Chile - About people, clothes and great landscapes
Santiago de Chile
Santiago is the capital of Chile and has more than 5 million inhabitants, or more than 7 million inhabitants in the metropolitan area. The special thing about this city, which itself is 522 metres above sea level, is that right next to the city, within sight, there is a mountain range of the Andes, which is around 5000 metres high. Unfortunately, you don't often see the mountains, as there is often smog due to the city's location in the basin, which prevents visibility. We walked around the city a lot and of course visited one or two sights. We would like to share these pictures with you and, of course, the pictures we took of Cerro San Cristóbal, a mountain that we travelled up on a funicular railway... Crazy thing... see for yourself 😊
What we noticed while walking through the city: there are a lot of clothes stalls here! Both at flea markets and on the street or in normal shops, clothes and shoes are on sale everywhere. The special thing is that almost all the goods look new and are from very well-known "cheap" brands. Even before our trip to Chile, we had read reports and seen documentaries about how Chile is one of the world's "textile waste dumps". A little digression in between... Fittingly, Greenpeace launched a campaign in the very week we were there to draw attention to the fast fashion problem. In Ghana, there is also such a problem!
The problem is the same in Chile. In order for us in the "western world" or, as Artur likes to say, in the "1st world" to have 10, 20, 30 or sometimes even more than 50 collections a year, depending on the label, many items of clothing have to be produced. Of course, not all of these are sold. However, as recycling is expensive for manufacturers and large special offers do not empty the warehouses, the "rubbish" is exported to other countries. There are special companies there that have specialised in filtering out the good items from the containers and putting them into circulation in the country and throwing the "worse" clothes somewhere in the countryside, as there are no proper laws in the countries or the laws can be extended, let's say through lobbying (corruption). Of course, the whole thing also destroys the local textile industry. People who sell clothing have told us that Chile no longer has its own textile industry. To what extent this is true, we cannot say at this point.
Textile waste mountains
Now let's jump away from Santiago de Chile to Iquique, a city and free trade zone in the far north of Chile, bordering the Atacama Desert. We were also here to look for the world-famous textile waste mountain and see it with our own eyes. After a lot of research, Artur found white patches in the desert that looked like textiles... So we set off to these places with a local guide and were shocked. It was a rubbish dump... It looked like an illegal rubbish dump to us. There was nothing fenced off, there were no official people or rubbish lorries to be seen, but what we did see were people living on (!) this landfill site. They had built their one-room house out of the rubbish and were looking for something they could turn into money. We didn't see the huge piles of clothes there, but we did see so many small piles of shoes and clothes ... that looked like new! Perhaps a little bleached by the sun or dusty because they were lying in the desert, but if you washed them once or even just shook them out, nobody would say that they were "rubbish". We were speechless and sad to see this and have thought a lot about whether and how to present this to you. In any case, we don't want to withhold this information from you. As you have already realised, we use our trip not only to see dream beaches and dream places, but also to get "out of the bubble" and see and experience things that tourists don't normally experience.
Speaking of mountains of rubbish. If you search for "Chile clothing rubbish mountain", you will find both an ARD documentary (link below) and pictures of the rubbish mountain we were actually looking for. "Unfortunately" we didn't find it or had to abandon our search because it became too dangerous for us and everyone involved. We travelled through the city with a private transport and our hotel owner (called Domingo), who was also very interested in the pile of rubbish, to the landfill site described above. As it wasn't the world-famous mountain of textile waste, our driver and Domingo started asking friends where "the" mountain was and got tips. The route led us... in South Africa we would say to a township, in South America to a favela or rather a poor neighbourhood. Here we saw how young people or young adults who had a small stall selling second-hand electronics had set fire to a pile of old desktop computers to burn the plastic and get at the metals and gold/silver. As it became too dangerous for us in this place, we cancelled the search. On the way back, Domingo told us that last week a reporter with a camera crew had also tried to find the pile on her own and ran into big problems. He couldn't or wouldn't tell us any more about it.
World Pictures: Fast Fashion - Clothing waste in Chile's Atacama Desert | ARD Mediathek
Those of you who also think that such waste exports are unacceptable are welcome to sign up to the Greenpeace petition and hopefully ensure that this system changes!
