A sense of perspective.
The jetbridge was broken, the captain announced apologetically after we pulled up at our assigned gate at Santiago airport. We’d have to use a set of stairs, he continued, before remarking that the outside temperature was a neat 1 degree Celsius above zero. It had been pushing 45 when we left Madrid some 13 hours earlier.
“Uno?” mouthed in disbelief a woman sat a few rows ahead of me as she rummaged through her bag, looking for a sweater.
That July morning in Central Chile was the first clear one after a week of rain. Mountains laden with snow rose in the background, hemming in the city. A thin veneer of frost covered parked cars, and puddles were crowned by a layer of ice. Each breath felt like sucking on a particularly strong mint candy.
My objective, however, lay further North, in that corner of the altiplano where Chile, Peru and Bolivia collided in a grid of borders drawn after senseless conflicts, invisible dichotomies across a land of bushes, sand and the odd volcano. But getting there involved a few more stops.
Arica was fast asleep by the time I arrived. The self-proclaimed driest city in the world (in the sense of dearth of precipitation, not lack of booze) was warm, humid, salty. My hotel was on the shore of the Pacific and, together with the rest of the town, sat under an impalpable veil of marine fog. Everything was quiet; even the waves seemed to have retired for the night.
The next day I walked along the seafront promenade, looking for the monolithic resort complex where the car rental office was absconded, and dove into the peculiarity of a seaside desert. Arica felt, and smelt, as if suspended between two worlds: ancient dust, devoid of humidity since time immemorial, rolled down from the hills that rose just off the city centre while, on the other side, were the sights and scents of the ocean. Here and there the dirt would turn soft, squidgy even, and the saccharine sweetness of decaying seaweed jumped at my nostrils. Despite its claim of quasi-perennial sun, banks of gunmetal clouds clogged the skies for each of the days I spent there, biding my time.
Emerging from the coastal strip of Northern Chile into the highlands has all the hallmarks of a well-rehearsed miracle. I pointed my hired vehicle inland and soon my large Hyundai SUV with an old-school diesel and a 75-litre fuel tank popped out of the murk into a land of sheer brilliance. The ancient seabed had been thrusted 2,000 metres into the air, and Carabineros were playing football outside their barracks in the hamlet of Poconchile.
This is where I wanted to be, what I wanted to do. To be driving into the Andean desert, moored only by fuel autonomy and the car insurance’s small print. To visit minuscule hamlets painted white, to see vicuñas graze in the shadows of snow-capped volcanoes. I was freshly unemployed from a job that had since long stopped being interesting and, besides a ticket home, had no other plans.
Bolivian juggernauts were my only companions and, with time, I became aware of the gentlemanly code of conduct that ruled the land. When the road grew steeper the lorry driver ahead of me would pull to the right and, as soon as the coast was clear, flash his indicator to let me know that I could overtake. I’d then press the accelerator and, as I passed him, I’d stick out a thumb up in appreciation. It was warm inside but, every time I lowered the window to salute a fellow traveller, the air rushing in would grow colder.
Chungarà, 4,600 meters up on the altiplano, was my destination, where lagoons and perfectly shaped volcanos intermingle and the air echoes of the songs made immortal by Inti Illimani. But to climb to such an altitude straight from sea level would be unwise. Much like alpinists headed to some Himalayan Peak, I needed to acclimatise.
Putre lay at 3,600 metres of altitude, one of those halfway villages that have neither the location nor the looks necessary to put them on the tourist trails. As it often happens, I took an instant liking to this hamlet where Aymara could still be heard, people saluted one another in the streets and dogs trotted up to those sat in the main square for a cheeky cuddle. I parked the car at the edge of the village and found a room in the third hostal I found, the first one having burned down and the second being closed. Later that day, as the sun sank behind the mountains, I drank juice made from a local berry with Don Isidro, the owner of the place. I was the first non-Chilean guest since the outset of the pandemic, he confided, before suggesting a restaurant for an evening supper of alpaca and sweet potato.
The next day I was on the move again. The road gained a kilometre of altitude in a series of switchbacks, and not even the sight of a trailer upturned in a ditch could dampen my mood. Eventually, it happened. I crested a hill and, before me, the altiplano stretched into infinity, its uniformity broken by the unfiltered brilliance of the icecaps sitting atop the trinity formed by volcanos Parinacota, Pomarape and Sajama. Luzmila Carpio was singing in Quechua on the car stereo, and I banged my fist on the roof like the Dude after the visit from Maude Lebowski’s doctor.
Life is a lottery and I, regardless of how many times I railed at the pettiness of fate, am one of its winners. The high-stakes game of roulette that is one’s birth made me arrive on this planet at the right time, place and in the right family; I’ve known it for a long time but, up in Chungarà, I was given quite the reminder.
In the beginning, neither me nor the Conaf ranger in charge of the national park noticed them. The two Chilean bikers that were there with us did, for they’d soon leave and, later, I’d find them parked up just down the road. The bottom line was that it was only the ranger and me to witness the arrival of the two young men hobbling from the Bolivian border.
There are those who are attired for the outdoors, and then there are those who aren’t: the young Venezuelans belonged to the latter category. They wore tracksuit bottoms and Nike sneakers. They wore all their jumpers on their backs and woolly hats decorated with alpacas of the kind bought by tourists from a stall in Cuzco. High school backpacks hung from their shoulders. They were very young, very cold and gave new meaning to the much-abused word “exhausted”.
