Antofagasta: My Favorite Kind of Tour

Wednesday, 8 October – Antofagasta, Chile

 

My favorite type of tour is one that shows the best a port of call has to offer even if it’s a mostly modern fast growing mining city without any need for accommodating or means of attracting tourists. The 20ish guide told us how she has been to Europe and the USA but loves coming back to her home in Antofagasta. She has a BS in geology from one of the half dozen universities in this very isolated location unlike most of our previous guides who had 2 year training programs in “tourism”. Antofagasta is a 20 hour bus ride or 2 hour plane ride (or 36 hour by 18 knot cruise ship) from Santiago, and the nearest next strip town (they all are in coastal Chile as the coastal plain is only a km or two wide before the multi-thousand meter mountains and lifeless desert starts so that even moderate sized cities are 30 km long) is hours away. The annual rainfall here is 4mm. A 60mm (2¼ inch) rain storm in 1963 flooded the town and killed a dozen or so people. Did I mention that it’s really dry in coastal Peru and Chile? In case you were about to ask, the Port of Antofagasta ships one half of the world’s copper. Everyone here is associated directly or indirectly with mining. I said the cute homesick tour guide majored in Geology, didn’t I?

 

As I was saying, the best of a town tour includes the historical market with lots of huge pieces of some sort of meats and strange looking produce from “down south” as nothing grows here, the ruins of a refinery build in 1868 that is across the road from what will be the city’s first 5 start hotel, and a 10 mile drive to LA PORTADA, a fairly modest natural arch along the rocky seashore. The arch is such a wonder in this very stark landscape that the city buses in this very prosperous city have a picture of it on their sides. This town is otherwise rich and well maintained. Antofagasta looks quite 1^st world. Chile is nothing like the other Latin American countries on this cruise. Great to see it and to see the difference.

 

Now for some follow up items. Yes, a refund of 50% of yesterday’s Nitrate tour was forthcoming by dinner time. And, no, I did not have anything to do with it. Well actually, I did mention casually to a few of the other guests that “if it were me who might be complaining” (about the guide who couldn’t speak English and knew nothing of the topic of the Nitrate, the subject of the tour), I probably would go directly to the Hotel Director (the big boss of the ship, as I’ve already mentioned) but not the Tour Director (who would no doubt jump into his rabbit hole and was in a way responsible for the screw-ups encountered) and “perhaps refer to the following talking points in this order.” As I said, the refund was credited before the bus got back to the garage. Oh well. Believe me, I know that entertaining some of these luxury cruise passengers takes a lot of work. I suspect, though, that little whining about the tour would have occurred if it were priced at $61 and not $122.

 

Regarding ship’s tours in general, the guides here—the awful but pleasant one yesterday and the wonderful young lady today—speak English easily but the English they speak has clearly been taught by teachers who are not native English speakers or even lived in an English speaking country. The vocabulary of the guides in Peru and Chile were very limited (like not knowing the word for “ground” as in ‘the white mineral component on the floor ceiling is salt”) or the pronunciation most reasonable but not quite right. Telling us that the new hotel is not yet occupied had a word in it that sounds like “oc-u-pate-ted”. Easy to understand, of course, but we struggled with, “as with many cities, we have a problem with too many stray ducks” as this was said as we were passing a site that would be a small city park with a pond. (But she called it a “small closed river in a new place where people could have reunion”.) I really love all this, of course, but when one of us clarified to the others (guess who) that feral dogs was the issue in the poorer parts of the city, the grumpy New Zealand lady hollered out, “Shoot them.” Actually I should have kept my mouth shut (!) and let her think that mallards were taking over an area that has no natural surface water of any kind.

 

The other follow up item I failed to mention in the proper earlier report from Callao, Peru was that there are 2900 Chinese restaurants in Lima. Hard to figure out where that would have fit in the narrative, but it’s nice to know for future reference.

 

About to go on deck and finish my book on Beaufort and wait for the Cephalexin to kick in. My post nasal drip and slight cough was beginning to wear me down and causing the couple in the next suite to ask me about my health each morning. An early visit to the ship’s doctor (an old friend who has dealt with similar symptoms of mine on previous cruises) welcomed me back when he found me camping at the infirmary door when he opened at 8 am. By the way, Dr. Riedel confirmed that I had done the right thing by taking the bus microphone on the trip to Lake Chungara at 15,200 feet after we had were to be above 14,000 feet MSL for many hours and delivering a short lecture on recognizing the symptoms of altitude sickness. He said that last year a number of guests from the ship had to have emergency treatment in Cusco on the two day trip to Machu Picchu.

 

Tomorrow is a sea day and then a short tour, “Valparaiso & Vina del Mar” (another favorite type tour with a stop to the town square, the Fonck Museum with Easter Island and Chilean mainland artifacts, and a beach resort), before turning West for 6000 thousand miles more of this with a stop at the real Easter Island. Whoopee.