Petition: Put an end to mountains of rubbish and waste! (greenpeace.de)
Back to Santiago
Sorry for the not so nice part, now we come back to Santiago and something positive! A person who stands up for the good in the world, for human rights and environmental protection. Tatjana met Macarena Martinic in Santiago de Chile. Macarena works for the Chilean non-profit organisation FIMA, based in Santiago. FIMA's main objectives are to promote environmental justice and protect human rights. For example, the organisation conducts strategic legal disputes in the interests of the common good and trains communities and social organisations. This enables them to organise and defend their interests and rights. In addition to regular publications with which FIMA contributes to the improvement and development of environmental law in Chile, the organisation also participates in current discussion rounds and draft legislation. At a joint lunch, Macarena and Tatjana discussed the particular importance of multi-stakeholder dialogues and specific training courses for those affected about their rights. In addition to the specific content, such training courses have the great side effect of making people more self-confident and self-determined in dealing with their rights, as Macarena has experienced through her important work.
Human rights violations are as much an issue in Chile today as they were in the past. After talking to Macarena about the present, Tatjana wanted to find out more about the past. That's why we went to the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights), which illustrates the human rights violations during the military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet.
Augusto Pinochet was Chile's dictator between 1973 and 1990 following a military coup. During his dictatorship, there were an enormous number of human rights violations; in addition to countless murders, there were numerous imprisonments with thousands of cases of torture; many Chileans disappeared under the use of violence. Many people with (alleged) links to the previous communist regime were politically persecuted. Some were granted asylum in the former GDR. This historical connection is also the reason why Erich and Margot Honecker emigrated to Chile after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Atacama Desert
After Santiago, we travelled on by bus to the Atacama Desert. We were both very excited and eager to see what we would get to see here. The Atacama is the driest desert in the world, outside of the polar regions. There are places here where no rain has been recorded for decades. The average annual rainfall is only 0.5mm. By comparison, the average annual rainfall in Germany was 958 mm in 2023 and 660 mm in 2022.
The landscape is unique. From sandy desert to stony desert to huge plateaus and in between, the road winds its way up and down the serpentines to over 4000 metres in the Andes.
Here too... how shall we put it... apart from the beautiful landscape... Oh... let's talk about the beautiful things first...
Our goal was
San Pedro de Atacama
San Pedro is a small town. There is a long shopping street, so to speak, where all the tourists bustle around and where there are shops, tour offices and restaurants. Just outside this part, the locals keep to themselves. There are no tourists here, or if there are, then very few. So? What do you think? Were we there? Of course ... not 😉 Unfortunately we have to disappoint you here, we normally try to separate ourselves from the "classic" tourists wherever possible and mingle with the locals, but in this town our stay was very short and at 30°C, which sometimes felt like 40°C in the sun, we couldn't really go for long walks without shade to explore the real San Pedro. Nevertheless, we did three tours:
Tour 1 - Laguna Cejar, swimming in the salt lake and small salt pan
Laguna Cejar is a salt pan in the Atacama desert, very close to the town of San Pedro de Atacama. What is special here is that there are also deep lakes in which the salt content is so high that you can float in them, just like in the Dead Sea. Of course, we tried it out, as the following impressions of the national park show. 😊 But there are also large holes that are filled with groundwater and only have a salt content equivalent to the oceans.
Tour 2 - Geysers, flamingos and an active volcano in our neighbourhood
We set off on this wonderful tour very early in the morning. Really early! Artur was picked up at the hotel at 4am. Tatjana was very tired that morning and stayed at the hotel and slept in, as the tour ended at 9 pm the previous day and the third tour was also planned for that day from 4 pm to 10 pm.
First we went up to 4200 metres. Now a piece of cake for both Artur and Tatjana. There were about 10 vehicles travelling in the dark, on a road you wouldn't believe! There were 2 options, slowly THROUGH the potholes or quickly over the potholes... You can imagine what the driver chose! On a road where a maximum speed limit of 20 km/h would be allowed in Germany, the driver sped over the gravel track at 90 - 100 km/h in the headlights and in complete darkness. He tried to avoid the large holes with jerky left/right movements. After about 60 minutes, we arrived at the geysers.
The geyser field is part of the El Tatio volcano. More than 80 of the 110 erupting springs have been identified as genuine geysers. Over 30 are constantly active and the others are intermittent, according to what the tour guide told us. This geyser field is the third largest in the world and the largest in the southern hemisphere. Only the Yellowstone National Park (USA) and Dolina Geiserow (Russia) have even larger geyser fields. Speaking of which... Because the water boils here at an altitude of over 4200 metres, it "only" has a boiling temperature of around 86°C. An almost pleasant bathing temperature for Artur. 😉 Years ago, Chile tried to utilise geothermal energy at this location. Unfortunately, the project failed. What remains is a small fenced-in house, which is still within sight of the visitor paths.
Playlist
On the way back, we passed a flamingo lake. There were already a few flamingos to be seen in between, but there were a lot of flamingos at this lake, sleeping, preening or looking for food. There are 3 species of flamingo here at this lake. The James flamingo, the lesser flamingo and the pink flamingo. As Artur unfortunately only got this information AFTER the photo stop, not all flamingo species are in the pictures.
