So, I felt somewhat deflated as we sailed down the fresh tarmac road towards the coast. From the rolling high plateau with quite a lot of grass on it and a fair number of llamas wandering around giving us idiotic looks as we passed, we sped through a zone of more vegetation with lots of blue lupins by the roadside. Large rolling dunes, fixed in suspended animation by salt, took over while the plant life disappeared as we descended further. Warning signs about sand on the road began to appear while I was pouring water down my throat and my ears began to pop.
Most of the Atacama Desert lies in a central valley that runs north–south parallel to the coast, bordered on the Pacific side by a low range of coastal hills and to the east by the Andes themselves. The uplift of the Andes, formed in this zone where two of the Earth’s great crustal plates collide, gives rise to one of the greatest altitudinal contrasts found on the planet. Over a distance of less than 300 kilometres, the Andean peaks up to 6,000 metres above sea level plummet down to the Peru–Chile trench deep in the ocean floor just off the coast at 7,600 metres below sea level.
The rise of the Andes is one of the reasons the Atacama is so dry. South America’s mountainous backbone provides an effective barrier to any moist air from the Amazon Basin, casting a ‘rain shadow’ across Chile’s northern coastline. Another central reason for the area’s aridity is the existence of a cold ocean current that runs most of the length of South America’s Pacific coast. The Humboldt Current brings cold water from the Antarctic, and this cold water prevents evaporation from the ocean surface, so limiting the amount of moisture in the atmosphere that can fall as rain.
The Atacama is not only one of the world’s driest deserts; it is also almost certainly one of the oldest. It has been extremely dry for about ten million years, since the rain-shadow effect of the Andes and the drying presence of the cold Humboldt Current have been in place. Extreme aridity also helps to explain the presence in the Atacama of vast quantities of salt. This central valley contains probably the most famous and important nitrate deposits in the world, locally known as caliche, a Quechua word for salt. This sodium nitrate is more soluble in water than other materials common to the Earth’s crust and is only so plentiful because the climate is so dry. That night, our first in the Atacama proper, we camped on the ancient crust of a dry salt lake that had been planted with Tamarugo trees, one of the few plants that can thrive on the saline surface, before forging on northward towards Arica.
Life in the driest desert on Earth is a question of grabbing opportunities. Permanent settlement for people is only possible where you can find a reliable source of water. Since rainfall is so sporadic in the Atacama, the only dependable supplies of water come from the Andes, reaching the desert either along surface rivers or as underground water found in aquifers. On occasion, where the incentives are big enough, people have built pipelines to maintain towns without their own natural water supplies. In most cases in northern Chile, the incentive has been the nitrate deposits, but once the nitrate has been worked out, the settlements have been abandoned. As we made our way up the Atacama’s central valley, we passed a string of derelict nitrate towns, cast-off shells left to wither slowly in the desert sun.
Parts of this desert were, in fact, inhabited for nearly ten thousand years. At a few choice spots in the coastal hills, where brackish water could be found in subterranean springs, the Chinchorro people eked out a living based on the abundant marine life fed by the Humboldt Current. They traded with other cultures established in the Andes, but the commercial traffic of those ancient times had to cross the inhospitable Atacama. Those trade routes probably made use of the valleys dissecting the desert, and evidence of these early highways can still be seen today in huge pictures, drawn with carefully laid patterns of stones on the valley sides, perfectly preserved thanks to millennia of near-zero rainfall. Archaeologists debate the significance of the stick men, animals and intricate designs. Were they icons put up to appease their gods, or desert road signs for weary travellers indicating the way to the coast? Or maybe the Chinchorro simply liked doodling on a very large scale?
We crossed a series of pampas on the last leg of our journey to Arica, extraordinarily flat, gravel-strewn plateaus where not even cacti could find enough water to survive. Then all of a sudden (wham!) we would come across these yawning gashes in the flat terrain, dramatic, steep sand-covered slopes plunging down to lush green valley bottoms.
In the last valley we came to before the Peruvian border sat Arica, the driest city on Earth.
