A Llama, A Lot of Adobe, and a UFO

We missed the UFO that flew over San Pedro de Atacama, a small village that not long ago had no electricity and was as far away from the modern world as you could imagine. It is now the most expensive place in South America to live, a mecca for tourists coming or going into Chile from Bolivia and Argentina. Streets mainly consist of restaurants, stores with items twice as expensive as in Arica, and places to book tours to various natural wonders that surround the town.

We had night of fitfull sleep worrying about our suitcase that a customs official in Arica had put not only on the wrong bus but with the wrong bus company. When we reached Calama,the Tur Bus driver drove the huge bus around town as dawn was breaking and located our bag at the Pullman station. Once in San Pedro, I was getting muscle cramps from being dehydrated from a stomach issue that began in Arica . . . we've seen restaurants in Chile called La Tourista and think No! No! No! . . . and trekking to La Valle de la Luna in 30 degrees Celcius or leaving at 4 a.m. to go to El Tatio Geysers, so high they're below freezing when the tourists arrive, weren't appealing choices. The mother of all bloody noses I got the first night sealed the deal: we were ending our vacation in the pursuit of shade and cerveza.

San Pedro is over 6,000 feet high and like most of the Atacama Desert, it never rains there. Ever. Irrigation water comes from the Andes but there is no potable drinking water. Many of the locals are being priced out of living there as new resorts are put in, salmon is shipped from the coast and prices for food, drinking water and other commodities soar.

The town is made completely of adobe. Even the swankier places being built are using the traditional style. The street below is in the newer section of town.

We stayed at a modest house for a modest price, sleeping beneath a ceiling made the traditional way with small limbs of trees tied together. Our floor was dusty and the outdoor showers cold, but the people who took care of it had an adorable five year old whom we listened to chat away while we laid low in the afternoons hiding from the heat.

This was the threshold to our room which we thought was beautiful because it was so worn.

We decided to visit the town of Toconao, 1000 pesos by local bus, located about forty kilometers away from San Pedro and several hundred feet higher, the cleanest place I've seen in all of Chile. There was NO litter anywhere. The town was charming, the buildings formed from a volcanic stone called laparita .



There is a very pretty Plaza de Armas, as all plazas in Chile seem to be, and a lovely church called Iglesia de San Lucas with a convent with no windows.


One of the doors to the convent made out of a type cypress.


We wandered into a taller, a workshop for handmade sweaters, scarfs, shawls and mittens made from alpaca and llama hair. We met Luisa, her daughter, and her pet llama. She was using cactus spines to knit a small puppet.


Louisa and her llama

She told us to follow the signs to take a walk in the bosque above.

Later as we waited for the bus, we walked to the other side of town and Bill spotted this volcano. It always smolders. We were told that it is the only active volcano in Region Two, but then we were also told it's in Argentina.

In the San Pedro area the light seemed crisper and the land full of a special energy that might make encountering things out of the ordinary possible. Please forgive the science fiction writer in me, but both the cloudless ultra-blue sky and the diamond pinpoints of stars at night made my imagination go to work. I wanted to keep going into Bolvia which was only a few kilometers away and run away from the school year that's facing me. Of course, I hoped for some kind of mystical experience, but somehow I just don't encounter them.

During our first night in San Pedro, we saw a man set up a telescope in the middle of the street. Looking behind me, Venus was was bigger and brighter because of the altitude and clear atmosphere. I thought he was charging money to look through the thing but later that night in the hostel we were told that he was there because something large was moving very fast and irradically. Oh, well. Even though I missed the UFO right above my head, but later that night I finally saw the Southern Cross as I made my way in the dark to the outdoor latrine.

My husband and I have camped in the most isolated places you could imagine in the Nevada desert or along the narrow spine of California between the Sierras and the Nevada state line. You'd think if there were UFOs, we'd have seen one. The only thing I know is that I've met many people, down-to-earth types, who have. More UFOs have been reported in Chile than in any other country. There was one last year right here in Concon, in fact. The caretaker where we live, a woman with no ego, told us that a something huge spun above her head for ten minutes a few years ago, only to vanish within seconds.

Right before we moved to Chile, I met a woman who had just returned from Peru and had this to say about her experience at Lake Titicaca: She and her fellow travelers were getting ready for a walk at the lake where they'd reach a viewpoint just as the sun was rising. It was around 3 a.m. and they were adjusting their cameras, snapping practice shots. People around her started to gasp. She clicked her camera and saw herself on the screen floating transparent but illuminated with a cord that stretched out of the picture reaching back to her. She and some others went back to their hotel and asked about this. The woman at the desk said, Are they your spirits or our spirits? She showed her picture and the woman said, Oh, they're yours. Later as they were reaching their destination and light was beginning to appear, she said three large "crafts" streaked through the sky, shaped unlike any airplane she'd ever seen. They fell then into the lake and disappeared.

Anyway, an interesting story for what it's worth.

We left San Pedro for a 22 hour bus ride through the desert to home. This last shot was taken an hour or so out of Antofagasta, the setting sun on a beautifully barren mountain with nothing but sky above it. It was all I really needed to see.