had built a bandstand in a green meadow. There was nobody in the bandstand, or the meadow; in fact there was nobody anywhere. The shepherds of the altiplano used to build their villages for festivals and funerals, living ordinarily near their llamas and alpacas and returning only on special occasions. It was a tradition which had been eroded in most places, as the villages had acquired schools, and other institutions, and the populations had stabilized.
After an argument about whether a distant camelid was a llama or an alpaca we picnicked by a fast stream, both remarking how different the park was from the landscape around Chungará only sixty or so miles to the north (but requiring hours and hours of hard travel). There was hardly any snow, to start with, more animals, more water, an abundance of short green grass and an irritating profusion of flies. It was less harsh, and not quite so other-worldly.
At one village we were closely observed by a small gang of Aymára children who had been playing in the potato fields. Their parents, said a small fourteen-year-old wearing a black hat with a narrow brim, were at the market at Colchane. Other children clutched their younger siblings protectively. One girl took us into a shack, hoping to sell a meagre bundle of woven goods. Her mother was crouched in a corner, suckling a baby with a shock of shiny black hair. I bought a bright strip of thickwoollen ribbon, and when the girl gave it to me I saw that the skin on her hands was dry and scaley, like a reptile. The children stared at us, unsmiling, as we drove off and whipped up the dust.
We approached the Salar de Surire, a great salt flat, and walked for a while, short of breath. The cone of the Isluga volcano was smeared with snow. When we turned back, later, we travelled up to the border village of Colchane, a dusty, straggling place cluttered with trucks and decaying cars piled with Bolivians, their possessions bulging out of cardboard boxes. The road from Bolivia to Chile through Colchane is a well-known cocaine route, or at least a route for cocaine base or paste. People walk across with a pound or two in their pocket, or else drive shipments through in lorries. Peru and Bolivia – both on Chile’s doorstep – supply a very high percentage of the world’s coca-leaf crop. While Chile doesn’t produce cocaine in any quantity, it does supply precursor chemicals, and both use and trafficking of the final product are common. Local dealers sell it in units called
empanadas
, the name of the pastry envelopes stuffed with meat, vegetables or shell-fish which are ubiquitous (and delicious) throughout the continent.
On the long drive back down to our hotel we passed open trucks with large families huddled in the back, shivering as the evening set in, their alpaca earflaps pulled under their chins while they bounced along. The sun slipped behind the most westerly ridge of the Andes, straight ahead, and conferred a halo upon the mountains while the sky turned itself into an excited configuration of pinks, reds and purples.
At a truckstop we ate a bowl of
cazuela
perfumed with a mound of coriander, but it was not a good one; it was tepid and greasy. There were two posters next to each other on the adobe wall, one showing Christ in close-up, wearing the crown of thorns, and the other, equally close-up, the glamourmodel Samantha Fox, wearing a pair of yellow knickers. This was less of a surprise than the Adventists: I had been expecting to find religion comfortably coexisting with trash culture. Both functioned at the centre of public life; religion – as a concept, if not a living faith – had not yet been pushed out to the margins. I thought then that perhaps I had underestimated the reality of their faith. It was easy to see the failings of Catholicism, and more difficult to appreciate the bedrock it was for many Chileans. Going to mass wasn’t everything.
The dust, when we reached the hotel, had coated us and our possessions
After an argument about whether a distant camelid was a llama or an alpaca we picnicked by a fast stream, both remarking how different the park was from the landscape around Chungará only sixty or so miles to the north (but requiring hours and hours of hard travel). There was hardly any snow, to start with, more animals, more water, an abundance of short green grass and an irritating profusion of flies. It was less harsh, and not quite so other-worldly.
At one village we were closely observed by a small gang of Aymára children who had been playing in the potato fields. Their parents, said a small fourteen-year-old wearing a black hat with a narrow brim, were at the market at Colchane. Other children clutched their younger siblings protectively. One girl took us into a shack, hoping to sell a meagre bundle of woven goods. Her mother was crouched in a corner, suckling a baby with a shock of shiny black hair. I bought a bright strip of thickwoollen ribbon, and when the girl gave it to me I saw that the skin on her hands was dry and scaley, like a reptile. The children stared at us, unsmiling, as we drove off and whipped up the dust.
We approached the Salar de Surire, a great salt flat, and walked for a while, short of breath. The cone of the Isluga volcano was smeared with snow. When we turned back, later, we travelled up to the border village of Colchane, a dusty, straggling place cluttered with trucks and decaying cars piled with Bolivians, their possessions bulging out of cardboard boxes. The road from Bolivia to Chile through Colchane is a well-known cocaine route, or at least a route for cocaine base or paste. People walk across with a pound or two in their pocket, or else drive shipments through in lorries. Peru and Bolivia – both on Chile’s doorstep – supply a very high percentage of the world’s coca-leaf crop. While Chile doesn’t produce cocaine in any quantity, it does supply precursor chemicals, and both use and trafficking of the final product are common. Local dealers sell it in units called
empanadas
, the name of the pastry envelopes stuffed with meat, vegetables or shell-fish which are ubiquitous (and delicious) throughout the continent.
On the long drive back down to our hotel we passed open trucks with large families huddled in the back, shivering as the evening set in, their alpaca earflaps pulled under their chins while they bounced along. The sun slipped behind the most westerly ridge of the Andes, straight ahead, and conferred a halo upon the mountains while the sky turned itself into an excited configuration of pinks, reds and purples.
At a truckstop we ate a bowl of
cazuela
perfumed with a mound of coriander, but it was not a good one; it was tepid and greasy. There were two posters next to each other on the adobe wall, one showing Christ in close-up, wearing the crown of thorns, and the other, equally close-up, the glamourmodel Samantha Fox, wearing a pair of yellow knickers. This was less of a surprise than the Adventists: I had been expecting to find religion comfortably coexisting with trash culture. Both functioned at the centre of public life; religion – as a concept, if not a living faith – had not yet been pushed out to the margins. I thought then that perhaps I had underestimated the reality of their faith. It was easy to see the failings of Catholicism, and more difficult to appreciate the bedrock it was for many Chileans. Going to mass wasn’t everything.
The dust, when we reached the hotel, had coated us and our possessions
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