T H R E E
It had been difficult to know what to expect from the world’s driest settlement. Dry was always going to be the least tangible of all the extremes. Hot, cold and wet would be in-your-face climates, immediately obvious as soon as I stepped out of the front door. I was ready for physical pain in temperatures of plus or minus 40°C (104°F to -40°F), and I knew that I’d be permanently wet in a place that could boast nearly 12 metres of rainfall on average in a year. But dry was not so palpable. OK, I was in a desert, but it wasn’t even a very hot desert. The Humboldt Current takes care of that. Temperatures in the Atacama are lower than anywhere else in the region of the Tropic of Capricorn or in any other of the world’s deserts at the same latitude. Arica simply isn’t a parched, scorching place full of dust and mirages. In fact, it has a very pleasant climate. It is completely devoid of rain, but always enjoys a soft sea breeze, which gives rise to luxuriant vegetation with landscapes of abundant palm trees and other tropical plants. The city has several sandy beaches and promotes itself as a tourist resort. The average temperature during the year is 20ºC (64ºF). The local authorities have dubbed it the ‘city of eternal spring’.
And despite the lack of rain, water did not appear to be a problem. As we drove into town, we passed lush green public parks full of municipal workers dressed in blue overalls watering the gardens liberally with their hoses. These guys were even wearing wellington boots. In my hotel room, there were no notices on the door saying ‘water is precious, please conserve it’, as there had been up on the Puna de Atacama. Damn it, my bathroom even had a bath.
I learned later that the city gets its water from a variety of sources. There are underground supplies and the San José River that flows through the heart of town, the latter being rather salty, so they have to desalinate its water. But Arica is actually worried about supplies. The groundwater level has been declining for some time and the authorities have experimented with the recycling of sewage water. There is even a plan to pipe the stuff from the highlands in nearby Peru. Water is a problem in Arica; it’s just that no one seems to have told its inhabitants yet.
Nevertheless, it is still the driest inhabited place on Earth. When you add up all the water that comes from the atmosphere as precipitation – not just rain, but fog, dew, mist, hail and snow, though they don’t get snow in Arica – it comes out at less than a millimetre of water on average each year. Arica’s annual average total precipitation is just 0.8 mm (0.03 inches). Rainfall is almost unknown here, and when a freak storm does produce some, it usually comes in small amounts. The 10 mm (0.4 inches) of rain that fell at Arica on one day in January 1918 accounted for almost a third of the total precipitation during the first half of the twentieth century.
My first stop therefore, after I’d settled into my hotel, was the meteorological station. I jumped into a taxi and sped out to the airport where it was located. I wanted to meet the man who presided over the driest station in the world.
Situated on the floodplain of the San José River, the city is hemmed in all around on the landward side by the barren coastal hills. To the south, these steep, sand-covered slopes rise abruptly, almost straight from the ocean, leaving just a strip of land 100 metres or so in width. It’s room enough to put up a few hotels and restaurants beside the beach and a highway to get to them, but not much else. The slopes themselves are useless for anything other than as giant advertising hoardings. Mimicking the ancient geoglyphs of the Chinchorro, local taxi firms and rad
io stations, as well as a familiar international fizzy-drinks company, had scrawled their names and numbers across the hillsides.
The road we followed to the airport, which is 15 kilometres outside the city, led north, where Nature had left a kilometre or so of flat land behind Las Machas beach before the hills began. We sped round the bay along the coast and, nearing the airport, hit a diversion. The driver told me it had rained heavily inland the previous month, sending huge volumes of water down towards the coast. Large chunks of land in town next to the San José River had simply disappeared, and out here, to the north of town, the river had washed away the bridge to the airport. That’s the thing about rainfall in deserts. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it can be very destructive. Little water percolates into the ground and the flow of any rivers increases dramatically for short periods. Engineers who build bridges and other structures in deserts have to cater for these rare flash floods, but in this case it seemed that the engineers had got their sums wrong. The army had put up an emergency bridge that we rattled over to reach the airport.
