reading

Chapter 6: The Atacama Desert

Ramiro and Barbara Miranda had very kindly offered to make their house in Oruro my base for exploring Bolivia. Together, we agreed that I should certainly visit the real atacama, not just the northern tip, so I bought a ticket on the night train to Antofagasta. It was a modern, two-car diesel train on which I had an empty seat next to me. It was almost midnight when we left Oruro. The conductor handed out huge tartan wool blankets. At first, the heating seemed to be adequate, and I used the blanket as a pillow, but at Uyuni the heating system quit functioning. The conductor simply shrugged his shoulders and the train became very cold. The blankets were put to good use.

Uyuni

The southern part of the altiplano has a number of large salt flats, but I particularly wanted to see the salt flat of Uyuni, which is the largest salt flat in the world, covering over 3,000 square miles. In a land of mountain peaks, Uyuni is probably the flattest place on earth. It is also the end of the line for the water that drains out of Lake Titicaca through the Rio Desaguadero, and in the rainy season it becomes an immense lake that is only a few inches deep. For centuries, it was considered a useless wasteland with scorching hot days and freezing cold nights, but recently geologists have discovered that the great salt flat contains lithium, which is used in electrical batteries. Today, the world’s most valuable deposits of lithium, a very “modern” metal, lie here in this ancient land.

Our train moved smoothly and quickly through the night, skirting the edge of the salt flats, and although there was no moon, the stars were bright enough to see quite clearly the Andes looming to the east and the salt gleaming white to the west. I thought how the railway builders must have enjoyed putting down miles of arrow-straight line across a perfectly level plain after having struggled to lay the line thousands of feet up and onto the altiplano. The engineers soon found that it was cheaper to ship in thousands of wooden railway ties from Europe and North America than to bring them up from the Amazonian forest.

Many of the passengers got off at Uyuni, and I wondered why. It was not a very large town, and it wasn’t very attractive, either. It seemed to me, situated as it is on the edge of the huge salt flat that is treeless, waterless, and subject to temperatures that could range seventy or eighty degrees in twenty four hours, that it must be one of the worst places to live in Bolivia. It is an important railway junction. There is no agriculture, and the only thing that might interest a tourist is the railway junkyard outside the town, which bears the interesting name the Railway Cemetery.

When the train stopped, the porters were wearing gloves and scarves and their breath steamed in the night air. Some German tourists and I found the extra blankets and snuggled down to sleep as the train headed for the Chilean border, and three large, overdressed women from La Paz fussed about the carriage, looking for places to hide their contraband and talking loudly all the time. Soon we were so far out on the wide, white flatland that even the highest peaks of the Andes were below the horizon.

Ollagűe

I woke to find that we were in the coastal range of the Andes, where all the hills and mountains were clearly volcanic. Their yellow, dry cones were everywhere, and there was not a speck of vegetation anywhere. It was still cold and cloudy and as lonely as the surface of the moon, yet, astonishingly, there were a few llamas and I even glimpsed a tiny farm house.

Ollagűe proved to be nothing more than a large mining village with a railway siding. Our train parked near the Chilean train, and then somebody collected our passports and told us to switch over to the other train. The three ladies were horrified. They immediately gathered up their contraband and scurried back and forth across the track, still talking excitedly all the time, while the German tourists smiled and pretended not to notice.

Unlike our earlier train, the Chilean train was delightful. It was still clearly labeled Antofagasta-Bolivia Railroad Company and had been built in 1910, but the old wooden coaches were pulled by a modern diesel engine. There were four sleeping cars and three first class cars, and the restaurant car in between had a little chimney on the roof. The two-way seats were cast iron but had comfortable, green, English leather cushions, and there were also brass hat racks and wooden windows with shutters that kept falling down. There were cut-glass panels on the doors and the WC was white tiled, although there was no water in the English pull-chain toilet. The train was beautifully made and still rode smoothly, with only the slightest screech of wheels on the tight bends. I spent much of the rest of the journey wandering up and down the train and leaning out the windows for a better look at the scenery.

