5 julio, martes: I'm nothing if not persistent. I tried to go to Salar de Uyuni again, this time going with Estrella Del Sur via another route, Ollague, waking up at 4am to catch their 5:30am tour bus.

This is the road as we approached Ollague.

Due to the snow, we turned back but then stopped here near this volcano. The guides asked us if we wanted to wait to see if the road cleared, as they had been encouraged by sunshine on the horizon instead of snow. We unanimously voted yes.

A strange man with long stringy hair came on board, talking with a husky gravelly voice. He claimed that the volcano in the distance was the shortest volcano. However, I had been to Valle de la Volcanes in Peru. They had volcanoes that were only 2 or 3 meters in height. He wanted us to take him back to San Pedro. The bus driver said no, finally sending him off.

We waited. We ate. We waited.

I was on a busload of mostly Australian and English travelers. Although two people were from Spain,they did not speak much English. I had the best Spanish and English skills. I often became the de facto go-between, communicating ideas and explanations between the driver and guide and the tourists. Strange. Maybe I'll get a job at the U.N.

Someone requested going to the bathroom. Turns out some of the females had been uncomfortable peeing in wide open country where the bus had been stopped for several hours. We stopped in a little village called Chiu-Chiu, not far from Calama. I was able to photograph the Iglesia de San Francisco, a national monument, and built in 1540, thought to be Chile's oldest church.

As we passed Calama and drove back toward San Pedro de Atacama, I saw this beautiful sunset. I finally asked the bus driver to pull over so we could see the sunset and take photos. Although I like how my other sunset photos came out, I especially like this one, showing the silhouettes of the others admiring the sunset and taking photos.

A few days later, an Australian tourist named Natalie, a Dutch tourist named Frek and I were sharing sunset photos of this amazing day. When I showed this to Frek, he said, "I think you got lucky." I showed him the next one, which was just as beautiful. Then another one. He shook his head. If you're right, Frek, I get lucky a lot.

6 julio, miercoles: I tend to roll with changes on trips, but I cannot deny that I was frustrated and disappointed that my chances for going to Salar de Uyuni were slipping away. I spent much of this day trying either to find alternates to Salar de Uyuni. I considered many places, but they were closed off by snow. I considered Valparaiso, the colorful city on hills, the city described so famously by Pablo Neruda and Isabel Allende. Without boring you with the bewildering choices and suggestions and dead ends, I'll just say that nothing ultimately panned out. Estrella Del Sur refunded everyone's money, but kept saying that the road might be open on Friday, two days from now.

While trying to figure out where I could go and how to do it at the bus company, I had seen a restaurant advertising beef stroganoff, one of my favorite dishes, and Chilean wine. After my frustrating day of dead-ends, this sounded like a positive thing to do. And to add to it, I ended up eating with three Australian women who I had met earlier in the day dudring their similar attempts to flee. Two were teachers. They just simply had quit work to travel. Nice. The wine was delicious. The beef stroganoff, not so much. It didn't resemble the dish and curiously came with potatoes, but no noodles. But no matter, a good evening.

~~~

7 julio, jueves: After more attempts to go to Valparaiso, I rented a bike. This time, no intense wind, just a beautiful day. Perfect.

The ride to Valle de la Muerte is an easy incline for only about 4-5km, a pleasant ride, riding up the dirt road of the Cordillera de Sal that leads to the valley. This felt great. I rode everywhere up the canyon of salt, walking around, sitting, eating, drinking, walking, riding.

Looking toward Valle de la Muerte. The high ridge on the right hand side is the ridge that we walked on before running down the sand dunes. The dune I was standing on - and eating empanadas - was the dune where in three hours more hordes of sandboarders would arrive, pumping Bob Marley from a van. But for now, the valley was silent and peaceful, and I had it all to myself.

I hiked some more, then rode my bike back down the bumpy dirt and sand road through the Cordillera de Sal, taking a left, leading up and over an incline, popping out on Callejon Flores and onto Quitor Road, not far from the fortress at Quitor.

8 julio, viernes: This day was a travel day, riding a tour bus operated by Tur Bus to Iquique, a seven-hour trip, taking us through the still-operating nitrate mining town of Maria Elena (and a town I think would be interesting to photograph for the people as much as the town), the sinfully ugly coastal town of Tocapilla, and up to the resort beach town of Iquique, arriving late at night.

~~~

9 julio, sábado: I caught a colectivo from the central market of Iquique to Humberstone.

Humberstone is an abandoned ghost town, a former nitrate town located 46km east of the coastal town of Iquique, higher up in the Atacama desert. It was founded by James Humberstone of the Peru Nitrate Company in 1872 (back then this region was in Peru), calling the location La Palma, renamed in 1934 to Humberstone. From pre-Hispanic times indigenous peoples in the area, the Atacamenos and the Incas, used nitrate as a fertiliser, extracting and grinding the saltpeter and spreading it on fields. Later, the Europeans showed interest in the saltpeter, using it for explosives, and after that, for fertilizer.

But Humberstone didn't just build a mine. It was a whole town, complete with a theater where international celebrities of the day performed. And it had schools, a plaza, a hotel, a ballroom, tennis and basketball courts, and more, as well as the extraction and refineries for nitrates.

And there was this swimming pool, with its diving boards still intact. This swimming pool was entirely made from cast iron scavenged from a shipwreck.

One of the many rooms of the hospital in Humberstone. Although designated a historical monument in 1970, Humberstone still fell prey to vandalism and unauthorized salvage. In 2005, the site was designated a Unesco World Heritage site, and with this, there are hopes for less vandalism, and even some hopes that the old hotel and swimming pool will eventually reopen to guests.

The primary school at Humberstone.

One of the abandoned offices in Humberstone.

In 1879 the Saltpeter War involving Chile, Bolivia and Peru (who supported Bolivia) gave Chile dominance of the industry. This further encouraged European investment, and Chile prospered. In just a few short years, saltpeter accounted for half of Chile's total revenue.

However, World War I was disastrous in general for saltpeter producers. The sea routes were unsafe for delivering nitrates. But still, what really kicked places like Humberstone to the curb were the development of synthetic nitrates, forcing the closure of Humberstone by 1960, which was consequently abandoned.

But unlike Chacabuco, Humberstone was never used as a concentration camp during Pinochet's regime. To this day, Chacabuco remains surrounded by landmines.

There are also landmines on the way to Valle de Arcoires, near the border of Bolivia and Argentina, most of which are marked, and most of which have been already found. Still, every year, a handful of Chileans lose a limb, and one of the guides said that one can occasionally see three-legged vicuñas. The landmines have killed dozens of people, most of them traffickers smuggling drugs into Chile from the north. Chilean Foreign Ministry official Luis Winter lost both legs during an inspection of de-mining work near the Peruvian border in 2005. These landmines were planted by Pinochet during an "almost war" that was narrowly averted by last minute intervention by John Paul II in the 1970s, mediating between Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. Chile has vowed to remove the remaining landmines by 2016.