before dinner. The rooms splayed off in four wings from a central atrium that housed video rooms and Internet connection sites. Each of the four glass wings looked in and down on to a lush interior garden transported straight from the humid tropics.

  Outside the ultra-modern, hi-tech man-made sanctuary, Collahuasi operates on a different scale to the real world. Just beside the opencast pit, gigantic crushing plants grind solid rock into mincemeat at a rate of 6,000 tonnes every hour. They are supplied by dumper trucks that looked like boys’ toys from afar, but up close, turn out to run on wheels taller than a two-storey house. Inside the pit, 60 tonnes of aggregate are shovelled into the trucks in just a couple of scoops by cranes the size of small skyscrapers. Twenty-four hours a day, every day for 365 days a year, the miners at Collahuasi are gradually inverting a mountain into one of the world’s biggest holes in the ground. Soon, there will be one less Ande on the skyline of northern Chile.

  The very first thing I had to do when I arrived was to submit myself to a medical check-up at the mine’s hospital. A doctor led me into a sparkling clean ward stuffed full of gadgets to take my pulse and to measure my blood pressure and blood oxygen content. My pulse was 100, normal for such an altitude, the doctor said, but my blood oxygen content was low at 78 per cent. ‘How do you feel?’ the doctor asked. ‘All right,’ I told him, ‘other than a lot of farting.’

  He ignored my attempt at levity and told me to take some deep breaths. I watched as the blood oxygen monitor rose to 85 per cent. ‘You’re fine,’ he told me, ‘but come back if you feel any effects of the altitude.’ I was relieved, because the mine has a strict policy of flying you down to the coast if you show signs of ill health.

  Because Collahuasi is one of the highest mines in the world, considerable amounts of time and money have been invested in ensuring a safe and healthy working environment. The walls of the hospital and the accommodation block were plastered with brightly coloured posters with bar charts and tables depicting their safety record. There hadn’t been an accident at the mine for more than six weeks.

  The company running Collahuasi has undertaken extensive research into the effects of working at high altitude. One of the outcomes of this research was the building of the accommodation, canteen and hospital somewhat farther away from the mine than originally planned. This was to reduce the altitude of the camp, which is at 3,800 metres (700 metres lower than the mine), an altitude at which most people experience relatively few problems. Several specific working practices had also been adopted to help employees further to cope with working in the mountains, including the shift system worked by most, which was seven days on, seven days off.

  But even so, Luis told me as he drove me out to the pit one morning in his red Toyota, he still felt poorly for a day or two when he first arrived for his seven-day shift. Luis lived down on the coast, in the city of Iquique, when he wasn’t w
orking, and felt the effects most when he flew to work in the company aeroplane. ‘It takes just 45 minutes,’ he told me, ‘which is fast to rise 3,800 metres. I always go white and get headaches for the first two days,’ he said, ‘but it’s not so bad if I drive up, which takes three hours.’

  Luis was a former naval officer who was rather officious and liked standing to attention and directing the mine traffic whenever I wanted to stop and take photographs from the side of the road. Herds of wild vicuña, a smaller, rare cousin of the llama that lives at altitudes where the air is too thin for most mammals to lead a normal life, wandered the area around the mine.

  Since Luis had a barrel of a chest and looked as if he could jog up from the coast if he wanted to, I took seriously his comments on the effects of working at altitude. Some say that the Chilean character is partly moulded by the constant battle waged against the country’s inhospitable environment, a wild land of untamed wilderness and mountains typified by this high-elevation desert. Here at Collahuasi, human ingenuity had created its own little oasis, an outpost of comfort designed to defy all that Nature could throw at it. All, that is, except the altitude.

  Luis was not the only person to complain of headaches and minor nausea when they arrived for work, and it came as no surprise to me when I learned that the mining company was experimenting with pumping oxygen into some of the bedrooms in an effort to sort out this final challenge. I wondered for a while whether perhaps I had been assigned one of these rooms because, other than a slight difficulty in getting off to sleep at night, I continued to feel few effects from my high-altitude abode (even my farting had subsided to a normal rate). Until, that is, I spent 20 minutes one evening trying to find my wash bag that had apparently completely disappeared from the basin in my bathroom. I couldn’t believe that the chambermaid had pinched it, but it took me an eternity to realize that the mirror above the basin was also a cupboard. I opened it to find my things all neatly laid out and ready for use. Trouble with concentration is supposedly another sign of altitude. I had stopped farting and started to lose my mind.

  There was a definite sense of community about Collahuasi and I wondered whether it was the isolation that engendered it. Whenever I passed anyone in the camp or at the mine itself, I was met with a cheerful ‘Hola’ or ‘Buenas Dias’, and everyone seemed comfortable and at ease. It wasn’t all James Bond, I discovered in time, since alcohol was totally banned and there were very few women (even my chambermaid was a man), but the workers enjoyed rates of pay that were significantly higher than the national average and while on site, the food and luxurious accommodation were supplied free of charge by the company.

  Luis told me that 99 per cent of the workers were Chilean, so it was a fluke that I met one of the few employees who wasn’t. I did so on my first morning at Collahuasi. I had just missed the early rush, which started at 7.30 in the morning in time for the shift change at the mine, and there were few people around as I hovered at the self-service canteen trying to decide which of the numerous food stations I should approach for my breakfast. Startled by an English voice behind me asking if I needed any help, I turned to see a man in a white coat and caterer’s cap who offered to show me what was on offer.

  ‘You don’t sound particularly Chilean,’ I ventured as he led me past the juice dispensers. ‘No,’ the man replied, ‘I’m from Wakefield, Yorkshire.’