When we stopped at a tiny station in Chile, a man wearing blue jeans and carrying a six-shooter on his hip gave us back our passports, then the customs men came down the train. Ignoring the Germans and me, they headed straight for the three women from La Paz, who began protesting loudly. Five minutes later, the customs man left with an armful of small packages. The women were wonderfully silent.

It was a slow, careful ride down to the coast, most of it spent winding down a valley with volcanoes on all sides. None of them were active, but I did spot steam escaping from fumaroles, and there was ample evidence of volcanic activity in the very recent past. It was a wildly savage and very beautiful land with small salt flats, dried up lakes, and rocks carved into strange shapes by wind and sand. The high Andes were bright with snow, but this stretch of the coastal range was mainly dry, with only an occasional patch of snow very high up.

At lunchtime I dined with a Bolivian business man in the charming restaurant car, whose brass fittings included flower holders with plastic flowers in them. The car was clean, the service was good, and the meal was also good, but there were only a few diners.

Everywhere I looked, I saw signs of mining activity. The desert was criss-crossed with tire tracks, some of the hillsides were pock-marked with exploration holes, and here and there blocks of salt or sacks of some mineral were piled alongside the train tracks. Once we passed a siding with a dozen freight cars loaded with chunks of brilliant yellow sulphur. It was startlingly bright against the brown hillsides. I saw not a drop of water anywhere. Although it warmed up by the time we came out of the mountains, there were still no trees nor even any grass.

Calama

Calama, Chile, is a big, dusty, ugly mining town lying under a cloud of pollution. It is an oasis town lying on the Rio Loa, but I could see no water in the river. Most of the passengers left the train at Calama, and so I finished the journey almost alone.

The line went straight across the desert, but the scenery was not very interesting, and a slight wind blew fine sand into the train so that I was soon covered in dust. Even my glasses were coated. In the distance, there was a ridge of low hills along the coast. I could see the top of the coastal fog bank drifting over the crest of the hills only to vanish in the dry desert air. It was very like the fog that rolls into San Francisco at certain times of the year.

Antofagasta

We entered Antofagasta high on the hillside with the sea port spread out before us. The city looked very dusty, the temperature dropped as we descended, and the sun had set before we arrived at the station, where I took a crowded taxi to what I was assured was the second best hotel in town. This was an old building that had plenty of hot water, enough to wash the dust off my skin and out of my hair. Then I dined in solitary splendor in the huge hotel dining room.

Antofagasta had not impressed Lily and me when we were there the first time, and now, after a day spent wandering around the city, I still did not like it. It is an old city with a few modern buildings in the center, but the rest was mainly lower income housing, with slums creeping up the hillside. Many trees had been planted, and there were flowers on some of the streets, but they did not make the city more attractive. It was a cold and windy day, and the city was sadly lacking in decent restaurants or even modern cafes. In one square, I found a monument to English friendship, nearby I found a bandstand dedicated to Yugoslav friendship, and I noticed that the mailboxes were the English red pillar boxes. Otherwise, it was all very dull. The few people I spoke to were rather surly and spoke a terrible Spanish with a strong Chilean accent and too much local slang. (In fact, of all the Latin American countries that Lily and I had visited, the Chileans spoke the worst form of Spanish.)

The one bright place in Antofagasta was the market. The prices were very high, but the quality of the fruit and vegetables was excellent, with huge yellow bananas and luscious grapes all very obviously imported from far to the south or from overseas. The fishermen’s wharf was picturesque, with women buying the gleaming fish straight from the boats, but when I asked about a good fish restaurant, nobody could think of one. There was a public beach, but it was dirty and huge waves were crashing onto the sand.

I dined in the hotel again that evening. There were three dozen tables, but only two customers. The plants in their oil barrel pots were dusty, and the train timetable on the wall was twenty years out of date. At that point, I decided that I had seen enough of the coast and decided to backtrack to Calama and go further into the desert to San Pedro de Atacama.