We then headed back to San Pedro, passing huge areas with llamas, alpaccas and vicuñas as well as one of many active volcanoes, which even produced smoke.
In the afternoon we went on the third tour together with Tatjana...
Tour 3 - Valle de la Luna and sunset
The name "Valle de la Luna", or Valley of the Moon, says it all here! We drove from the plateau between two mountains and the landscape changed abruptly. It really did look as if we were suddenly on the moon or on Mars. As we learnt from our tour guide, this valley was even used by NASA to test the Mars rover Curiosity. The walks through the sand and over the dunes were anything but easy, but the views were impressive.
We also stopped at an old above-ground salt mine and were told to be very quiet for a few minutes to hear the salt crack... Because the sun shines on the salt here and heats it up and then cools it down again, just like in glaciers, tension builds up, which then eventually dissipates and large cracks appear. And we could even hear this without having our ears on the rock.
At the end of the tour, we went up a hill to watch the sun set over the Atacama Desert. Here are the pictures... We think they speak more than 1000 words 😊
What we unfortunately didn't manage to see: The starry sky o <- There should be a very, very, very sad smiley here. As sad as you can imagine ☹ It was cloudy on the next three days... That's the disadvantage of travelling to the Atacama Desert during the rainy season... But, the proof that you can really see stars here is definitely given by science 😊 There are countless telescopes in the desert. Here is the list sorted by size, from the BIGGEST to the smallest:
- European Extreme Large Telescope (d=39.3m primary mirror (d = diameter))
- The Giant Magellan Telescope (d=24.5m)
- Very Large Telescope (d=8.2m)
- Gemini Observatory Telescopes (d=8,1m)
And not to forget: The ALMA Obervatory, whose base camp is very close to San Pedro de Atacama 😊 ALMA stands for Atacama Large Millimetre Array, which is located at an altitude of 5,000 metres and consists of 66 radio telescopes. This means that it does not collect photons, i.e. light waves/particles, as we all know them from a normal telescope, but radio waves in a wavelength range of 3.6nm to 0.32mm (31Hz to 1000 GHz). We can't provide you with any pictures, as the inspections have not yet started again after Corona. But we did take a photo of the base camp from a distance...
As we announced earlier, there are a few things here in the desert that have been nasty. You know us and our reports by now and we are sharing these things with you... Even if they are not so nice, we think it is still very important to know them.
Fruit and vegetables
Have you ever looked at the label on blueberries or raspberries in the supermarket or at the plastic sticker on the beautiful red apples? Or avocados and grapes? You're 90% sure to find "Made in Chile" there. We can't wash our hands of it either, because these delicious berries and apples are available in the supermarket all year round. Sometimes 500g for €1.99 or so, but where exactly do they come from? Chile is huge and stretches across several climate zones. When we took the bus from Santiago de Chile towards the Atacama Desert, the landscape changed very quickly from lush green to desert sand and stone... but it was amazing to see that huge fields were still green. Fields and greenhouses where fruit and vegetables were grown were located above what would have been the course of a river. Sometimes there was even a sign on the road saying "Fruta de exportación", which means "Fruit for export". In the stores, we found the familiar plastic packaging for blueberries and raspberries, sometimes with the country for which the packaging was actually intended written in German or English... On closer inspection, however, we noticed that the berries inside were only 2nd or 3rd choice and not 1st choice as printed.
As we learned from conversations with locals, the rivers are systematically used to irrigate the plantations and often nothing is left for the locals themselves or only contaminated water that is no longer suitable for drinking. This has given us a lot to think about and we are going to get ourselves a seasonal calendar for the future and make sure that we buy seasonal fruit and vegetables from Germany and Europe as much as possible. Yes, we also like berries in winter, but when fruit and vegetables come from the DESERT, we think the costs are simply too high for the others.
Copper, lithium and other commodities
Have you ever dug up all the sand in the sandpit to find something valuable? Yes? Great, you're set! On our bus trips, we saw so many small and huge piles of sand and stones that had been artificially heaped up, you get the picture! Everywhere there was dredging and sifting, either to get stones and gravel for constructions or to find evidence of raw material deposits. Currently the most valuable: lithium. Every cell phone, every electric car and almost every electronic device with a battery contains a lithium polymer battery, or LI-Po battery for short. And since nobody knows how long the hype for lithium will last and how long the sales prices will be worthwhile, action has to be taken quickly, so people are digging, excavating and searching everywhere. And when something is found... There's no stopping it! Not even tourist attractions and nature reserves are safe, as we found out. For example, a popular photo opportunity and natural paradise (a special lagoon) in the Atacama Desert was closed and destroyed for lithium mining. This is just one example of many. We saw mountains of spoil several hundred meters high. Even the ultra-large trucks that transport the stones in these mines looked tiny on them. Because of 100 years of raw material extraction, i.e. for 2 or 3 generations, the landscape here will be irretrievably destroyed for several thousand generations. Chile, for example, has set itself the goal of mining all lithium deposits in the Atacama Desert in the next 20 years. Even if it is a desert, yes, but even this landscape has its charm! In any case, this has given us a lot to think about and confirmed our decision to rely on our technical devices for as long as possible and not to replace them with the latest model every year, as some people do.
