When we reached the top of the hillside, Pablo walked over to a net and showed me the problem. ‘You see,’ he said, tugging one of the thin metal cords that held the giant green nets in place like horizontal sails facing out to sea, ‘this is too loose. The nets must be kept taut to catch the fog most efficiently.’ The metal cable had rusted and become slack. ‘The problem here is that no one is interested in maintenance.’ He looked up at the lines of nets marching across the slope. There were gaps in the lines where nets had fallen. Elsewhere, posts that had once held nets stood pointing to the skies ready to do their fog catching duty, but their nets had disappeared.
‘In 1992 there were 100 nets here,’ Pablo said. ‘They were enough to supply all the village’s needs. But now there are just 30 left. It is not enough.’ Because no one had bothered to look after the fog collectors, the village had started to receive tankers again to supplement the fog water supplies. Pablo couldn’t understand it. The maintenance wasn’t a difficult job. Tightening a few cables, clearing eucalyptus leaves from the plastic gutters occasionally, checking the nets for holes, these weren’t arduous tasks, but if no one did them, the system was stuffed.
I found it difficult to comprehend too, but it wasn’t a totally unfamiliar story to me. I’d seen many development projects like this, simple, clever ideas that worked technically but foundered on people’s inability to keep them going, or disinterest in doing so. This wasn’t rural Africa, where well-meaning white foreigners don’t always get the social side of their projects right. The villagers down in Chungungo weren’t rich, but they all wore shoes and had enough to eat. Pablo was certainly well meaning, but he wasn’t a foreigner. Yet still the problems were similar. The fog collectors were a brilliant technical solution to the village’s water-supply problem but unless the villagers could be encouraged or cajoled into participating, the system simply wasn’t going to work.
I’d gleaned a few clues as to why earlier that day when I’d sat in on a meeting of Chungungo’s Water Committee. It was a pretty little village with dirt roads and houses painted in bright primary colours. On the breeze-block wall beside the committee’s building, someone had daubed a slogan that read: ‘Queremos una solucion definitiva de agua para Chungungo’ (We want a definite solution to Chungungo’s water problem). It wasn’t the sort of village where you’d expect to find graffiti.
A dozen people sat round the small hall. Although getting their water from both the fog collectors and trucks didn’t really seem to be a problem that I could see, it was a shame that the fog-collecting nets weren’t being properly maintained since it was a good project and had been proven to work. But in the wider scheme of things, did it really matter as long as Chungungo was getting enough water? Then someone pointed out that the trucks were paid for by the government, as part of a drought relief scheme, and Chungungo couldn’t rely on deliveries forever. The drought relief budget might be cut at almost any time. It wasn’t a long-term solution to the problem. So why weren’t they maintaining the nets up on the hillside? I wondered to myself. The solution to their problem lay in their own hands. The answer to the quandary slowly became clear.
Everyone paid a water rate to the government, and the amount they paid was the same irrespective of where the water came from. If they received all of their water by truck, they paid the same. If all the water came from the fog collectors, as it had done a few years previously, they paid the same. If Chungungo’s water came from both trucks and nets, the rate was the same. No one had an incentive to fix the nets because it made no difference to the amount they paid.
The debate continued. It was clear that most people preferred in principle to have their own fog water. It was a more reliable source than the trucks, and some said it tasted better, but no one was willing to take on the responsibility of maintaining the nets.
Pablo and I left the meeting as someone was suggesting that the fog collectors could become a tourist attraction for the village. It had become more difficult for everyone to support themselves by fishing. Tourism would bring new jobs to the village. The idea struck me as a red herring. The fact remained that until someone took responsibility for those nets, the problem would continue.
A solution seemed obvious to me. Why not get the government to waive the water charge if Chungungo supplied themselves from the nets, I asked Pablo. ‘They won’t do it,’ he said sadly. So why not ask the government to put Chungungo’s water rates into a special account and use the money to pay someone to maintain the nets? That way they would save the money used to pay for the water trucks and create a job too. ‘The sums don’t work out,’ Pablo replied, ‘and besides, no one in government is really interested. Chungungo is too small a place to bother with.’