I’ve often wondered what I’d do in the event of an emergency. Would I freeze, fight, or flight? On that day, as soon as the bolder of the two young men asked for some water, I surprised myself by handing him the carton of apple juice I’d just cracked open and hadn’t even had the time to drink from. And I surprised myself even more by raiding the crate of food – too much for myself alone, admittedly – that I filled in Arica. Bread, cheese, ham, nuts, apples, chocolate, and water came out of the back of the Hyundai and in the hands of the two men who were sitting on the low stone wall that delimited the picnic area. For that felt the obvious thing to do when confronted with two young men who’d walked all the way from Venezuela and hadn’t eaten in two days.
Looking back, I’m surprised by how automatic it all felt. They asked and I gave them food, water and listened to their story as the ranger grabbed his first aid kit and started checking them out.
We didn’t exchange names. They started calling us jefe and then we slowly transitioned to hermano and chamo. Somehow, in that moment, first names didn’t seem necessary. We stood there and listened to their story gushing out in quick bursts like a torrent, with me struggling to catch their faster, almost rapped, version of the language of Cervantes. Theirs was a painful footnote in the tragedy of Venezuela’s economic self-implosion, a tale of how working for a month yielded enough money to buy meat, sugar and oil for three days, of the painful decision to migrate south, towards the stability of Chile and a city called Iquique. Between then and now lay thirty – or maybe more, they’d lost count – days walking through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and, at last, Bolivia. They’d slept rough, suffered the cold and, cherry on top, were robbed by the Bolivian cops.
Iquique. How much further for Iquique? they asked. The ranger and I exchanged a glance, neither of us wishing to tell them that it was more than 400 kilometres away through the driest desert in the world. We told them Arica was closer.
If dignity had legal tender, those guys would’ve wanted for nothing. It took me a long while to get them to accept the juice carton I’d just opened, and I saw them tearing up as they tucked into the sandwiches I hastily put together for them. They even tried to dust my car as a mean to pay me back. But, unfortunately for them and for the wider world, it’s money, not manners, that count.
It’s not lost on me that immigration is a charged topic, and I’m not here to debate it. It’s not my intention to step in the minefield that features walls, deportations, integration or lack thereof; I’m not here to cast aspersions on anyone based on their beliefs on the issue. What I’ve learned at Chungarà, on that bright but cold day, is that the only way to stop this tragedy is to act on whatever makes people so desperate that the idea of walking the Andes, or crossing the Med on a dinghy, is preferable than staying where they are.
A while later, as the two Venezuelans rested on the low stone walls, the ranger took me aside for a whispered chat. This, he said pointing at the young men, was becoming a common occurrence. Migrants from Venezuela – often entire families – would cross into Chile from Peru and Bolivia in a harsh and remote environment that, often, would kill them. The two young men weren’t in danger, but they were fatigued and chronically dehydrated, and the ranger had quietly called for the Carabineros and medical help. A patrol was on its way from Chucuyo, while an ambulance was arriving from Poconchile. The migrants would then be taken to Arica, to a hospital, but there was a chance that things might get a bit edgy, and he suggested that I make myself scarce while that happened.
It’s shameful to admit it, but I lied to the two young men. I flat out told them a string of porkies about meeting a colleague over the border, about needing to be on my way. I shook their hands, wished them good luck, gave them some cash, and tried to hide the guilt I, by then, had started to feel. Because it had occurred to me that the main reason for me being in the SUV and them being on foot was where we’d been born. Not much else.
As I drove out, I saw a white-and-green pick-up, warning lights flashing, running uphill. Not far behind it, an ambulance.
I drove without thinking and soon found myself in Parinacota. The village was akin to an island in an ocean of sand and wispy quinoa bushes, haven for the Spanish caravans that carried to the sea the unimaginable wealth of Cerro Gordo. The discovery of silver near Potosí unleashed hell on the newly conquered Inca communities, set off a web of globalisation that linked Seville to the Andes, Mexico, the Philippines and… established the tiny hamlet of Parinacota, population allegedly in the low thirties but, as far as I could see, zero. If you excluded a herd of inquisitive llamas.
I harboured the desire to visit Parinacota for months. And, yet, as I stood there, everything felt futile. A selfish indulgence, an egotistical slap in the face to those who didn’t have anything. I had a four-season sleeping bag in the back of my car just in case I didn’t feel like sleeping in a hostal and I fancied playing the hobo. The guys over in Chungarà didn’t have it. I decided to knock on the door of a building that promised good rooms with hot water.
I left Parinacota well before dawn. The road back to the border was deserted, my headlights showing nothing but the smooth black tarmac and the crushed crystals of rock salt blown from the salar. Stars punctuated the dark sky and, to the East, the horizon grew pinker as sunrise approached.
Dawn was in full swing by the time I climbed down to the waterfront of Chungarà lagoon. The night’s cold had solidified the mud on the foreshore, and birds quarrelled as they walked, Jesus-like, on the ice that clogged the shallows. Further ahead the water was calm and Sajama volcano silhouetted against the purple sky. Finally, the first rays of sunshine appeared behind it.
The altiplano was everything I wanted it to be. It also was nothing like I expected. It offered plentiful of natural beauty on one hand, and the depth of human desperation on the other. It gave smiles, exaltation and sadness in equal measure.
But, more importantly, it gave me perspective.