Next morning, I took a very crowded bus to Calama. It was nice to be away from the foggy coast, even though it was not hot and there was even a slight breeze. Calama proved to be a bustling mining town, dirty, expensive and dangerous with narrow streets and corrugated iron buildings everywhere. Groups of rough looking men stood lounging around, and even the women looked hard and grim. The bus driver told me that there was no bus to San Pedro that day, “Maybe tomorrow,” he said, so I checked in at what seemed to be the only decent hotel in town. It proved to be very modern but very expensive, and I shuddered when I saw the prices in the restaurant.

Since there was nothing to see in Calama, I walked out to the river. The Rio Loa is unique because it is the only river to cross the atacama and usually has some water in it when all the other streams have dried up long before they reach the Pacific. Before this land was stolen from Bolivia, Calama was a popular oasis village on the trade route from the altiplano to the Pacific at Mejillones or Antofagasta. Today, the little river cannot supply enough water for a mining town, and water has to be brought great distances through aqueducts that reach far up and into the coastal range of the Andes, where the water is collected from the melting snow.

The river I saw was barely ten feet wide and blocked behind a concrete dam. There were some scraggly trees and some painted concrete picnic tables, but it was not very inviting. I took the ramshackle bus back to town.

When I arrived, I saw a notice in the hotel lobby that invited visitors to tour the great copper mine at Chuquicamata, which is close by. I decided that I would see the mine before going to San Pedro de Atacama, but to be on the safe side, I bought the bus ticket first. On the way back to the hotel, I noticed a restaurant in a converted private house and decided to gamble on lunch. I was lucky. The food was excellent, the service was excellent, and the price was not too high. That night, it was pleasantly cool, and I slept in a modern bedroom with a bathroom that positively gleamed with modern plumbing.

I was up early the next morning and squeezed into the crowded bus for “Chuqui.” We raced along a dead-straight road across the desert and suddenly found ourselves facing an enormous slag heap that was a hundred feet high and at least a mile long. Just behind it, two tall chimneys were belching smoke. Beyond a gateway guarded by armed police was a small town with a theater, a stadium, some stores, and a large hospital, all coated with dust. Along the main street a few skinny trees struggled to survive. This was Chuquicamata.

There was a suspicious lack of truck traffic, and when our little party of foreign tourists reached the public relations office, we found it locked. We waited in the hot sun for about an hour until an official who spoke perfect English arrived and told us that the miners were on strike and that there would be no guided tours for the next few days. Waiting at the bus stop for the ride back to Calama, I chatted with an Italian who claimed that Calama was the most expensive place in the whole of Chile. I had to agree with him.

San Pedro de Atacama

The bus for San Pedro had not left, so I hurried to the bus station. But I need not have worried. It was the usual half an hour late. This bus was the strangest vehicle that I had ridden in so far. Its front half was a bus with seats and windows, but the rear half was an open truck bed with straps to hold down the mixed cargo. I found a seat between a stolid Indian woman and a very fat businessman who did not talk. For a few miles where the road was surfaced, our driver (an army officer in a tight uniform) drove quite sedately. But when the good road ended abruptly and degenerated into little more than a track of broken rock and sand, he handed over the driving to a boy who looked hardly more than sixteen and drove with his foot flat down all the way.

The desert was mostly quite flat, and we could see the smoke from the smelter at Chuqui for miles. There were vast stretches of sand broken by piles of colored rocks, long sand dunes smoking in the wind, and ranges of hills carved into strange shapes by the wind and blowing sand. Huge chunks of black pumice poked through the yellow sand. There was not a blade of grass, or a tiny cactus, or even a dry twig to be seen anywhere. It was a fantastic and extraordinary scene, as eerie and strange as the surface of the moon.

