Getting Used to Clean Air

The plane ride to Calama is a boys' club; the flight attendants strolling up and down the aisles are the only women you'll see. Calama's a mining town and, therefore, if you've got business there, chances are you're a man. It's the base-camp for the world's largest open-pit copper mine, a massive terraced crater called Chuquicamata, first worked under the Guggenheim brothers' Anaconda Copper Co.

The bus from there to San Pedro was a different deal entirely. The company running shuttles to San Pedro, 120 km east of the airport, didn't have enough passengers to make a trip economically feasible. This was lucky for me, because I took a taxi into town, ate lunch and bought a bus ticket for less money than the shuttle would have cost. No skill, pure dumb luck-especially since the cabbie gouged me out of $2 bucks. The bus, though, took two hours, just like the flight, even though it never stopped.

Now, not to dwell on my health, because I've done that recently in these entries, I went to San Pedro to get healthy, to get pure, clean, dry air. And on the bus, the window wide open and my right arm pinning back the whipping sun curtain, I breathed in that air, looking out on the white rock of the Atacama Desert, the driest in the world. At least initially, I felt better, or at least that there was hope for my sinuses.

The Atacama Desert is just like what you've seen of it in movies, like, say The Motorcycle Diaries, where the young Che walks across a dry, bright desert, flat and extensive with the sun blaring down so hard you squint through sunglasses. It's unforgiving land in the broadest sense of the term.

My bus got in shortly after 2 p.m, and it was the same one I took out 6 days later-on the surface, a newer model, but with the back bumper missing and the fan belt spinning wildly and totally exposed. My plane had left at 7 a.m., forcing me to leave for the airport at 5 (I woke up 5 minutes before the Supper Shuttle came, luckily, because the alarm didn't go off). If I felt healthier, the tradeoff was how tired I was.

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