  Being in such a remote spot, in a faraway country, I was prepared for many types of surprise, but not one that emanated from so close to home. I didn’t want to blurt out anything so inane as, ‘What are you doing here?’, but that was the only thing that came to mind. He told me he was the catering manager. Dazed, I selected breakfast and took my tray to a table. Some moments later, the man from Wakefield, Yorkshire came over and sat down. He asked what brought me to Collahuasi and I told him. Recovering somewhat, I introduced myself.

  ‘My name’s Graham,’ the man said, ‘but everyone calls me Paul.’

  ‘Why?’ I heard myself say. Altitude sickness and inanity clearly went hand in hand. ‘Because Chileans can’t pronounce the name Graham.’ I shoved a piece of toast into my mouth to stop me saying anything mindless in response to that.

  Paul was married to a Chilean and had been working in the country for over ten years, though not all at this mine, which had only been in production for three. The company he worked for, based in Santiago, was responsible for all the catering, he told me. I complimented him on the canteen’s food as I drew a plate of fried eggs towards me. With knife and fork poised over the yellow yokes, and my mouth watering, Graham said, ‘Oh, that’s not very sensible at this altitude.’ This was getting beyond a joke.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Fatty foods aren’t a good idea on your first days up here,’ he told me. ‘You shouldn’t be eating butter either,’ he said, pointing to my toast.

  Deflated, I put down my knife and fork.

  ‘What should I have for breakfast?’ I asked, probably a little too aggressively.

  ‘Well tea is better than coffee.’ He nodded at the cup of black coffee by my elbow. ‘And you need to drink lots of other fluids. Plenty of water and juice. You should eat light things, like fruit. Jelly is also excellent food for high altitude. It’s nourishing and gives you plenty of fluid.’

  ‘Looks like I’d better go round another time and start again,’ I said irritably. ‘That’s fine,’ Paul said. ‘Go round as many times as you like.’

  It must have been a measure of the minor shock I still felt at having just met a Yorkshireman in a remote copper mine in the Andes that I went back to the food stations and selected a healthy high-altitude breakfast of jelly, fruit, tea and juice. Back at the table, Paul smiled and told me I’d feel much better for it. Unconvinced, I drew the plate of jelly towards me. It made me feel like a recalcitrant schoolboy.

  ‘Can you drink the water here?’ I asked Paul. He said it was fine, since it came straight from the mountains, ‘but it smells a bit of sulphur,’ he added. ‘It reminds me of Harrogate Baths.’

  I detected just a hint of homesickness, so I asked Paul if there was anything he missed from home. Out came a list that included pork pies, fish and chips, and most of all cricket. ‘I have cable TV in my room, but you only ever get brief highlights of the cricket,’ he lamented. ‘I think that’s what I miss the most.’

  His comments seemed strangely appropriate given his white coat and hat. Paul could easily have been an off-duty umpire chatting over breakfast before taking the field for the day. He said he worked ten days on and ten days off. The facilities were excellent, he said: games rooms with ping pong and pool, video games, a sports hall, Internet connections, TV in most of the rooms, but they all became boring after a while. ‘You must have seen cable TV,’ he said, ‘you watch for more than a day or two and you just do your nut.’ ‘So how do you relax?’ I asked him. ‘I work,’ he said. ‘Like everyone else, I have 12-hour shifts, but I often work 14 or 15 hours because otherwise there’s nothing else to do.’

  Among the many surprises Paul sprang on me that first morning was the pronouncement that going down from high altitude could be as injurious to health as going up. He told me several times to drink a lot of water when I came to descend from Collahuasi towards Arica on the coast. Indeed, as he wandered off to check on the food stations and pass the time of day with the few stragglers still turning up for breakfast, or an early lunch, his last parting comment to me was, ‘Don’t forget, drink lots of water.’

  Even without Paul’s words, I was intent on sinking several bottles of mineral water the morning Zahel and I left the mine and headed for the coast. The reason was that I needed it to rehydrate after a particularly foolish attempt at machismo the evening before. For reasons best known to my inner psyche, I had talked my way into the mine’s five-a-side football team for a friendly match against the local border police. I kidded myself that this was because I was so confident about being unaffected by the altitude that I felt some kind of perverse need to test mys
elf. Conversely, of course, some might say that my choice of test was complete proof of the fact that the altitude had indeed had an effect – on my judgement – and a serious one at that. The football match completed the full set of effects, physical to go with the mental, it nearly killed me.

  That’s not quite true. I was pleasantly surprised at how long I actually lasted. The big problem was breathing. I just couldn’t get enough oxygen into my lungs. The rest of me felt OK, physically my muscles and things kept going, but I had to stop because I just couldn’t breathe properly. At one point, while I was bent double outside the opposition goalmouth, the border guards’ goalie put his hand on my shoulder and told me to take deep breaths, rather than the quick, feeble pants that I had opted for, as the best way to get more air into my lungs. I stopped panting and took deep gulps instead, which did indeed seem to get more precious oxygen into my body. But only for a short time, and soon I was bent double again, desperately trying to satisfy my body’s needs. There was no option but to bow out gracefully and lie down on the ground.

  Once I had got my breath back and the game was over, I challenged our centre forward, who was half Indian and had told me he’d been born at some altitude, to a ‘hold-your-breath’ competition. Children born on the Altiplano are supposed to have a greater lung capacity than those born at sea level. This guy was small and stocky, and a very skilful striker, and his chest looked like it probably contained a specially enhanced set of lungs.

  There are no prizes for guessing who won. While we both managed quite happily for what seemed like a minute or two, our centre forward still looked supremely unconcerned when I finally gave up, gasping. The second prize was a few slugs of pure oxygen from the bottle that Luis had wisely brought along with him to the match. I had always wanted to have a go on neat oxygen, but it was rather disappointing. It didn’t taste of very much and actually I’m not quite sure if it made any difference to me. Oxygen or not, I still felt as if I’d been run over by a truck.