After about two hours, we bounced over a low hill and there below us was a large area of vegetation with the top of a church poking through the green trees. This was San Pedro de Atacama, the oldest town in Chile. There has been a human settlement in this tiny oasis for many thousands of years. The Tihuanacu empire probably did not know of its existence, but the Inca did and used it as a welcome rest stop on the route to their lonely southwestern frontier. When Almagro and his unhappy army of conquistadors arrived in the 16th century, they were returning to Lima, having found absolutely nothing of value in Chile. It is quite possible that it was in this peaceful little village that the “men from Chile” plotted their bloody revenge on the Pizarro brothers and started the civil wars that plagued the Spanish empire in the New World for over a decade.

When I was there, San Pedro de Atacama was a very quiet little town. The bus was the only vehicle on the street, and I walked two blocks to the hostel without seeing a soul. I came to a clean and modern hostel with five separate chalets and only a few other guests. Its low walls were made of white volcanic rock and decorated with pumice carvings and cactus wood, and the glass walled dining room offered a superb view across the desert to Mt. Licancabur, the local volcano.

After I had dropped my bag in my room, I went for a walk to the edge of the town, which is in an oasis. Out in the desert, some men where loading blocks of brilliantly yellow sulphur onto a truck, and when I asked where it came from, they pointed vaguely into the range of volcanoes in the far distance and said, “Across the border, in Bolivia.” As I wandered around, waiting for the sun to set in order to get the best photo of Licancabur, I met a teacher from the local school. He was young and enthusiastic, and we walked to his school, where we climbed to the top of the new football bleachers to get the best view of the mountains. While we waited for sunset, he told me that the latest explorations showed that the Incas had made human sacrifices on the cold, high summit of the volcano.

Licancabur was the most perfect volcanic cone that I had ever seen. It towered 19,000 feet over the bare desert, with just a few patches of snow on its steeply sloping sides and as the sun set it glowed pink, then bright red, then purple. Then the huge desert stars appeared in the crystalline air, and the volcano became a giant, ghostly shadow.

That night I dined very well and slept like a log in the absolute silence. It was such a quiet night, in fact, that I overslept in the morning. After a quick continental breakfast, I hurried out to do some sight seeing. The first thing that impressed me was that most of the buildings in San Pedro de Atacama were quite low. The private houses were packed close together and built of sun dried adobe bricks, but the fashion was to build just high enough for comfort and no further. There were very few windows, the roofs were flat, and the doors were barely high enough for a tall man to get through without cracking his skull. Many of the houses were painted white or blue, and much of the woodwork was obviously light cactus wood, which has so many holes and hollows that it is barely useable. Most of the little stores had no windows and their walls were covered with old advertising that the sun had long ago reduced to tatters. These stores seemed to carry nothing but the bare necessities.

Down the middle of many of the streets there were tiny irrigation ditches carrying a steady flow of surprisingly clean-looking water. Now and then I passed a garden hidden away behind a mud wall with large thorns set into the top, and I also glimpsed fig and pear trees and some corn. It was Saturday, but the town seemed fast asleep as I made my way towards the main plaza. Even the few lonely horses with their light saddles and large wooden stirrups outside the stores seemed to be sleeping in the hot sun.

The plaza was tiny, but wonderfully cool under its huge pepper trees. There were flowers carefully fenced against the goats and a little bandstand, but, thankfully, no huge bronze statues, just a little bust to some long-forgotten general. Near the plaza was a very old tumbledown building. An elderly gentleman who spoke some English explained that it was a hospital built by the conquistador Valdivia in the 16th century. “Since it was the first permanent building erected by the Spaniards,” he added, “we can claim that we were the first European city in Chile.” He was so proud of his charming little town that I did not point out that the land had originally been part of Bolivia.

He and I strolled over to the small, white-washed church with its short tower, and my guide pointed out that the walls were six feet thick at the base. “Look at the roof,” he said. I looked up at the brown ceiling supported by thin beams. “It’s just adobe,” he said. “Just clay spread on twigs.” He laughed at the surprised look on my face and said in Spanish, “Well, it never rains here. At least, it has never rained in my lifetime and my father’s lifetime, although they say it snowed for a few hours in 1908. That could be the original roof that the Spaniards put on when they built it in 1550.” Then he added in English, “Which makes this the oldest church in Chile.”