Aldo Espindola looked too cool to be Arica’s meteorological observer. Unlike your average English male weather buff, (think of the weather bulletins on the BBC), he wore a well-pressed, white sleeveless shirt, beautifully polished shoes, and trousers with a crease that looked as if they would draw blood if you ran your finger down them. His complexion brimmed with vitality beneath his slicked-back hair and reflective sunglasses. He looked like a Chilean version of Tony Curtis, but the mild surprise I got when I met him was nothing to what was to come.
We walked out of his office at the small regional airport and moved over to the compound containing the meteorological instruments. I moved towards the rain guage and asked him how often he checked it. ‘Every six hours,’ he told me.
The pluviometer was a standard piece of apparatus, a white cylindrical funnel stuck on a pole at about chest height. In the bottom of the metal funnel a hole allows any water to drip into a metal bottle stored below. ‘And how often do you find something inside?’ I asked. ‘At least once a day,’ Aldo started to say, which stopped me in my tracks. ‘I find bird shit in the funnel,’ he continued, smiling as I let out a sigh of relief.
Now at the rain gauge, I opened the metal door to take out the bottle. ‘When was the last time that you found some water in here?’ I asked him. ‘You can find a bit of drizzle every now and then, in January and February, but there is no rain,’ he said. ‘No rain at all?’ I tipped the metal bottle upside down over my hand. A little dust fell out, and a dead fly. ‘Absolutely no rain.’ Aldo was very definite about that.
‘What about fog?’ I asked. Fog is pretty common on the Atacama coast, about the only reliable form of precipitation it gets, but there was no fog here either, he told me. ‘But they get some in Arica,’ Aldo added. That stopped me in my tracks again. From the airport, we could see the city across the bay.
‘They do get fog in the city?’ I asked, just for confirmation. All the climatology books on the region I’d read said otherwise. ‘Yes,’ Aldo said, ‘because of the hills. There are no hills here, so no fog. And Arica gets some rain too.’
I wasn’t reeling from this revelation, but I did find it disturbing. It’s not uncommon for towns and cities to have their official meteorological stations some distance from the actual settlement. But in this case, the short 15 kilometres between Arica and its airport made a significant difference. Here at the airport, source of the meteorological data that gave Arica the record as the world’s driest inhabited place, Aldo was telling me that he recorded no rain and no fog. But across the bay, in the actual city, they had both. In minimal amounts, no doubt, but nonetheless, they got some.
Disturbed as I was by this information, it was nothing compared to what came next. I was still pondering what Aldo had told me, speaking almost to myself. ‘So, is Arica the driest place on Earth because the meteorological station is out here and the city is over there?’ ‘I don’t think so,’ Aldo said. His remark was so conversational that I almost missed it.
‘Pardon?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Aldo said again. ‘There are drier places in Chile.’
I just looked at him.
‘In the interior of the Atacama Desert, down the coast, inland from Antofagasta, it is drier than here. It is the Domeyko region. That is the driest place in Chile.’
My mind was racing. ‘But does anyone live in that region?’
‘It is a desert, but there are some villages there,’ he said.
I stood with my mouth open. My legs felt weak. If anyone else had told me this, I’d have laughed it off, but when the official meteorological observer in the world’s driest inhabited place tells you he thinks there are drier places, you have to listen.
‘Would any of these villages have meteorological stations?’ I asked cautiously. Even if any one of these villages was drier, I was thinking to myself, they would have to have some data to prove it.
‘Perhaps,’ Aldo said simply.
It looked like maybe my journey wasn’t yet over.
It was a peculiar feeling. I’d only just arrived in the place that represented the culmination of my journey, the city I’d come to Chile to see, and already I was itching to leave. If what Aldo had told me was right, and there were villages further down the coast and inland that were drier than Arica, and had meteorological records to prove it, I might have a coup on my hands. It wasn’t every day that I got the chance to overturn an established world record. I was eager to start searching for a new driest inhabited place in the world.
But, before I quit Arica, there was one place I definitely wanted to visit: the San Miguel de Azapa museum of Arica’s University of Tarapacá, where they kept some of the world’s oldest mummies. The Atacama’s long history of aridity, combined with the widespread presence of salt, represent near perfect conditions for preservation. But down on the coast, archaeologists have also found numerous burial sites containing ritually preserved human bodies, and a lot of them are now in the San Miguel de Azapa museum.
