Parque Lauca

After breakfast in the main dining room at Putre, our table separated from the students' by about a foot, we checked out and drove on up to the park. In the U.S. our national parks are huge commercial affairs, with "lodges," multiple well-paved roads, and plenty of safety rails and warning signs. In northern Chile, there's one road which you share with truckers and a ranger station where the toilets have frozen. The only signs are the ones that say, sort of pointlessly, the road's in bad shape. It's ALL backcountry up here.

The volcanic landscape was amazing, an ash and dirt plain covered with scrubby brush, large debris piles along valley floors, and swampy shallow high alpine lakes. By "high" I mean close to 15,000 feet.

At the park's western entrance we stopped and talked to the ranger for a few minutes. He lives in Arica and does eight days on and eight days off by himself at the station. He said he reads, listens to the radio, and looks at the night sky to entertain himself. That sounds like a great job. Except that the toilets were frozen.

I was excited to see the vizcachas, described as "prehistoric rabbits" by the Lonely Planet, so we walked around the short observation trail near the ranger station. This was the only improved trail we saw. Everything else looked like trackless wilderness.

The vizcachas were everywhere, but difficult to see in the rocks. They are the same color and pattern as the rocks where they sunbathed. They showed no fear of us coming right up to them, but not close enough to touch. Maybe we should have tried, but I'm not real keen on getting within touching/biting distance of wild animals.

We saw our first vicunas here too. They look like deer with very skinny necks, small heads, and no antlers.

We drove on up the road, oohing and ahhing at the scenery, until we came to another ranger station at Lago Chungara, 14,762 feet above sea level, at the foot of Volcan Parinacota, something over 20,000 feet and a perfect pyramid.

We bought our first handicrafts from one of the stalls set up at the parking area, a scarf for me, wall hanging, and something else. You gotta have gifts, and they were real pretty.

We chatted with the snack kiosk guy and paid for the use of his restroom. What a luxury. (If a toilet doesn't flush, it's pretty much just a bucket with waste in it, right?) I now truly appreciate our reliably flushable toilets here in the good old USA.

More mate de coca to warm up and help us breathe, then a stroll along the lake. It appeared that there'd been some information signs up here, but any text was long gone and just rusty signposts remained.

We had a few minutes of peace before the busloads of kids rolled up, along with their army escort (?!) and a guy in the bed of a pickup waving a flag and whooping. The kids swarmed the lake. We drove on.

A few minutes later we came up to the Bolivian border and turned around. It had cost $100 US each to get into Chile and we didn't want to go through customs and all again just for a stamp in the passports. Next time.

So we started the trip back to Arica. Down down down until we came to the "road" to the village of Parinacota. Roads here are dirt. In the US, you might not even call it a road, much less the one connection to the town. Next time we're renting a high clearance vehicle, although you'd be surprised where buses can actually go. We were.

Parinacota is a typical small village around a plaza and church. They were obviously ready for the tourists to show up. All the little kiosks were open, though the many separate ones seemed to be manned by only a few people. I guess in a town of maybe 100 you can pretty much trust anybody. More mate here, along with sopapilla and trying to keep everything from blowing away in the gritty wind. The plaza also has an elevated gazebo with a foosball table. I wonder how good they are at it.

I was excited to see the inside of the church, where I'd read they had beautiful murals and a table they have to keep tied down so it won't kill anybody. Anybody... else!

When I asked the guy about it, he said they were just about to unlock the church because... the bus loads of kids were about to arrive! Yay.

When it was unlocked I rushed in to get a couple photos before it was overrun, and it was totally worth it. The paintings are beautiful. The table, as promised, was tied down near the altar. It supposedly walked out one time and parked itself in front of a guy's house. The guy turned up dead in the morning. Since then they keep it tied here so nobody else winds up dead due to the End Table of Doom. This church had three skulls with flower garlands in a small room off the main sanctuary. There was no indication of who they belonged to and the video crew accompanying the students was hogging the church guy talking about the table so I did not find out.



Al joined the line of female students to use the outhouse here. I preferred to stop along the highway. She then got into a conversation with one of the army escorts, a big, cheerful, talkative and friendly guy. He didn't really explain why these students from Spain and Argentina on a cultural tour needed an army escort. Some kind of exercise? Just keeping an eye on them? I guess the students might be great targets for kidnapping, or maybe they're just kids and have a knack for getting in trouble. There were also carabineros and an ambulance accompanying the student group.

This guy had been all over the world with the Chilean army, and described Haiti as the worst place he'd ever seen. Sounds about right.

We decided to pass on the army guy's recommendation of a town about 20 miles further down the road, as the road to Parinacota had been a real struggle for our little car and my ass.

The trip back to Arica was uneventful, except we were finally able to spot the geoglyphs (petroglyphs?) along the hills near the city.

Arriving too early in Arica, we had several hours to kill before the Avis people came to the office at 8 p.m. to take the car off our hands. It was a Sunday and the street fair was going on. A stumbling drunk shouted gringo and slurred something indecipherable at me. While nearly everyone we met here was very kind, friendly, and helpful, this guy, others, and the general bad looks I'd get from some people gave me a whole different perspective on being in the hated minority. It's hard to be a tall, blond, white guy from North America!

We were nervous and tired, bored too since we'd gotten back earlier than expected. Not a lot goes on on a Winter Sunday afternoon in Arica. The street fair was lined with stalls selling a bunch of plastic crap and clothes made in China, same as home. We ate empanadas and drank warm cokes ("natural" means warm, fyi) at a food stall.
The fair also had trampolines and mini 4 wheelers for the kids to ride around the plaza on the media. We watched them for a while, and finally reached the Avis people. They could not come early, so we had to find something to do to entertain ourselves. The bar down the road worked fine.

A couple of old guys discussed the dictatorship at the table behind us. A drunk would occasionally get run off by the bar lady, then come back and sit by her and watch TV. Some kids juggled for change in the intersection while squeegee guys hustled on the opposite side. We drank a large bottle of Cristal beetween us. Drinking and watching the street is a great way to pass the time, and the toilet down the hall at this place was something to see.

Eventually it was 8 p.m. We walked back up the street to Avis, returned the car, and they were nice enough to drive us over to the bus station. Our bus left at 10 something for the 12 hour trip to San Pedro de Atacama. When we tried to board the driver told us we needed a special pass to get on the bus, in addition to our tickets. We walked back inside the terminal to purchase the 50 cent slip from a guy in a booth, and got on board.