Postcards from Chile

And so, I'm back in Chile.

It's different to last time. Last time, I didn't know where I was going, what it would be like, or how I would cope with it. Last time, I arrived at San Pedro at night, after a gruelling series of flights that included a 9 hour wait in Santiago. I had almost turned back at that point.

And when I had arrived in Calama - essentially a mining town in the mountains of the Andes -and been transferred onto a rattling minibus reminiscent of school trips, we travelled out into the desert, our headlamps casting pale pools of light onto the road, beyond which the grey desert disappeared into blackness.

We drove for about an hour, and when the road ran out San Pedro began. The night I arrived there had been a power cut (I guess), and none of the streetlights were on, so the buildings just suddenly seemed to emerge from the ground. As we drove through the dusty streets, people would drift into our vision, like creatures seen from a deep-sea submersible. Some were riding bikes without lights, others were just standing in doorways or sitting on street corners, illuminated by the lights before being swallowed once again by the shadows.

Then there were the dogs... lots and lots of dogs, wandering around the streets alone or in small groups. They looked like wild dogs, with extended jaws and shaggy coats, and most of them were big. It all felt very surreal and not a little druggy, as though I had found myself in some Kafka-esque town of lost souls.

But this time, things were different.

The lights were on when we arrived, and the dogs seemed to have gone. It seems strange to me that so many dogs seem to have disappeared from the streets in just a year. And something else seems to have disappeared with them. The atmosphere of the town is subtley different. As we were walking around yesterday there were a group of Indians performing in the main square for tourists. Our Chilean friend smiled at this and told us that it was all fake; that even the language they were using wasn't the original lanuage of the Indians. The people still appear to be as poor as ever, but their poverty seems less noticable now, pushed into the background so as not to disturb the tourists, perhaps.

There's the sense that what is replacing San Pedro is a kind of picture postcard; an image of what Chile 'should' be like. There seems to be less 'raw spirit' to the place. Much as I found my experience last year challenging, there was something... real... about it, which you don't find in the usual destinations. Now it seems like that's being eroded.

Is this really what tourism does to a place? Does it plaster over the real nature of an area a glossy version of what visitors are led, or have come, to expect?

In a sense I feel lucky. I'm working here; and not (explicitly at least) a tourist, so no-one has had to pretend to me. I feel I've come closer to what San Pedro is really like, or at least what it was like, 'warts' and all. And somehow I feel that that will have been the more rewarding experience.