This entry will be more of interest to the people who have visited San Pedro de Atacama than anyone else, but i suspect that some of my observations would probably apply to a lot of touristy places. For those of you who don´t know the town (which, when i think about it, is the majority of my mailing list), you just need to google the name, and you´ll come up with a heap of sites offering excursions to the various places of interest around here. and there are quite a few of these places: el Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley), el Valle de la Muerte (Death Valley), el Valle de los Dinosaurios (Valley of the Dinosaurs).... if you´re not such a fan of valleys (even with their spectacular rock, salt, and sand formations), you can always visit the Tatio Geysers at less than 100km from San Pedro, go sandboarding at the nearby dunes, practise a bit of rockclimbing and abseiling along the ravines 40km away, or go flamingo-watching at some of the high-altitude lagoons. And in the evening, after spending the whole day outdoors, you´re more than welcome to come visit me at Café Esquina where i´m working, for a refreshing juice or hot chocolate with pancakes. Or if you´re really buggered and i happen to have the evening off, you can ask about the relaxation massages that i´m offering at one of the hotels in the centre. With so many opportunities to go out exploring the surrounding areas, and close-to-perfect weather every day (blue skies, hardly a drop of rain), i was smitten. i arrived on a Sunday with the idea of spending only a few days visiting the main hotspots, but by Tuesday, i´d found myself a room, and on Wednesday, i´d already found a job to start paying the rent!
It all sounds just too perfect to be true, right? Well, in some ways, it is. The San Pedro that i´ve just described is the San Pedro that most tourists know and love after a few days absorbing the relaxing atmosphere of the town, and the spectacular scenery around. And this is the same San Pedro that very easily convinced me to leave my travels for a few months while saving some money before heading north. But within a couple of weeks, it soon became apparent that there´s another side to San Pedro that isn´t obvious to the passing tourist. At this point, it´s worth remembering that Chile is one of the most expensive countries in South America, and that San Pedro is easily the most expensive part of Chile (with maybe the exception of Torres del Paine National Park in the south). With the amount of tourists from Europe and the States, the town operates at seriously inflated rates. to give a quick example: you could get a decent 3-course meal in other parts of chile for 2,000 pesos, but the restaurants here average 5 to 6,000 pesos. it´s hardly surprising then that for many young chilenos, and not a few peruanos and bolivianos, this is the ideal place to earn some fast cash. But as the saying goes: easy come, easy goes.
With so many young people in such a tiny town (´young´ being early to late 20s, and ´tiny´ meaning that the town centre is really only one main street stretching over 500m), San Pedro has a reputation for being a party town. The young´uns don´t just come to work here; many come to forget personal problems, and the most common way to do this is to ´carretear´ (ie, to party). The local laws are such that licensed venues are only allowed to serve alcohol until 12.30am during the week, and until 2am on the weekends. Since the majority of the people who work here are in gastronomy or hospitality, this means that after finishing their shifts, everyone heads to the ´clandestinos´ (private parties). With pockets full of wages (most get paid in cash daily) and anxious to join the tourists who started their evenings much earlier, the drinking, smoking, snorting, and flirting is more intense here than in other places. Almost everyone smokes weed, and a large number powder their noses on a daily basis. Most will say that this is purely for recreational purposes, that they´re in control, but if this is the case, wow, I really need to revise my definition of ´control´. (yes, full-strength sarcasm is needed here.)
2 days ago, I moved house, mainly because I was finding it harder and harder to distance myself from the personal life of one of my roommates. His habits meant that even though he was earning the same amount as me, he owed several people money. Apart from that, he had pretty much done the tour of the town in terms of jobs – getting kicked out from several places because of his behaviour, and last I heard, he´d been kicked out not only from the place where we used to live, but also from the campground where he´d set up tent shortly after. For a short period a few weeks ago, my concern for him stressed me considerably (we did start off amicably as roommates after all), but eventually I opted for the tactic of blocking him completely from my emotional life. One friend is absolutely correct when she says: ´nothing´s going to stop him until he hits rock-bottom´. Ironically, my new roommate seems to be climbing up from his personal rock-bottom: a guy I used to work with when I first got here, who accompanied me to peru for pamela´s wedding (photos attached!), and who says that he´s trying to lead a tamer life over the last couple of months. Despite a few people cautioning me against living with him, I decided to follow my instincts. I figure that if he wants to sharehouse with someone like me, fully aware that the sex, drugs, and rock´n´roll lifestyle is not my thing, he really is making an effort to turn a new leaf, and deserves all the faith his friends can offer.
But I don´t want to sound negative; as I mentioned before, everything is more intensely felt here, possibly because the community is so small. Unlike my other pit-stops, where the local people are in their zone, the majority of people who come to work here are in a similar position to me in that they´re far from old friends and family. As a result, the contacts that are made here are that much more important. despite personal differences and our respective ups and downs, the affection between friends is, I believe, authentic. I´ve long given up the belief that true friendships are measured by the amount of time that the people have known each other, and depend more on the sincerity of wanting the best for the other person. I´ve been here for less than 3 months, but when I was ill a month ago, I was so touched by the surprise visits to my room to see if I needed anything, to keep me company for a short while, or to make me a hot honey and lemon tea. And when I recently had problems with a rental truck broken down in the mountains, I felt honoured to have so many people calling their contacts to see if they could help. I´m fully conscious of the fact that when I eventually leave this town, I´ll probably never see the majority of these people again, … and maybe it´s because of this that each day I have to remind myself to follow my intuition and make the most of every personal contact, and every day that i spend here. San Pedro is a town with an amazing amount of energy, and how one fares here is knowing (or in my case, learning) to harness this energy and make it work in positive ways.
(and if all of this sounds too airy-fairy for you, check out some of the photos in the san pedro gallery - this place is just too beautiful to be true...)