One of the pleasures of wandering though this little town was the absence of flies or other insects. It must be too dry during the day and too cold at night for the pests, but I wondered how the crops got pollinated because there were quite a few well tended fields, all of them surrounded by low mud walls. I also wondered about the water supply because the wide bed of the Rio Atacama was bone dry and had not seen water for many a long year.

Behind the police station I saw two trucks marked Geografico Militar and half a dozen horses and mules, which made me wonder what geography the military were studying. As I stood staring across the desert, one of my questions was answered when I caught a flash of water and spotted the irrigation canal that came down alongside the dry river. It seemed to come a very long distance from very high up in the mountains. I wondered just how old it was and whether or not the Incas had built it.

Standing there, I could also make out the road, actually hardly more than a track, that zigzags up past Licancabur and crosses 300 miles of mountain wilderness to make its way eventually to Salta in Argentina. It’s probably one of the worst drives in all the Americas. It was just such a mountain crossing by the conquistador Almagro, 400 years ago, that had left a trail of frozen corpses. It was such a terrible experience that Almagro never again crossed the mountains, preferring to reach Lima by the route through the atacama.

At noon, I went back to the hostel and washed everything I could. Thanks to the arid climate, every garment was bone dry within the hour. After lunch, at the suggestion of the hostel manager, I went to the museum, which was an old adobe building with a mud roof run by Padre La Paige, a Belgian Catholic priest. When he heard that I was a Canadian, he was excited because he had not been able to converse in French for years. But I disappointed him. Not much French is spoken in Vancouver, and although I had lived in Montreal, I could hardly speak a word. “Tant pis,” he said, “a pity.” He had worked in the Congo for some years and, since I had been there quite briefly, he cheered up and showed me around.

The padre was short and pleasant and wore a tattered khaki shirt and a large silver cross. His Spanish was excellent, as was his English, and he talked nonstop as he showed me his extraordinary collection of artifacts. There were pots and arrows, cloth and woodwork, and unusual artifacts from all over the atacama. There were also drawings and sketches that the padre himself had made, plus some very detailed maps. Although the museum was packed from floor to ceiling with things he had collected over the years, most intriguing was his collection of mummies. There were dozens of them sitting around in cardboard boxes, and thanks to the climate they were nearly all beautifully preserved. Traditionally, the dead were buried sitting down and hunched up. I wandered from shelf to shelf and box to box, staring at well preserved cloth and hair and skin while my guide pointed out details.

It was clear that the padre loved his job and loved the desert, too. Sitting on a bench in the shade, he spoke to everybody who walked by and it was obvious that all the small boys admired him. He also told me a story. When he began his archeological and anthropological work, years before, he found that while skeletons out in the desert were very well preserved, the bodies of Christians buried in the hallowed ground around the church were decomposed. The Atacama Indians saw this as an ominous sign and it took some time for the padre to explain to them what was happening. The reason was obvious. Over the years, well meaning people planted flowers or shrubs in the cemetery and sometimes watered them. The Indians would never dream of wasting precious water on the graves of their ancestors.

By late afternoon there were more people on the streets and quite a little crowd in the plaza, where I watched some men playing a game that looked easy but wasn’t. The players threw steel pucks at a target that was just a large box of damp clay. It was rather like pitching horseshoes and just as difficult. There were vendors selling fruit and homemade candies, but at sunset everybody went home. That night, I slept under a couple of blankets.

Next morning, I was up at six and tip-toed out of the hostel to the football bleachers, where I hoped to get some good sunrise pictures. It was cold and I shivered on my perch for an hour only to find that in that crystalline air, the spectacular sunrise was much too brilliant for my little camera. The bell in the church soon began to ring, but I was too cold to visit, so I hurried back to the hostel for a hot breakfast.

