Free Travels in a Thin Country by Sara Wheeler

Christmas,’ said James. By some seasonal miracle two small boys emerged from a derelict cottage and fetched branches which we wedged under the back wheels. Hearts beating with relief when we finally drove the vehicle out, we gave the boys a huge tip, forgot about the prehispanic ruins we had gone to Zapar to see, and headed home to San Pedro as quickly as possible for a large Christmas drink.
    James and I were used to each other’s company. We could sit up till three with a bottle and our books, not saying much. That evening we were lounging at a table on the grass outside our room, the air still enough to read by candlelight. Suddenly Colin appeared, the Canadian engineer from Arica.
    ‘Happy Christmas,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be here.’
    I was delighted to see him. He had a German man with him, and quickly told me that Paul from Tucson was about to join us. He hadn’t been able to shake him off. Paul was the traveller none of the gringos in Arica had liked. He was in his early forties, quite a loudmouth, and he had given up a well-paid job designing industrial air conditioning units in order to see the world for a year or two. One day he had told us in some detail about a recent sexual encounter with a Chilean woman. He wasn’t boasting; quite the reverse, actually, as he said he hadn’t made a very good job of it (those weren’t his exact words). It is a universally acknowledged truth that thereis no more popular topic than other people’s sexual peccadilloes. But Paul achieved the impossible. He made his sound boring.
    Six or seven other gringos turned up, bearing cartons of wine and diluting Paul’s company.
    ‘We won’t swap addresses’, said Colin when he lurched off into the darkness many hours later, ‘as I know I’ll see you again down the track.’
    But he never did.
    Compared with most indigenous cultures in Chile, Atacaman civilization, much of which has been preserved in the desert sand, is reasonably well documented. In the museum at San Pedro they had a mummy, labelled Miss Chile; even her long dark hair was intact. The museum made me feel I could walk out into the desert, dig my fingers a few inches into the warm sand and pull out a broken cup or a human bone. The arid sands struck an odd contrast with the rich treasures they yielded. There was a statue outside the museum of the grand master of Atacaman archaeology, the Belgian Jesuit Gustav Le Paige (he was a dead ringer for Gordon Jackson from the television series
Upstairs, Downstairs
), and alongside a paean to his life’s work I read that the Atacameño were agriculturalists and herders, oppressed by other tribes prior to the Conquest. Their little-studied language,
Kunza
, was spoken up until the end of the last century.
    North of the village the landscape transformed itself into a still and rocky valley where sapphire dragonflies pitched on the marshy riverbanks. We climbed to the top of the ruined Pukará de Quitor, a fort built in about 1200. A Spaniard attacked it three hundred and forty years later, and with just forty men on horseback he took it.
    Pre-Columbian peoples had no concept of geographically defined nationality. Tribespeople in what has become Perureferred vaguely to the land to the south as Chilli or Chile, and a
conquistador
appeared there on his horse in 1535, forty-three years after Columbus first crossed the Atlantic. Diego de Almagro, an illiterate peasant like many of the Spanish conquerors, had been granted a slice of territory south of Peru called Nueva Toledo by the Spaniards. His expedition to this unknown land, where there were no glittering piles of gold and silver as there had been in Peru and Mexico, was such a disaster, and he spoke so bitterly of Chile, that the tribes there were left in peace for five more years. (Almagro was subsequently strangled in Peru by a rival army of
conquistadores
.) But in 1540 Pedro de Valdivia – in whose honour the love hotel in Santiago had been named, four