JiJ - Day 38 - Humberstone, Chile to Tacna, Perú

Waking up early, we decided to go and explore Chile's most famous ghost town, Humberstone, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where they produced nitrate and iodine until the 60s when synthetic nitrate production put them out of business. On the way there, at a small way station with an police control point we found a series of mining dump trucks and tried to pose Jules as if she was hauling the load.

People in this part of the country make use of whatever they can to eek out a living. Here is a house made of pallets.

Humberstone is well-preserved for being abandoned some 50 years ago and the Main Street has been turned into a series of little museums where specific aspects of life in a mining town are displayed. For example, there is the children's toys museum, the kitchen gadget museum, the random electronics museum, and the "typical houshold" and "typical office" museums. Other than the organized Main Street, the town is left to exploring. It was neat to see the graffiti in the school and hospital where people who lived there wrote a little something about themselves with little pieces of charcoal.

 

The houses were impressive too with preserved wallpaper and other personal items.

The school house had some of the best cultural artifacts carved into the desks or scrawled on the walls.

I miss my mom.

Here is a memorial created by the family of a long-time worker.

 

 

Out in the parking lot we ate a little food and were visited by the many stray dogs wearing clothes. Someone put childrens clothes on these dogs--maybe they have owners, who knows?--and they looked pretty silly. My favorite was the dog with the collared shirt and coat. Too much.

Now we had to make some serious time traveling northward.  There were many geoglyphs (large scale drawings made be rearranging rocks on hillslopes) along the way to keep us interested...most of the time.  It was amazing to consider that if rearranged rocks will persist on the landscape for centruies, what about all other random disturbances we make?  Infrequent sightings of roadside dinosaur-in-crutches shrines or burnt out wrecks were also welcome encounters.  We sustained on manjar (a carmel like spread) and apples.  Rough life.

Here are some ancient geoglyphs...

And here are some more modern ones...It's important to be thoughtful of where you drive around here!

Here is an animita for a little girl, I think, that loved dinosaurs. This area was so incredibly dry that the ground was cracked all over.

We kept going, and fueled up on some manjar and apples--delicious!

Look, I'm driving!

Here are some giant geoglyphs.

Dylan is a great cook, and helps out often!

Our friend José Antonio said he was going to be visiting some friends in Arequipa de Perú these next couple days and that he hoped we could meet them. We thought that if we pushed hard, we could make it to Arequipa by noon the next day, but we had to pass the border first, which meant that we had to find Perú car insurance late at night in Arica. We decided to go for it. Ben was motivated by the fact that the Copec gas station in Arica had hot showers.

We arrived in Arica at around 8pm, showered, and found a place to buy insurance near the international bus terminal. We got searched at the border by the Peruvian guards, but they still didn't find our honey. Lots of waiting in front of glass windows and making sure we had all the appropriate paperwork to permanently take our Chilean vehicle out of the country.  Jules has no plans of returning south... at least not for a long while.

Everything in a bag had to be x-rayed.  We have lots of bags. Customs in Peru are kind but thorough people.

They gave us the advice to sleep at the Plaza de Armas in Tacna and that Arequipa is about 6 hours north of there. We found a parking spot between the Tourist Police and a cab driver sleeping in his car, and at about midnight we fell asleep--after setting our alarm for 5am.