One of the several failed attempts to generate power from the geyser field.
Best view of the sunrise was to the south...
After the geysers we went to a hot pool, which was about 90% tepid and 10% way too hot. Didn't stay in there very long...
We stopped a few times on the way back to San Pedro for photos. I hate tours.
Hawk-eyed bus driver noticed this guy on the side of the road.
After a while we stopped at a little old village.
Andean seagulls?
Day of chillin, then a couple of others in the hostel and I hired bikes to ride to the Valle de la Luna (The Valley of the Moon). The road there had pretty good views of the surrounding area; you can't really see anything from San Pedro except San Pedro. Nice little ride, except for the bit where I thought I'd forgotten my memory card.
Just inside the entrance to the valley, there was a little system of salt caves, which were pretty cool for a wee wander.
Overheard from random guide talking to his group: the valley's only called the moon valley because of its moon-like appearance. Not because it has the same mineral content as the moon or something. As noone ever would've ever thought.
A couple of ks down the road from the caves there was a huge sand dune, which you aren't allowed to walk up, but there's a trail around the side (and a bunch of footprints in the sand anyway).
There was a couple of dogs at the top of the dune. Not sure if they live there off whatever tourists give them or if they have a home, but the home would be far...
Natural amphitheatre. Can't go in it though :(
We wanted to hang around and watch some of the sunset, so we decided to press on to the Tres Marias, which was supposed to be really nice. Was more like 2.5 Marias.
So we went back up the dune and drank some chamomile liquor (surprisingly good! and hella cheap) to wait for the sunset. Wasn't too impressed with it to the west, but the mountains in the east looked nice.
And the full moon which prevented us from going stargazing. There was a few agencies still running stargazing trips, but the more reputable ones weren't, so it seemed a bit disingenuous for the others to say it'd be worthwhile.
Red chemtrails?! Must be mind control drugs.
After another day off, I left for Calama to see one of the biggest open-cast mines in the world, Chuquicamata, with a few others from the hostel to whom it sounded interesting. We got an early bus to Calama, not really sure what to do after the mine, and really hoping we could go that day, as the only information about it we could find said to book it in advance. A cab to the mine company's tourist office and a few minutes later, and we were booked for the tour in the afternoon, which was quite conveniently free. I guess the biggest company in the country can afford a couple hundred dollars a day to send tourists to see their biggest cash-cow.
The mine was a few ks from Calama, and the first thing we saw was the city of Chuquicamata, which used to be home to 25,000, miners and everyone else needed to support such a city. In 2009 or so they finished relocating all the residents to Calama, as it was deemed unhealthy to live so close to such a huge dust producer. These days it's a big ghost town.
We stopped next to what used to be the town's main square, and the guide took us into an old book shop to explain the goings-on of the mine. The area's been mined for copper for centuries, but it didn't really kick off until about 100 years ago, when a new copper-refining technique was developed. The mine passed through various sets of foreign hands, until Chile nationalised all their copper in the 60s and 70s, and the mine passed into the control of Codelco, a state-owned company.
Nowadays Codelco is the largest copper-producing company in the world, and also controls the largest known copper reserves in the world. I believe Chuqui alone produces around 500,000 tons of copper a year, exported as 99.9% pure plates, mostly to China. Chile's also one of the world's largest producers of molybdenum, and the revenue from the molybdenum funds operations at the mine, making all the copper profit.
I'm not sure how they actually make the hole (dynamite, probably?), but the ore's loaded either onto a conveyor belt, or onto the biggest trucks you've ever seen (each one can carry around 350 tons, and burns 3L fuel/minute) to be taken away for milling, to the tune of 150,000 tons of ore/day. Apparently only 1 in 4 trucks actually has ore in it, all the rest is spoil. Of those that contain ore, the average amount of copper is 3%, so fuck-all.
The ore gets milled to 0.3mm, and then goes through some sort of funky flotation tank to get the purity up to 30ish%. After drying, the copper goes through a foundry and some other kind of oven, resulting in plates of 99.7% purity. Finally, these plates are purified to the final level by electrolysis. I understand about half of these things...
After having all this explained, we were free to roam around the square a bit, before continuing to the actual mine. I loved this place, a huge ghost-town overtopped and being overrun by mountains of mine spoil, a direct result of its reason for existence. There was also a bigger main square than most much bigger cities I've been to in Latin America. I suppose they had a lot of space.
"Live better. Department of Wellbeing."
Workingmen's club.
Theatre on the left and bank on the right.
Plenty of room for some good old-fashioned Latin protests.
Gazebo and a statue of Bernardo O'Higgins, one of Chile's national heroes.
The hospital's buried under there somewhere.
After a little drive past arcane-looking processing equipment, we got to the mine itself, which was rather impressive:
Control room for the trucks, which're all tracked by GPS. Considering they cost US$5m each, they probably don't want many crashes.
The wheels of those things are almost as tall as a bus. Would've been nice if there was a better photo op, but as the guide pointed out, having one idle just for the tourists who don't pay anything would be a rather ridiculous expense.
One of the many smaller mines dotted around the main Chuqui pit, on the way back to Calama.
Our plan was to carry on to Antofagasta, one of Chile's biggest cities, before heading down to Santiago, but it didn't seem like there was any hostels there and the cheapest accommodation we could find online was stupid expensive. So we stayed in Calama, city of nothing, drinking the afternoon away. In the morning we got a bus to Iquique, another city on the coast where 2 of my friends wanted to drop in on their way north to Peru.
The bus to Iquique passed through copious amounts of desert, aside from this little bit of green around the one river we saw.
I was pretty keen for a swim in the ocean for the first time in a few months, but it was always cloudy while we were in Iquique, so I didn't bother. A couple of days after arriving, I got on the nice 24 hour bus to meet my brother in Santiago.
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