Everybody was quite vague about the bus schedule, though it was generally agreed that it would arrive “soon.” I sat in the plaza, watching the citizens walk up and down with the children all in their Sunday best. Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, the bus arrived and the driver went off for an hour to have a drink. It was a regular bus, covered in dust inside and out, but there was plenty of room and we eventually headed off across the desert back to Calama. The plume of gray smoke from the smelter at Chuquicamata was clearly visible across the desert an hour before we got there. After a mediocre but expensive spaghetti supper at the hotel, I watched a Salvation Army band playing on the street corner. They were a rag-tag bunch dressed in bits of uniform, and they were not very good, but there was a large crowd, almost entirely men, stolidly listening to the fire and brimstone preacher. I gathered that the Salvation Army was the only entertainment in town that Sunday night.

I am glad that I visited San Pedro de Atacama when it was a half-forgotten little village. Today, it is an extremely popular holiday destination for Chileans, with bars and discos and all-night parties with amplified music. Modern new buildings have sprung up, and the village has completely lost its charm and character.

The Copper Mine at Chuquicamata

Next morning, I took the bus again to the mine at Chuquicamata, hoping the strike was over. I was eager to see the famous copper mine and smelter built on the site where, centuries before, Spanish explorers had stopped to make crude horseshoes from the chunks of raw copper they found among the rocks. The tourist office was open this time, and a smartly dressed young man showed us a slide show, gave us all hard hats, and then took us in a minibus to the edge of the pit. It was enormous! We stood on an observation platform and stared down into what must have been the biggest manmade hole on earth. I had seen the great hole at Kimberly in South Africa and a few others, but this hole was not only deep, it was wide, too, so wide that it took the little bus nearly two hours to drive all around it. Below us, scores of giant trucks climbed slowly up the winding road that cut through the hundreds of steep terraces. We could barely see the huge machines at the bottom that were ripping out the copper ore. The guide claimed that there were 100 miles of railway track in the pit alone. Over everything there hung a haze of dust, and whenever the wind changed, great clouds of foul-smelling smoke rising from the smelter chimneys blocked our view. The land all around was horribly torn up and the giant slag heaps and other heaps of rubble slowly crept out into the ancient desert. The guide would not take us into the smelter and banned any photographs of the smelting process that we could glimpse, but we did see the great sheets of pure copper stacked up and gleaming like red gold, a brilliant contrast to the dust-coated gray buildings and the smoke-filled sky.

Some of the visitors who had a car offered me a lift back to town. They told me that the miners earned five times what the average Chilean earned, but since Calama was the most expensive place in Chile, their high wages did them very little good and strikes were quite common. When we passed the large hospital, the woman in the group said, “Yes, they need this hospital. Most of the patients are children, and eighty percent of them are on oxygen because of the pollution.”

Back in Calama, I bought a bus ticket to Arica, then waited in the hotel lobby. The bus to Arica was modern and comfortable, the road was well paved, and we went directly to Arica with no stops except for the usual passport check in the middle of the night.

Arica

After our bus arrived in Arica early in the morning, I found a small hotel where I slept until noon. Back at the station, I learned that the next train to Bolivia was next morning, so I had the remainder of the day to see Arica. Lily and I had been there before, but we had not been impressed and had left very quickly. My first task now was to change some money, which proved quite difficult. I tried three banks before I found one that would change a traveler’s check, and then they only gave me half the posted exchange rate and were rude when I complained. It seemed that the country was experiencing financial problems and the exchange rate fluctuated daily. Prices were so erratic that nothing in the shop windows had a price tag, and even the restaurants had their prices in chalk so that they could be quickly changed.

Down at the fishermen’s wharf, the sun had broken through the mist and black cormorants sat on the lighters, carefully watching the line of yellow-painted fishing boats tied up to the dock. There was a beautiful display of gleaming silver-blue fish of all sizes with plastic bags of fish roe among the little crabs and octopus, and crowds of people were buying directly from the fishermen.