There is a woman who lives a few doors down from me at home in Oxford. I don’t know her very well but we always exchange greetings when we pass on the street and, without fail, her cheery hello is always followed by a comment on the weather. ‘Hello Nick, colder today.’ Or ‘Hello Nick, it looks like it’s brightening up.’ British people are obsessed with the weather in a way that few other races are. Our constantly variable atmospheric conditions provide a perennial topic of conversation and TV weathermen are national heroes. It’s not like that in northern Chile. The weather is more or less the same every day of the year, so there’s not a lot to comment on. ‘Hello Pedro, dry again today,’ wanes after the first rainless month.
But ask a Chilean when it last rained and you start something. Motoring back to Mejillones in the boat after my unsuccessful sortie into the octopus fishing business, I put the question to Rodrigo. ‘There was rain in 1982,’ he said. ‘It was an El Niño year. There were very few fish and lots of the sea lions died.’ El Niño is the name given to the phenomenon that occurs every few years in the Pacific when the Humboldt Current fails, the waters are warmer than usual, most of the fish disappear – killed off by the warm temperatures and the lack of nutrients upwelling from the seabed – and the weather gets uppity. El Niño kicks in around Christmas time; the name means little boy or Christ child. There was a really severe El Niño phase in 1982/83.
‘It rained in Antofagasta in 1992,’ Enrique chipped in as he peeled off his wetsuit. Rodrigo nodded. ‘Yes, there were mudslides, 120 people died. But the last time it rained here was in 1999.’
Enrique looked at him with a frown on his face. ‘1999? Are you sure?’ he asked. Adolphe looked puzzled too. Neither of them was convinced. ‘Yes, 1999,’ Rodrigo continued. ‘It rained for about ten minutes. Don’t you remember? I think it was in January.’ But neither Adolphe nor Enrique could remember and the three of them argued about it for the next quarter of an hour.
While fog is a frequent visitor to the coast, sometimes penetrating up to 50 kilometres inland, rain is almost unheard of. Beyond the fog belt, the exceptional rainfall event is virtually the only precipitation they get, and this is why Aldo, the Arica meteorologist, had told me to go inland to look for a drier place.
By a curious turn of events, the first two days of my journey through the interior of the Atacama, in search of a new driest inhabited place on Earth, I spent with the Chilean army. I met with a climatologist in Antofagasta, a tough city that looked as if it worked hard for a living, and he told me about a large area of desert where no one went except the army. ‘Go and talk to them,’ he suggested, ‘they know more about that area than anyone else.’
The seventh regiment commandos had their base near the seashore where flocks of pelicans roamed and fierce breakers rolled in from the Pacific to crash against the rocks. I’d been a bit uneasy about consulting the army. Chile was no longer under military rule, but by all accounts these guys had kept the country on a pretty short leash during the Pinochet years. But when the commanding officer had to turn down the salsa music in his office so that we could hear each other speaking, I felt a little less nervous about seeking their advice.
After half an hour in his office, I’d been invited along on the next visit the commandos were making
to what they considered to be the very driest part of the Atacama, an area known as the Plain of Patience. The name made it sound as if it might be a rather relaxing trip, but I was under no illusions. The commandos go to the Plain of Patience for desert survival training. My initial thoughts on the offer were clouded by a sense of curiosity. So far, I’d seen little of the rigours of the Atacama. All the towns I’d passed through were protected from the harsh realities of desert life by their water supplies. Getting a dose of the real thing might be interesting, I thought.
Well, of course it was interesting, but even more so it was also bloody hard work.
The Chilean army is proud of its desert survival skills. Back in the late nineteenth century, they were involved in a conflict with Bolivia and Peru over part of the Atacama Desert. It was a struggle for power and influence over the Pacific coast of South America based on control of the thriving guano and nitrate industries. Some call it the War of the Pacific. I prefer the alternative: the Fertilizer War.