To give you a few impressions.On our bus trip from Calama to Iquique, we drove past the largest open-cast copper mine in Calama.We would have loved to visit the mine, but unfortunately this was not possible at the time.
We also saw huge water basins for lithium and saltpetre extraction.The Atacama Desert has some of the largest lithium deposits in the world.On the one hand, these raw materials are needed for the sustainable restructuring of the economy and on the other hand, this has a concrete negative impact on the local environment. At the same time, there are repeated accusations of human rights violations during extraction. Huge quantities of fresh water are needed for extraction, which is naturally a scarce resource in a desert. This has a direct impact on the quality of life of the people living here. It is an exciting and very important question as to how extraction can be carried out in the most environmentally friendly way possible and in compliance with human rights. This is why there are multi-stakeholder dialog formats in which the German automotive industry, among others, is involved. The aim is to develop joint solutions for people and the environment. Tatjana was able to discuss this exciting topic in a virtual meeting with Daniel Baumer, who, as a specialist in business & human rights at the Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), led and moderated the automotive industry dialog on responsible lithium mining. A big thank you again to you, Daniel, for the interesting insight into this topic and your important work.
If you also find the topic exciting, you can find a link here:
Iquique
We continued our journey to Iquique. We already wrote about this place at the beginning of this article about the mountains of clothing. Iquique is a popular coastal town with very large beaches against a desert backdrop and huge mountains in the background. The city once achieved its prosperity thanks to the saltpetre deposits in the adjacent desert.
Our great-grandparents may still remember the advertisements for the fertilizer packets from Chile (see pictures). Saltpetre is still mined today, but only on a small scale. There is great international competition. In addition, the sales market collapsed at the beginning of the 1920s. The reason for this was the invention of ammonia synthesis by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch in Germany. Finally, the business location was so unattractive that the Humberstone saltpetre plant was closed in 1961. Since then it has been a ghost town, which we visited. It was very moving to see that some of the people had left all their belongings behind. For example, there is a doctor's surgery where the doctor had left his medication behind. We spent several hours strolling through the abandoned buildings and factory halls, listening to the desert wind blowing through the dilapidated roofs. Here is a small impression for you:
Arica
Our last stop in Chile was the border town of Arica. On the way there by bus, we again saw lots of plantations in the desert. And just before entering the town, there is an ultra large Coca Cola logo made of bottles on a mountain. In the town itself there is also an oversized Coca Cola soccer near the bus station. We learned that Coca Cola is a major employer in the town.
In our search for healthy food, we browsed through the organic section of the supermarket. We noticed that the majority of organic products are imported from Germany, especially fruit juices. We found it very strange that these foods come from Germany, given that agriculture is a key economic pillar in Chile. In German supermarkets, on the other hand, we find a lot of fruit and vegetables from Chile. Why not grow them locally and organically if there is a market here?
That was our penultimate stop on the South American continent... Incidentally, the word America comes from the cartographer Amerigo Vespucci. A little fun fact by the way, in case any of you ever sit in the contestant's chair on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 😉
So it's back to Peru for 3 weeks of relaxation and reflection, in and around Cusco, because we loved it there so much. We'll definitely be back with one last article. You can start thinking about what you're going to do with all the free time you'll have when you can no longer read 6-8 pages of text and marvel at more than 200 pictures.... Just before the big memory panic breaks out... This website will definitely remain active and available for you and us to read 😊
Thank you once again for your feedback and for making our trip so much sweeter with your comments and WhatsApp messages 😊 We appreciate every single comment and message from you. It's great that you exist!
Liebe Tatjana und lieber Artur,
wieder sind Wilfried und ich sehr fasziniert von Eurem Reisebericht, bereichert von so vielen Bildern.
Der Blog ist sehr informativ geschrieben.
Es ist wichtig die Augen immer offen zu halten für das schöne und das nicht schöne, um zu erkennen wie wir leben möchten auf unsere Erde.
Liebe Grüße Mama und Wilfried