The town looked very busy. There were new shops and apartment buildings, and I found a fruit bar selling blender-mixed pure fruit juices that seemed to be very popular. I also came to a little shrine at the roadside that was covered with bunches of flowers with a small pyramid of melted candles in the center. An old Indian man was carefully adding another candle. One of the cards on the flowers said Gracias, but when I asked the man what it was for, he ignored me.

At the dock I had asked about a good fish restaurant, and that evening I tracked it down and ordered a full meal. I was in for a surprise. The soup came with the head and the tail of the fish in the tureen. It was delicious. Next came the rest of the fish, baked to perfection and wonderfully flavored with a few vegetables. It had been a large fish, easily enough for two or three people, but it was so fresh and so tasty that I sat and ate the whole thing, leaving nothing but polished bones. I could tell from the wide smile on her face that the manager was impressed by my performance. I still think that was one of the best meals that I have ever eaten.

Before I went to bed that night, I looked out the window and noticed that many of the houses near the hotel had roofs made only of split bamboo canes or canes covered in a thin skin of adobe. It seems that there is at least one advantage to living in a region where it never rains. Another advantage is the complete absence of mosquitoes.

The Train to La Paz

There was a small crowd of passengers waiting patiently with their luggage at the train station the next morning, but the customs agent never turned up. As we boarded the single passenger carriage, I saw we were a very mixed bunch of Bolivians, Chileans, English, French, Americans, and a young Swiss couple who seemed to be on their honeymoon. I sat next to a Bolivian student who said he had exchanged American dollars for fifty Chilean pesos in Santiago, but only twenty pesos for travelers checks. I told him that I had not even received that much. Across the aisle was a little old Bolivian nun with a huge bottle of wine peeking out of her black bag. The American woman had a teenage daughter in dental braces. Neither of them spoke a word. The most interesting people in the carriage were two retired English teachers who were worried about altitude sickness. They were very capable looking ladies. I told them that Lily and I had never had any trouble, and the Bolivian student agreed that altitude sickness was greatly exaggerated. A few days later when I met them again in La Paz, they were tackling the steep streets like mountain goats and enjoying every minute.

The train was just our one passenger carriage with what I took to be a baggage car behind it and a large diesel engine pulling us. The line is famous for being a cog rail line, and when it climbs the mountains or went around very sharp bends, it was possible to see the third rail, but we did not seem to be using it. The first few miles went along the coast through mist and fog, then we turned up a long, wide valley and headed into the desert sun. There was some irrigated agriculture in the valley, but no villages and so we made no stops. The train climbed quickly and smoothly until, quite suddenly, we were in the mountains and I caught a glimpse of a snow-capped volcano far to the north in Peru.

I made my way through the carriage to the diesel engine, then past the giant, noisy engines to the engineer’s cab. The engineer did not want me there, but before he chased me away he explained that the cog rail was not necessary for such a light train pulled by such a heavy engine. Only heavy freight trains used the cog system. There was a pipeline running alongside the track, but he did not know whether it carried oil or natural gas or whether it was being imported or exported. His only interest was his train and his schedule.

Soon there were volcanic peaks all around us. The steward appeared with an excellent lunch, which told me that part of the baggage coach was obviously a kitchen. Another surprise was in store at the border: we did not stop and there were no formalities. In fact, if it had not been for the sudden change in scenery, we would never have known that we had crossed the border into Bolivia.

Suddenly we were on the altiplano with its familiar adobe farm houses and women in derby hats staring silently at the passing train. There was a herd of llamas in the distance and flamingoes stood in the little river the train was following. The sky was huge and bright with thunder clouds hiding the peaks of the coastal range. Far in the distance, the afternoon sun sparkled on the snow clad peaks of the Andes.

The rest of the trip was quite fast. After a brief stop at the railway junction in Viacha, we soon arrived in El Alto, where our train wound down the mountain side to La Paz without another engine assisting. In the crowded station, the porter cried out the numbers on our luggage like a Bingo caller. After a short hunt, I found a suitable hotel where, although there was no heat, the beds had plenty of blankets. It was hard to get to sleep with the noise of the busy city and the high altitude, but it felt good to be back in Bolivia.