Our Just Deserts

The desert wants to keep me, and I haven´t yet decided if it´s out of love or hatred--towards me, that is. My nostrils burn from the high, dry air, and everything is covered in a fine coat of desert dust.

The first desert adventure began as Jason and I were heading north from Chile to El Bolson, a little micro-climate hippy community just south of Bariloche, Argentina. The bus treks up Route 40, which is nothing more than gravel streching through an endless desert, east of the Andes. The trip was supposed to take 25 hours, already a harrying journey on a crammed bus on bumpy roads. Halfway into the trip the bus broke down and after hours of poking, prodding, and crawling under the bus, it was deemed unfixable. As we were in the middle of the desert with no cell service (less water or food), we had to wait until someone passed us to send a message along for them to send a rescue bus...and hope that the message was transferred. We finally got word that one was on the way and would arrive in about ten hours. So we waited.

We scooped sludgy water from a questionable pit 3km down the road, and dug through my pack for the iodine tablets. The hot sun slipped below the brown horizon and left us in a bitterly cold night, and still no bus in site. We spent the night on the bus, and 24 hours later, a bus finally showed. Apparently the rescue bus had broken down, as well, and this was the third try. We arrived at our destination one hour before 2011.


The desert tried to take us again at Quebrada del Diablo, a `mountain-biker´s paradise´ outside of San Pedro de Atacama, in northern Chile. We rented bikes, lathered on sunblock, and headed out to crumbly grey rocks below a blue, cloudless sky. After crossing a river up to my shins, the sandy trail narrowed into a crude labrynth of compressed sand and clay (which is only held together because it never rains) with outcroppings, sharp corners, and a few places where we had to lift the bikes up to continue. At one point, a smaller trail led off to the right, and I parked my bike and followed it on foot. Soon the trail forked. It forked again. And again and again with no end in site. That was when I first felt the presence of this canyon´s namesake (i.e. devil). So I turned around, and we continued on our collective four wheels.

Two-and-a-half hours into the journey, my bike chain broke, and after multiple failed attempts at reconnecting it, we decided that one of us had to go on ahead for help. The map clearly markes this as a loop, but the trail was getting more sketchy, with more forks and less clarity. Plus, the sun was hot, and our water bottles were not getting any fuller. Jason started walking my bike back the way we came, and I sped ahead on his bike as fast as I could, considering my options, knowing no car or even a horse could make it through here. Images of Ralph Fiennes in `The English Patient` kept creeping into my head, him stumbling down dunes in a desheveled turban, crazed from dehydration. Perhaps it was these fantasies, but I arrived surprizingly quickly to the river, where about ten people were hanging out in the water. Jason arrived shortly after, and we got a ride back into town with a local family, disaster averted.

It has not rained in San Pedro de Atacama since 2000. It used to rain in this desert oasis more like seven days a year, but now water is scarce. The riverbed is a pile of dusty rocks, and from the top of the lookout I climbed (where the indigenous peoples held a fortress and managed to stave off for the Spaniards for a good number of years), I could see a swath of green snaking through the valley and widening at the town--the oasis, the product of a one-meter-wide canal coming from the river.


Back when it used to rain, farmers were allotted an hour each day to irrigate their corn and wheat. Now there is no wheat and little corn. Food is expensive, as you might imagine, but locals love this place and are proud of their roots, and tourists flock here from all over the world. Rightfully so. There is a lot to do here, just walking and biking distance from this tiny pueblo. We managed to go sandboarding (think snowboarding, but on sand dunes), watched the sun set over Valle de la Luna (so called because of the formations in the rock which resemble the surface of the moon), walked through ancient ruins, and watched stars through telescopes in the middle of the dark desert, where I bathed in starlight that had been travelling since the time of Colombus to get to me.