Wide Eyed and Awake in a Bunk at 12,000 Feet

The pantomimed characiture of a man holding his eyes open proved to be an omen. Our bus driver was showing me what would happen tonight as I lay in a bunk bed with two snoring roommates after chewing on three coca leaves earlier in the evening.

It was a sleepless, restless, and anxious night up here at 12,000 feet where we stayed with Aymara Indians. One family named Lucas lives up here, and they offer guests a chance to watch their native dances and spend the night in simple bunkhouses.

A family from Switzerland, three generations strong, joined us at the communal dinner table, where a hunk of chicken was served in broth surrounded by quinoa, the grain that everyone lives on in Northern Chile. They loved roughing it despite the fact that the water truck had not arrived so there were no showers or running water during our stay.

To help us with the altitude, which at these heights can make the unaccustomed weeze and get altitude sickness, our hosts offered us cups of chachacoma tea. Oh, and those coca leaves that one of my roommates bought in Pica also helped keep me up.

The rugged scenery up here is spectacular: the sunsets up against the brown mountains are even more dramatic when used as a backdrop for the native dancers in their bright red costumes.

The lodge where we are staying was built by the Collahuasi mine, the company’s largesse is what pays for people’s education, cars, houses and just about everything. In exchange they use a lot of water and get to chew up vast amounts of land and pretty much get their way. Getting a job in one of the many mines, despite its tough regimen, pays nearly $12,500 a year. That’s by far the highest pay anyone earns, so the jobs are coveted by nearly every young man in this northernmost region of Chile. A woman who works in a local trade school said that occupations like food service and auto repair are never, ever as popular as mining techniques.

One of our guides, who lives in the town of Pica, has organized an awareness campaign, to let local people know the price that the environment has paid through history by their fealty to the big Canadian, Australian and Chilean mining companies. The water table is getting lower and lower, and the vast open territory is littered with piles of tailings and holes in the ground.

The distances here in Chile are punishing to the uninitiated….and the altitude here in the alto plano makes even busses wheeze, chugging up a moderate incline because the diesel engine is starved for oxygen. All along the road are memorials to drivers who died in head-on collisions, we were told that many of the fatalities result from miners high-tailing it home after a seven or 10 day workweek where they live at the remote mine and want to get back to families and civilization.

Accommodations would continue to be rustic here in this hardscrabble northernmost section of Chile called Tarapaca. Temperatures during the day climb easily to 90 Farenheit, and at night tumble down to 35 or 40. We met a couple, Marco Fernandez-Coneha and Coco Coello who offer camping stays in an outdoor hotel called El Huarango, near the roadside village of Le Tirana. Entering at night, there are cots with warm comforters, and stand-up tents lit by candles. Pathways to each tent are lit with candles too, and our evening meal was taken at wooden tables with plenty of wine to accompany the hearty food part of which was cooked with a solar cooker.

The couple is warm and friendly, and love to take guests on tours of the house that they built out back with mud bricks. It’s comfy and stays a constant 19 degrees throughout the searing day and chilly nights. While we visited their German Shepard had just given birth to eight pups, who squirmed inside their mud dog house. Marco also showed us the subterranean storage chamber where he keeps his supplies and his immaculate workshop with each of hundreds of tools in its special place.

As we drove back down from the alto plano, suddenly people on the bus began yelling about rainbows, and we pulled over to tumble out clutching cameras. Up in the sky was a circus of riotous rainbows, a circle right above us with all the colors of the spectrum in a round colored arc and three other rainbows on either side. Wow, that’s Northern Chile for you.