Today, Bolivia is a landlocked nation. Until 1884, it had a coastline on the Pacific, but that territory was surrendered to Chile in the truce that ended the fighting. Bolivia didn’t have much option, because Chile had occupied the Bolivian coastal region (today’s Antofagasta province) easily before moving on to deal with the more powerful Peru. Chile did pretty well out of the conflict with its northern neighbour too, securing Arica amongst other places. But it could have been much worse for Peru because Chilean forces occupied Lima, the Peruvian capital, for three years before withdrawing when a peace treaty was negotiated.
No one had really expected the Chilean army to be able to reach Lima because there was so much desert in the way. The Chileans couldn’t do it, the Peruvians thought, because they wouldn’t be able to carry enough water. It is said that the army managed this extraordinary feat by leaving all the metal objects they carried with them out in the open each night. In the mornings, they would be covered in dew, and the soldiers would lick their rifles and shovels clean before setting out to march each day.
I didn’t get to carry a rifle on my survival exercise, but it wouldn’t have been much good as a water source because modern Chilean commandos’ rifles are encased in plastic so that they don’t get too hot to hold during the day. But the commandos still harvest dew. It’s just that they use plastic sheets to do it nowadays.
The one thing that anyone who has spent any time in a desert will tell you is to take lots of water. It’s simply the main thing you need, and you need lots of it because deserts are very dry places. I have made several journeys through the Sahara and Gobi Deserts and I know that a good supply of water is essential. A person can survive for many days without food, but without water you simply don’t last long. Ten litres a day per person is a sensible average to take. The ground rules for the two-day course were outlined to me by the commando instructor, a man a little younger than me whose name was Zeus, pronounced Zé-ous in Spanish. Each day, he told me, I had one meal to eat and 1 litre of water to drink.
The rules began as soon as I pitched up at the commando barracks in Antofagasta at 8 o’clock sharp. I climbed into the back of a large lorry with six men from the lower ranks and off we set for the Plain of Patience. The higher ranks led the way in relative style in a pickup. The journey took eight hours and the wooden benches in the back of the truck were very hard. As soon as we’d unloaded our packs, and camouflaged the truck with netting, we set off for a march. It was quarter to five and the sun was very low, but still scorching hot. I could feel it burning my face even with sun protection factor 35 on.
The lack of water and food I was mentally prepared for, but the marching was something else. It was curious, because when I’d been thinking over the option of spending two days in the Atacama on a commando desert survival course, I hadn’t considered marching. This was stupid of me, I know, but I hadn’t got further than visions of digging holes in the ground to harvest dew, and maybe catching a few lizards for breakfast.
But armies are made for marching and that’s what we did. I was thankful that Zeus called a halt after about an hour. We had reached a gentle hillside littered with stones, not unlike all the other gentle hillsides we had just spent the last hour marching across. Zeus knelt down and scraped the stones away from the surface with his small spade, dug a few preliminary shovelfuls of dirt, and announced that this was where we would set up camp. ‘The ground is easy to dig,’ he told me. ‘We don’t sleep in tents because they would be easily seen by the enemy. We try to blend into the landscape.’
After eight hours sitting on a hard bench in the back of an uncomfortable lorry and another hour marching across stony ground with a heavy pack on your back, about the last thing you want to do is dig a hole in the ground. But the idea of going to sleep was an attractive one, so I set to. Zeus and I spent 40 minutes digging our two-man hole, about 30 centimetres deep. We stuck a green plastic tarpaulin over the top and secured it at the edges with soil to keep it in place. Then, one at a time, we eased our way in through the flap left at one end and settled down for a short rest. Short was the operative word. To conserve energy and water, we would mainly be sleeping during the day. Night was the time for proper marching.
So less than two hours later, Zeus woke me with a dig in the ribs and we marched again. The sun had disappeared and all around me shadowy commandos were checking their weapons. Now that it was night-time, in one way the marching was easier because I wasn’t so hot. But in quite a significant way it was more difficult, that way being that I couldn’t see a bloody thing. A march on a parade ground at night would have been one thing. Marching across a rough and stony desert landscape was quite another. I slipped and stumbled, the pack growing heavier on my back.
