Next stop on the tour - geoglyphs, located in the Salar de Pintados, a very large salt flat area in the Atacama Desert north of San Pedro de Atacama in Tarapacá on a rough road not far from the Panamerican Highway. Here at Pintados, the images have been constructed both by piling up stones and scratching out other stone from the surface. The geoglyphs are mostly geometric forms, camelids (seen in the photo), fish, birds, and human figures. They reminded me of a sort of mini-Nazca.

The guide informed us that these were created before Christ, although other estimates place it at 1000-1400 A.D., according to various web sources. The Bradt Guide to Chile estimate that the geoglyphs were created AD500 to 1450.

At any rate, they're old.

So how are they so well preserved? Mostly because it's really dry here. The Atacama Desert is one of the driest places in the world. And it turns out that Dr. Nick Middleton, a geography lecturer from Oxford, determined that Quillaga, a small village oasis in the Atacama, is the driest place in the world, averaging just 0.5mm of rain per year, about the amount of liquid of several Quillagans sneezing. These geoglyphs are only kilometers from Quillaga. So did I mention that it's really dry here?

Cocha Resbaladero in Andean town of Pica in the Atacama Desert.

Eat a big lunch, then go swimming in a thermal pool. Didn't grandma say not to do this?

Last stop on the tour was the town of La Tirana. Now, this was especially tormenting for me because just three days later, there was to be Chile's most spectacular religious event, the Fiesta de Virgin de Carmen, complete with curly-horned devils dancing, masks, sequins, short skirts, drum and brass bands, the whole bit. And the town was preparing for it. You could see the fields of tents, people preparing, painting, panting, pacing. As many as 80,000 people turn up for this event, quite amazing for a town of only 800 with no hotels.

But Wednesday was the day that I was to return home. I thought I'd make up for it by donning a devil's mask and a short skirt and dancing in the Santiago airport.

The tiny village is also home to one of Chile's more unique churches, shown here and in the photo above, as well as the final resting place of a notorious Inca princess. The village of La Tirana, or "the tyrant", is named after this Incan miss. It seems this princess was forced to accompany Spanish conquistador Diego de Almagro to Chile in 1535. However, she slipped away in nearby Pica and assembled a band of Incan warriors hell-bent on payback. They set about killing as many Spaniards as they could find as well as any indigenous people that had the misfortune to be baptized. And this is how the princess earned her nickname "the tyrant".

However, the story does not stop there. Her Incan horde captured a Portuguese miner fighting for the Spanish. But the bloodthirsty princess found herself smitten by this fair lad, sparing his execution, and then, incredibly, converting to her new beau's Catholic faith. Her band of not-so-merry men took umbrage to this, shooting the couple full of arrows just moments after her baptism.

And now, our conversation will turn to meat.

Andean fast food, located by the Santuario de La Tirana, the large plaza in La Tirana. Salchipapas are thinly sliced pan-fried beef hot dogs or sausage and French fries, mixed together and served on a plate or in a paper cone, typically served with different sauces, chili peppers, ketchup, or mayonnaise. And with Chileans, it's so frequently mayonnaise. Choripapas are the same, but with chorizo.

11 julio, lunes: Ah, Calama, the macho copper mining town. I had ridden a bus through the town before, past the casinos and bordellos and love motels with large signs outside extolling their virtues as a love motel. And there must have been a city ordinance commanding everyone to leave no surface without graffiti. Locals in San Pedro had warned of its thieves. The town was chock full of bars with girlie shows at Moulin Rougge, Sotomayor 1806, and more, with Avenida La Paz lined with seedy bars with such names as Disco Cuervo, Kamikaze Pub, and Lucifer Night Club, all with waitresses wearing short skirts for all the workers to enjoy after a hard day of mining in nearby Chuquicamata. A man sitting next to me on the bus from Iquique to Calama told me, "There are only three things in Calama: miscreants, dogs, and whores."

Although endlessly tempting, I decided to leave, taking the bus to San Pedro de Atacama, a 90 minute bus ride away, for one more evening at Hostal Terracota.

~~~

Oh, yeah, I have a photo here, a sign for the bathroom + a sign that says "pee", taken at the Calama bus station.

Usually, photos taken from moving buses look terrible. But I take them anyway. And here's why...a rare photo from a speeding bus that doesn't stink, this taken near Valle de la Luna on the way to San Pedro with the moon making an appearance over the desert mountain. Maybe Frek the Dutch tourist was right. Maybe I got lucky.

Back at Hostal Terracota, as I was using their computer, one of the guys there brought me a beer and put on Pink Floyd. I'm talking hospitable here.

I had gone to Inti Sol Restaurant in San Pedro many times, as I mentioned, and befriended these two people, Ricardo from Guayaquil, and Daniela from San Pedro. They made me feel at home, and when the restaurant was not busy, we enjoyed talking. We are now Facebook friends, and as I write this, Ricardo is using this photo as his profile picture. Just underneath the photo, someone asked, "son chilenos o ???" If so, one of 'em's a really tall Asian one.

During one of my last visits to the restaurant, I asked Ricardo if they served any llapingachos. He burst into laughter, asking how did I know this. Llapingachos are pretty only served in Ecuador, and are a tasty highland dish of fried potato patties, sort of like mashed potatoes, and often with cheese inside, cooked on a griddle until crispy brown. Yummy.

"Llapingachos" (yah-peen-gah-chos) has earned its place in the pantheon of best sounding Spanish words, proudly standing alongside "equipaje" (ay-kee-pah-hey; for "luggage"), "panqueque" (pahn-kay-kay, meaning, you guessed it, "pancake"), and "Iquique".

12 julio, martes: My series of flights consisted of Los Angeles - LIma - Santiago - Calama and in reverse on the way back, always with a long layover in either the airport in Peru (five and a half hours!) or in Chile (seven hours, from midnight to 7am!).To pass the time, I slept in airport waiting areas, read the Keith Richards biography, or ate. And since I'm crazy about Peruvian food, eating in the airport in Lima was a beautiful thing. Here is a platterful of lomo saltado a la criolla, and to wash it down, that fizzy carbonated bubble gum fizzy sensation known as Inka Cola.

I should say here that I found Chile to be absolutely charming, and its people friendly and well-informed and hospitable and funny, as I've found with Andean people in Peru and Ecuador. I had more difficulty with Chilean Spanish. They spoke rapidly, used different pronunciation, and a lot of their own colloquialisms, but ultimately still posed no real problems. I learned fantastic new Spanish phrases such as "¿Como estai, huevon?" and "¡Hay harto frio hoy!" and "palola" and how not to pronounce the "d" in "pescado" from the locals and Chilean language specialists such as Gus Lozada.

Now that I had made it to the end of the trip, it was time to reflect, compiling a couple of lists, translated as closely as possible from Spanish:

List One: Upon finding out I'm from the United States or Los Angeles, this is what I was asked:
- Do you like Chile?
- Why are there so many fat people in the United States?
- Is it true that only 10% of the people there have passports?
- I've never met anyone from the United States who is for the wars (Iraq, Afghanistan). Why is that? Who is for these wars?
- I heard Santiago is like Los Angeles. Do you think so?
- What kind of food do you have in Los Angeles...I think you have a lot of hot dogs?
- Have you ever been to Yosemite?
- How did you learn to speak Spanish so well?
- There are many Spanish speaking people in Los Angeles. Why don't you speak better Spanish?

List Two: Comments About My Hat:
- You will need that hat all the days you are in the desert.
- You have taken that hat on all your travels, I think. It looks very used.
- That hat makes you look like David Carradine.