Puedo Caminar..

I´m in Arica, Chile, a northern port town whose main claim is a few buildings designed by Eiffel (yes, the Eiffel Tower guy). This post is more of a story of what happened today and requires some actual reading.

I woke up to my dusty shoes shuffling clouds along the Northern Chilean coastline. The sky was gray and a cold marine breeze blasted my tired eyelids to a squint. An ominous smell from what looked to be a deserted fish processing plant wafted into my nose, guiding my view to rusted, darkened silos below me. The ocean´s consistent noise prevented me from recognizing the familiar sounds of a passing engine (they were few and far between, and each one emitted its own brand of spew-black exhaust trails behind muddy, rusted bumpers and windows clouded with years of untended grime) until it was too late to put a thumb out. Hunger tormented my stomach, despite the stale odors of rotting fish. My feet were swollen and panged with each step in my fading boots, and I had no idea where or how much farther I was headed.

For one second the peaceful war of waves and sand let up, enough for my right ear to detect the backfiring of a sadly maintained engine (my left ear was thoroughly busy waging battle with the steady breeze now, giving my eyes and the muscles in my forehead a break). I turned and a blue car, paint peeling, rambled toward me down the empty highway. The horn sounded a bleak, high-pitched dying sound - beeoonk beeonk - and slowed its half-flat tires next to me in the middle of the highway.

Inside sat four Chileans: the driver - a middle-aged woman, looked immensely like a prostitute and was missing a front tooth. Her hair was ragged and dreading from lack of a wash, and a soiled cigarette hung out of her mouth like it had been there for years. In the passenger seat sat a pirate of a man if I had ever seen one. He wore a denim vest over a black t-shirt, both of which were covered in grease of some sort. His hair was black and short except for a small part in the back, which lengthened itself into a fine mullet to his shoulder. An earring made from a rusty fish hook, two tabs from a soda can, and a few other various shiny objects dangled from his left ear as he turned to look at me with a hideous smile and yellowing eyes.

I won´t further try to justify my decision to get inside this car, because it was a terrible decision.

The two men in the back were also middle-aged and as grimy or more than the two up front. They both wore stupid grins, like the cronies of some evil high school arch-nemesis-coolguy in some bad 1980s film teen-angst film. The car tore down the highway back towards town with me in it, coating all my belongings with a fresh blend of urine-manure-fish smell. It soon became evident to me that these Arican pirates were all blind drunk, including the driver, as they slugged gulps of cheap bagged wine from a black liquor store bag, offering me some. They all resembled Meth addicts. Not surpisingly, I had immediately regretted my decision to hitch a ride with this wild bunch. The car sputtered, barely able to hold the speed that the woman gave the accelerator with an unsteady foot - we swerved on both sides of the road (luckily there was no traffic) and edged the curb more often than my nerves could take.

At once a million thoughts crossed my mind. They were going to just mug me and drop me off somewhere obscure with no clothes, no map, and no money. They were going to take me to their dirty coastal lair somewhere and I was going to be their pet the rest of my life. They were just going to drive right past the city and into the ocean and kill us all. Could it really get any worse? Yes.. As they were asking me questions in slurred, rapid Spanish over the roar of the tortured engine, I was discreetly fumbling around in my pack for my knife - and I couldn´t find it. Great. I wasn´t going to use it, but I´d feel a hell of a lot more comfortable at this moment in time with it in my hand or pocket. Although they looked menacing and smelled like a urinal at a rock concert, they were surprisingly nice to me, which scared me more. They were polite as I lied to them that I had friends in town that I was going to meet, so they wouldn´t kidnap me. The wine had run out.

As we pulled into town (to my relief, now we were in a populated area where I could yell for help if I needed it) the woman chose the steepest street to get to my destination. The hissing tires and sputtering engine couldn´t handle it. Halfway up the narrow street in downtown Arica, the engine stalled, and the car begin rolling down the hill backwards. The drunk driver couldn´t get it together quick enough to change gears and hit the brakes, and meanwhile the rest of the three drunk pirates howled and laughed, not a care in the world. I desperately tried to see what we were going to hit, but the back window was so covered in dust that it was hopeless. Somehow we made it to an intersection and the car stopped. My heart started again. After a few failed attempts (and me failing to convince them that letting me out here would be fine) the driver started up the sad engine, and proceeded to fly over a curb and slam directly into a parked SUV. Everyone in the car went ¨Sssssssss!¨ and she quickly backed up, redirected, and passed the SUV, flying through another intersection to my street. We nearly hit every single car, no exaggeration, along the way.

Once we had unsafely parked near my hostel, I paid them for the ride (the money was cleaner than they were) and the two in back immediately got out to use it at the liquor store across the street for more wine. I was alive.

It had been a bad decision. For those of you that worry about me, I apologize. I guess I had to learn the hard way, and it ended well. I guess I was lucky they meant no harm and just needed more money for booze. I wanted terribly bad to snap a photo of them all, but it wouldn´t have been a great idea to take out my expensive digital camera for them to snatch from my hands.

I learned my lesson: walking ain´t so bad.

Here´s for the lazy ones: The pictures that I walked for so long to get.

The caves were amazing, nobody was there, and these few pictures do them absolutely no justice. Some of them were incredibly scary, especially alone, as I didn´t want to 1) unlikely, get eaten by ogres only to somehow cut my way out of their stomachs and survive unscathed with no one believing me, or 2) more likely, trip in the dark and break my ankle alone.

South of Arica, Chile. Playa Corazones: