Moto Day 3: Arica to María Elena

Christmas morning in Arica was as quiet as the night before had been busy. Waking up at eight to a recently risen sun was disorienting; Chile's clocks were two hours ahead of Peru's. And not only was the Chilean time zone closer to Europe--it was everything. Home supply stores with treated lumber, nuclear families in sedans, men in shorts, two-ply restaurant napkins, receipts for everything... Throughout my time in Chile I was to be shocked and (let's be honest) delighted by its comfortable modernity.

The morning took me through deep desert canyons with snaking green lines of vegetation in the bottoms. It had been a mystery to me, looking at the map, why the road south of Arica made a big zig zag. Now I knew: it didn't bother with small-scale switchbacks, it just angled down for ten or twenty kilometers until the bottom, then turned and went back up the other side going the other way.
Today was a good day for variety of desert surfaces. Here we have the classic cracked mudpan look, always a classic.
...and here is a salt flat. I felt like I was walking around on antlers. At one point I broke off a chunk and the inside was pure solid white salt. Roadside geoglyphs.
I ate dinner at a tiny restaurant in María Elena which catered to long-haul truckers and the workers in the salt factory, the only industry in this one-horse town. The family who ran the place was very sweet to me, boosting my already high opinion of Chileans. The man was curious about my motorcycle ride and peppered me with questions like, Do your arms get tired in the wind? (They didn't. It was really just my butt that objected to the long hours in the saddle. I have way more sympathy for cowboys now.) After dinner I set out to look for a private spot in the desert to camp.

There's car camping, and then there's this:
Some parts of the Atacama haven't seen rain in thousands of years (it's the driest desert in the world), but not the part I was in. I felt raindrops in the evening and heard thunder in the distance, so I set up my tarp. Unnecessary, as it turned out, but it was a pretty cool setup. The great thing about tarps over tents is the way they necessitate invention. My night in the desert was cold, scentless, uncannily quiet, and cozy.