Reached Iquique at noon yesterday. It’s a dusty city sprawled at the edge of a dry brown coastal mountain range. Managed some sleep on my semi-cama and awoke at Antofagasta to find ourselves on a tarmac right next to the sea – rocks, brown sand and strange formations beside us; bleached hills to the right and a steel-grey ocean to the left. It’s surreal – black lunarscapes literally blending into the sea. Welcome to the Atacama – the driest place on earth. The spookiest part is that you don’t see ANY sign of life – so animals, no plants, not even cacti! 
All you see are occasional colonies of cormorants; and we pass a solitary large black bird with a brilliant red head perched on a rock. That’s it. For 7 hours. We pass some towns abandoned and rusting like beached ships on the shore; desolate cemeteries and one ugly, grim mining town. On the subject of cemeteries and crosses, the number of roadside shrines has increased dramatically since we left La S. Wonder if that says something!!One of the high points of Iquique is the Zona Franca –a duty-free zone to which Chilenos flock in their thousands. My taxi driver pointed out there are Indians here – “Rakhu”, “Rames”…trust the Indian trader to go anywhere. Not in Santiago, not in Buenos Aires but in Iquique, in the middle of nowhere – because it has a duty-free zone for them to do their import-export business!
Wandered down the main street of Iquique looking for lunch and (on a Saturday afternoon), it seemed as dead as its neighbouring nitrate ghost towns. Finally managed to get lunch and a solitary tour operator to book a tour of the (other) ghost towns for the next day. 
Spent the evening strolling around town. Comes a bit more to life after 8pm – mainly promenading down the street). Iquique also has a Croatian club – the last one I saw was in Punta Arenas; some 4000km South. Some similarities between Croatians and Indians? O’Higgins is reduced to a street name while Capt. Arturo Prat lords over the central plaza. He’s a national hero – but also the local lad. He was a naval captain who fought a hopeless battle against a Spanish battleship in the war with Peru in the 1870s and died in the process; leaping onto the battleship and being cut to ribbons. And all this leaping and dying happened off Iquique – a vital port given the nitrate boom in those days.The day trip today was a bit of a let-down.
It began in a minibus full of Chilenos and yours truly. So all the ‘guiding’ happened in Spanish. Yo entiendo muy muy poco! Saw the ghost towns of Santa Laura and Humberstone – Humberstone is pretty much preserved as is from the time it was abandoned around 1960. Was a bit eerie walking down empty streets and squares and markets with the wind clanging away at doors and windows. Humberstone even has a grand swimming pool now rusting away.Then a very long trip to Pica – an oasis town in the Atacama, famous for its limes and hot springs. Springs they certainly were - everyone in the bus whipped out their swimmers and sprang into them. Apparently Chilenos come in droves to cram into the springs – and it seems to have been the principal focus of the trip! I was clearly unprepared and swimmer-less; thinking I would be seeing geoglyphs, nitrate towns and the Atacama.
We spent 3.5 hours in Pica – and I soon got bored of walking up and down the one main street while the others splashed about. Lunch too was at Pica – I picked at my soup which had a whole chicken in it – wings and all (thankfully no feet!). In all this, we never made it to the geoglyphs which I thought would be the highlight of the trip. The saving grace was an impromptu stop at a town where a local fiesta was in full swing; complete with band and colourful costumes.Oh yes, we also stopped at a Marquez-ish town called La Tirana. It’s a dry and dusty town with shabby houses and peeling whitewash on streets named Esmeralda and Santa Maria.
And in the centre is this incongruously huge square and a church that has a roof of tin; gleaming in the blazing afternoon sun. In the languorous heat of the afternoon; with the local old fogeys and stray dogs flopped in the shade of a couple of old trees in the plaza, the Marquez feeling was even stronger. There’s a story too to La Tirana – she was a local Indian princess who terrorised the Spaniards (hence her name La Tirana). But she fell in love with a handsome Spaniard she captured. She delayed killing him but her people felt betrayed and forced her to do so. She ordered the execution but chose to kill herself beside him (of course, she was baptized by the dying Spaniard – just so there was a happy ending!). It could well be ‘The Tragic Tale of La Tirana – and other stories’ by Marquez!Photo album for this post available at: http://picasaweb.google.com/shivmoulee/IquiqueAndTheAtacama
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