Atacama

A bunch of us were slowly threading our way down through Chile.
I don’t know if you know where Chile is. Take a look on the map. There’s a lot of up and down but not a huge amount of across. Never very far to the East is either Bolivia in the North, and then Argentina in the South. To the West is the South Pacific. It’s a very long, very thin country.
It was to make up the biggest part of my trip, or at least the trip I planned. I wanted to get way off the beaten track.
I had been with a bunch of people for a couple of weeks. We were having a hoot. We had talked about heading to Lake Atacama. But then the time came and everyone else wanted to head further south—on the grounds it might be cooler. True, where we were it was hotter than Hell’s boiler room and the current bus had no airco. I could have just gone with the flow but I decided to head for the lake. The guys tried to persuade me not to. But I sensed that was partly because they felt protective; me being the baby of the group. So that was me, off the bus and headed inland. Wouldn’t do to go being smart and getting help or advice where it might actually be useful. If I’d listened, I’d probably be sitting in a big hall right now, sitting Spanish A level with a bunch of kids who’d been in the year behind me at school before and now I’d be in their year.
This was my first big travel mistake.
Time for a quick geography lesson. The reason we were so hot was we were on the edge of something else called Atacama that I wasn’t as aware of as I really should have been. Not the Lake. The desert. The Lake isn’t so big. The desert is. It is rocky, barren and very hot. What could I tell you that would explain what a bleak, hostile place Atacama is? Here’s an honest to goodness 24 carat fact. The Atacama Desert is NASA’s favourite place to test Lunar and Martian terrain exploration vehicles. Oh yes.
First off, I couldn’t find a bus. There was one a week and I had three days to wait. To wait here in Hell’s waiting room.
So I hitched.
That’s about as smart an idea as it sounds. It only took me three hours to get to the Lake. Like Chile, the desert too is long and narrow. When I got to the Lake I was ready to leave again. It wasn’t a decision that took too much thought. It was wet but it wasn’t cool; it was edged with salt.
There was one small hotel and it was closed.
Really, the Atacama is a stunning, beautiful place with all manner of wicky-wacky wildlife. But I felt like I was drying up and would soon be a little pile of minerals in the back of the old pick-up I was riding in.
Also, did I mention that it is on a 4,000 ft high plateau, so the air is thin and hard to breathe in?
And the air has another pretty tough to handle quality. It’s hot.
Next item to the East was the Andes. I knew the air would be thinner, but as some of them are also snow-capped, I guessed it would have to be cooler too.
Onward Jakes!
My last lift dropped me off who knows where. It was certainly in the foothills, but he didn’t explain where he was going, he just stopped at a petrol station, let me down, took a call on his mobile and spun off back in the direction he had come. I waited a while but there was no traffic at all. Nothing passed and left me standing; nothing so hostile. Nothing passed at all. So I set off walking in the same direction I’d been travelling. My bag had started off light, and now I only had one book left, I’d first ripped then dumped my spare jeans, and my toiletries were down to toothbrush and paste and a bar of soap, so I was down to almost nothing. I strode off making good speed, climbing steadily.
It was one of those roads you see on sports car ads, winding up the side of a hill through tight hairpins so that after a few miles you can look down and see the road you came up on looping below a half dozen times or more. Near the top, off an even narrower track, I saw a little white village, like the kind you see perched up in the middle of nowhere in Southern Spain or Sicily when you’re in the middle of some interminable day out on your holidays with your Mum and Dad. I took a left off the road and headed up the track. It could have been driven by a 4x4 but from the ruts in the track it looked as if it was mostly horses or donkeys and light carts. I was pretty excited. This was real Chile.

If my life until the journey was the first part of my life, and the journey so far was the next part, then Part II was pretty short because it had less than a day to run. Here was when my life went Yikes! And Part III kicked off.
Now’s the time I have being warming you up about.
The part I need to warn you about.
When you read about what happened to me, you might think,
‘Well, someone with a big mouth like his, this was something just waiting to happen to him. It was a hole covered in leaves lying in wait for Mickey ‘the Mouth’ Jakes,’
You could be right. But here’s where I’m not such a nice kid. I had to drag myself off into the foothills of the Andes to find out what I found out, and it couldn’t have happened to me any other way. Because that’s the way it did happen. That’s when I heard. But now I’m writing this story and you could hear all about it in the next half hour; in the next few easy flicks of the page. That could make your life too do those accidental acrobatics. Turn it all around and make you go:
‘Yikes! I had to go read a book when the TV was sitting there, all inviting and unthreatening.’
Here’s the warning. You can take the risk that your life will change forever, or you can put the book down and leave it alone.
Or you could even put it somewhere safe where no-one will get hurt, like between the guide to the 1997-98 football season and the dictionary of science, where no-one ever looks.
Read at your peril.
Read ahead and it’s down to you.
I’m not responsible.
I’m describing what happened to me.
You’re the one doing the reading, and you know how your friends told you not to read and instead you should come on out, and how your parents and teachers said ‘Read, read, read!’
Now whose judgement do you trust?
Teachers or friends?
Warning over.
Read or stop reading—your call.