When the earth moves

The earth moved for me in Chile. For several people actually, and on so many occasions that it became almost mundane

The earth moved for me in Chile. For several people actually, and on so many occasions that it became almost mundane. Earth tremors are so common here that when choosing a restaurant, something to look for, alongside the daily specials, is a large "S" (zona segura - safety zone), certifying the building is earthquake-proof.

What with the earth shaking, the former dictator returning, the cholera-carrying fruit and the football, there's never a dull moment in Chile. And if it all becomes a little too hectic, there's always a plaza nearby for some sit-down time. Every town in Chile revolves around a plaza, or central square, and all have the same name - Plaza de Armas. This oasis around which daily life bustles is an ideal place to spend your siesta - that three hours in the middle of the day when everything shuts down and ignorant tourists like me wander past "closed" signs and shuttered windows wondering if they've entered the twilight zone.

I had been instructed by several South American travel veterans to get out of Santiago as soon as I got in. The capital, I was warned, was polluted, ugly, unfriendly and unsafe, and Chile had a lot more to offer elsewhere. But I found it an intriguing place and felt immediately at home in a city where the main thoroughfare bears a distinctively Irish name - Avenida O'Higgins. Granted, his first name was Bernardo, but there is no denying the Irish connection, and later discoveries of Mackenna Street and Avenida Lynch in other cities further aided in my acclimatisation to this continent.

From Santiago, there are two directions to take - north or south. Chile is long (4,350 kilometres long) and skinny (on average only 180 kilometres wide), bound on one side by the Pacific ocean and on the other by the towering Andes. We went north, to San Pedro de Atacama, one spot firmly on the backpacker trail through Chile. Right in the middle of the altiplano - a high plateau in the Andes - San Pedro de Atacama is a small, green town in the large, dust-laden, eerie Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world.

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Quaint adobe houses line the dusty streets of this thriving tourist town, around which swarthy men parade on horseback with all the spit and swagger of a Clint Eastwood movie. If it weren't for the Internet cafes, tour operators and proliferation gringos, you could be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled into a spaghetti western. But these days, San Pedro is a commercial centre for tours around the altiplano. There's El Tatio, for starters, the highest geyser field in the world, where you arrive by tour bus for sunrise, and bathe in hot springs at altitudes of 4,300 metres above sea level. For sunset, Valle de la Luna is a must, a huge lunar-like valley of sweeping sand dunes where 60 or so tour companies disgorge tourists

who vie for sunset-viewing spots. But the defining characteristic of this part of the world is the dust. Having already formed a somewhat relative notion of cleanliness on our travels, San Pedro managed to further lower our standards with its omnipresent dust particles that turned every item of clothing and any visible skin a rather fetching sepia tone. Dust dried out my skin, my hair, my hands and, I am convinced, aged me by several years. With the help of the sunshine, of course, which produced an intense, burning heat during the day, while temperatures sank to Siberian conditions at night.

After five days of this alternation between equatorial and polar conditions, we moved back to the coast, to water, to the decaying port city of Iquique, which is a pleasant, temperate zone by comparison. A short drive from the city brings you straight back into the mountains and the desert, to the ghost towns, reminders of the booming nitrate era which began in the 1860s, and was ended by the depression in the 1930s. The big attractions in this area are the geoglyphs - large drawings on the mountainside made by some ancient civilisation, which nobody can explain and which look remarkably like some giant three-year-old doodling.

The best thing about Iquique for me was John Denver. He was the great obsession of our genial hotel proprietor who had us translating lyrics from his endless CD collection. It was an interesting way to pick up Spanish - I can now tell any Latino who gyrates in my direction, a la Ricky Martin, that, though he fills up my senses, I am leaving on a jet plane. Unless the earth moves, in which case, I'd be more than happy to ask him to take me home, country road.

roundthe world@irish-times.ie