The Chinchorro, as the group who occupied the northern coast of Chile are known, settled around Arica and further south around 9,000 years ago. Where these people came from remains a matter for debate. Some suggest they crossed the Andes from the Amazon Basin, others think they may have moved down the Andes from the north of Colombia.
Whatever their origins, the Chinchorro developed a simple lifestyle on the arid coastline based on fishing, hunting and gathering of the plentiful wildlife of the Pacific Ocean. They fashioned fishhooks from bone, shell, cactus spines and copper, and wove nets using cotton and fibres from a tree that grew in nearby riverbeds. Stone spearheads were carved to make harpoons so that they could hunt sea lions, and animal ribs were employed to gather shellfish. Their way of life has been pieced together from remains found in archaeological sites at Chinchorro camps of round dwellings built with wooden posts covered in mats, hides and branches. Seemingly, these people moved their homes with the seasons, migrating inland to valley bottoms and oases.
All this, the presence of a culture that thrived in what is seemingly such a hostile environment, is extraordinary enough. But more remarkable still is the fact that the Chinchorro also practised mummification. Ritually preserving the dead is often thought to be the domain of more complex societies, who supposedly had more time to indulge in such rites. Civilizations such as the ancient Egyptians, and the Incas (who didn’t emerge in South America until 1000 AD), were into the practice of mummification when they weren’t managing fantastic feats of construction like the pyramids and Machu Picchu. Simple societies with mobile lifestyles, like the Chinchorro, weren’t supposed to have the time or energy to indulge in such things.
But indulge they did, and in a big way. The San Miguel de Azapa museum was full of mummies. Calogero Santoro, professor of archaeology at the University of Taparacá, showed me around a back room of the museum that contained row upon row of glass cases raised up on legs to
waist height. It looked like a mortuary, which it was, only for people who died thousands of years ago. Yet these bodies weren’t wrapped in white bandages like the mummies of ancient Egypt or a Hammer horror film. Most of the Chinchorro specimens were recognizable as human forms, but had been transformed to look more like life-sized dolls. Faces were covered by flat clay death masks, their features reduced to minimalist noses and mouths. Limbs and torsos, unnaturally straight and wooden-looking, were also encased in clay, often braced with sticks and, in some cases, clothed in rush matting. The sex of the individuals was only discernable by stylized breasts, small fistfuls of clay attached to their upper bodies. Dead people of all ages were on show, adults, adolescents and tiny babies that really did look like dolls.
The mummification process was elaborate and must have been very time-consuming. ‘Each one of these bodies,’ Calogero Santoro told me, ‘has had the flesh removed. Then sticks were bound to the bones and the body covered in an ash paste.’ All the vital organs had been taken out and the skeletons reassembled. Muscles were recreated with thin bundles of wild reeds and sea grasses. Then, incredibly, the body was ‘reupholstered’ with its own skin, which must have been carefully removed and set aside. Any gaps were filled with sea lion skin before the outer covering of ash paste and clay was applied.
Another interesting aspect of the Chinchorro mummies was that they were usually found buried collectively, in groups of distinct sex and age. ‘We think this means that the basic unit of Chinchorro culture was rooted in a group of individuals,’ Calogero said. ‘Perhaps the concept of one person did not exist.’
Needless to say, we can only guess at the reasons for this sophisticated procedure. Was it to prepare the dead for an unknown fate, or to allow them to play a new role in their coastal community? We know that the Incas worshipped the mummified remains of their forebears, because missionaries working in Peru after the Spanish conquest recorded their disapproval of religious ceremonies in which Inca lords were publicly displayed, dressed in fine robes, and given cups of corn beer to drink. For the Incas, death marked not so much the end of life, but a transition of the soul, which needed help to enter the afterlife. In exchange for such hospitality, the dead would mediate with the gods on behalf of the living to ensure fertility and good crops. The Incas were the last in a long line of Andean peoples to preserve the remains of their ancestors, a line that began with the Chinchorro.
Going to Extremes Page 10