I got a humongous head cold. My sinuses weighed two pounds apiece. Unfortunate timing: the ship sent us all a rather alarming coronavirus letter about how, if you get any kind of upper respiratory symptom whatever, stay in your room and call the infirmary immediately. I’ve had dozens of these things. I know their trajectory. So I hunkered down and slept for two days and it cleared up. On the other hand it couldn’t come at a better time. I mentioned my lack of interest in Coquimbo and La Serena. I was able to sleep through it.
Tire inflation adjuster. You soften tires in loose sand and inflate them back to hard on pavement. Buses in Iceland do the same when driving on loose snow.
Landlocked Bolivia really needed a seaport and Peru was not cooperating. So in the late 1800s’ Battle of the Pacific, Bolivia and Chile duked it out with Peru and won the city of Arica 12 km south of the present Peruvian border. Arica, Peru became Arica, Chile. Now 80% of Arica’s shipping is Bolivian.
Ah, but Arica is different. On the west coast of South America, the Chile coastline goes more or less north. But then it hangs a tight left turn, going almost due west at first to form the bulge that is Peru. The region of this sharp angle is called Puna, and Puna has many species indigenous to the area.
Arica indeed has wonderful birds, for example flocks of Inca Terns, grey birds with black heads and an outlandish blond Snidely Whiplash moustache. Guanay cormorants are common here, and Turkey and Black Vultures perch on lampposts in town like seagulls do. The common dove here looks like Arizona’s white-winged doves, but there are differences enough that it is instead the Pacific Dove.
Coke sign beyond the bend in the road - made of coke bottles.
This afternoon I went on an excellent tour called Man in the Desert. I was not alone. There were 4 buses of us. We drove out into the Atacama Desert. Picture tan rolling hills with not a single leaf of anything. Nada. This is the world’s driest desert and it won the title fairly. It has not had significant rainfall—indeed, most years no rain at all—since the Andes rose up.
A few valleys near Arica irrigate, using water from up in the Andes behind town. So the relentless tan is broken in those places by some little blobs of green. Except this one valley where nearly every citizen is a pig farmer. Almost no green. It’s just pig sheds.
Mom and pop nursery. This is the whole thing
Farmers put their stuff under plastic to speed up ripening, and there are thousands of acres of white translucent visqueen. Many of what we call nurseries are mom-and-pop operations where everything, even the permanent plantings, are grown in tubs. Apparently the native soil is not all that great. However, probably thanks to pig mature, they grow four crops of tomatoes a year, mangos, bananas, onions, and citrus. Bolivia sends down boatloads of quinoa to ship and goes back home with fruit.
From the parking lot of one such garden nursery we could look at geoglyphs, the forms and images that were apparently laid out large (very large; a llama 400 ft tall) on bare hillsides up to 7000 years ago.
For the second time I toured a very fine museum out in the middle of nowhere. The first was that paleo museum in Brazil. This one was built by a university’s anthro department primarily to house ancient mummies recovered nearby. There is no town adjacent.
We hit rush hour traffic coming back complicated by extensive one-lane construction on the way to the museum. We were supposed to return by 5:30 but our 4 buses finally got back to the ship at 6:26.
The ship sailed at 6:30.