We marched in silence, Zeus communicating with his men by means of low whistling, so I couldn’t grumble. I also couldn’t afford to slow down because I had to keep close enough to see Zeus’ feet otherwise I’d be lost in seconds. Every now and again, my stomach put in a rumbling complaint, having not received any nourishment since 7 o’clock that morning. I was also getting thirsty, not having drunk a drop of water since breakfast. To add to my worries, I began to feel just a bit breathless. The Plain of Patience lies at an altitude of 2,500 metres. On top of all this, my pack was seemingly tightening around my shoulders, stopping the flow of blood to my fingers.
After 40 minutes, I made my way to within whispering distance of Zeus to tell him about my pack and bloodless fingers. I wondered whether the pack’s strap needed some readjustment. When I explained my predicament, he just laughed.
Fifty-five minutes after leaving our sleeping holes, Zeus called a halt. ‘We rest for five minutes every hour,’ he told me in a whisper. I hadn’t been able to see the dozen commandos around me for the last hour, but they emerged from the dark and made a circle, all facing out. I saw one of them unhook the strap over his water bottle and take a swig. Momentarily, this made me feel better since I’d made a promise to myself not to be the first one to drink. Happily, I raised my own water bottle to my lips and took a sip of beautiful water.
We marched some more. Zeus found me to explain how he knew where we were going, pointing out the Southern Cross that he was navigating by, bright and sparkling in the clear night sky. With something other than stumbling to concentrate on, I almost felt good about being out in the desert with a group of commandos, but the high only lasted for a few minutes.
Then, 30 minutes into the second hour of marching, things got significantly better. I was just beginning to have serious doubts about lasting the night when the moon came up. It was quite extraordinary. I don’t think I’d ever seen it rise before. Really fast to begin with, it just popped up from behind the mountains. Then it just sat there, clear of the skyline, not quite full but completely surreal. The light it shone was remarkably bright and all the commandos around me suddenly became visible and took on very long shadows. I allowed myself another drink in celebration.
But Zeus didn’t like it. ‘Too much l
ight,’ he complained in a whisper. ‘This would be bad for a night march in battlefield conditions because we would be clearly visible to the enemy.’ As far as I was concerned, it was brilliant because at last I could see where I was going. ‘We are also walking too fast,’ Zeus continued, ‘we make too much noise walking at this pace. It should be much slower, which takes a lot more effort. We’ll do it later.’ Oh good, I thought to myself.
When we stopped for our five-minute break just before 11 o’clock, I felt very tired indeed. The soles of my feet hurt a lot, and my legs ached all over. My shoulders hurt because the rucksack was too heavy, and my blood had given up even trying to reach the ends of my fingers. My pulse was racing like a maniac’s and my breathlessness was getting to be a habit.
The next hour was the worst. For the first time, I began to feel thirsty. I think it was partly the altitude because I couldn’t get enough oxygen and I had to breathe through my mouth. I caught myself panting and my tongue, well my tongue started to ache if you can imagine such a thing. The relentless marching began to mess with my mind. When trudging across a dry river channel, I swear I heard flowing water. I was getting hallucinations of the ears.
I kept reminding myself that my body wasn’t actually designed for this sort of behaviour. It was designed for a sedentary lifestyle, writing at home in the mid-latitudes with lots of water and food available. My tiredness started to make me stumble much more often that I had been a few hours before, but I didn’t actually fall over. One of the real commandos did though, which made me feel much better. Perhaps I was not the only one feeling rough, I thought to myself.
Thankfully, at midnight, Zeus called a halt. ‘We’ll sleep now,’ he told me. I asked him how far he thought we’d marched. ‘About 12 kilometres,’ he said. I wasn’t surprised I was feeling bad. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d walked 12 kilometres anywhere, let alone at 2,500 metres altitude, in the middle of the night, carrying a 10-tonne pack, with no food and just a few sips of water, across the driest desert in the world.
Going to Extremes Page 12