Decalage

In French, the word decalage means both time difference and jet lag.  To me the word evokes the slightly nauseous, hungover feeling that comes on in the airport after an overnight flight and sometimes lasts as long as a cold.  The detached feeling that life is out there, on the other side of a dirty window that you can't seem to figure out how to roll down.

There is a two hour decalage between Tacna, Peru and Arica, Chile, the two sides of our most recent border crossing.  There is some logic to this, I guess.  Chile is south, but also east of Peru, accounting for one time zone of difference.  In addition, Peru does not observe daylight savings time which is not surprising given the general lack of rules, timetables and infrastructure that is both maddening and charming about Peru. In Peru we had developed campers hours, waking early and going to bed early.  Though days were getting longer as we went south, our 6 am breakfast/ 6 pm dinner timetable served us well.

The crab Luc caught for dinner

In Chile, we were waking up with a start at 8 AM only to find the days overcast and the light slanted. Since north of Lima, we have been driving in the desert by day, sleeping by the ocean by night.  It seemed important to keep moving, though we didn't have a particular destination, and we kept putting off calling our friends near Santiago to let them know we were in Chile.  We didn't have plans for Christmas, but didn't want to impose either.  So more desert would go by, and another night at the beach, and advent calendars everywhere had fewer and fewer doors to open until Christmas, and we still had not called.

One of 3 fish we bought from fisherman who waited with us at a construction stop

The desert is an amazing place.  The Atacama, the driest place on earth, doesn't look much different to me than the desert in Southern Peru.  The roads are wider and faster in Chile, though, so a lot more desert goes by in a single day.  The Atacama has been a recurrent source of riches for Chile, with an uncanny ability to reinvent itself when the boom goes bust.  We drove by signs that pointed the way to abandoned mining towns and ghost ports, only to pass others where boats and trucks were lining up to ship off fishmeal or carry away some currently exploited ore from a mine.  In the desert, I read Desert Memories by Ariel Dorfman.  And when we were around Copiapo, a short book called Finding the Devil about the nearby San Jose mining disaster in 2010 from which all 33 trapped miner were eventually rescued.  (I am saving the recent official biography of the miners for the trip north).  I loved being in these places and imagining the experiences of other people who had been there.  It is my new version of audio books, replaying these stories in my mind as I drive.

The busy, windy mining town of La Negra

Statue El Mano - from the highway

Ariel Dorfman talks about the desert as being a place that forces reflection.  In Desert Memories, he comes to Antofagasta to revive the memory of a friend who was disappeared by Pinochet and consider his own place in the story.  For me, it was a place to keep the interior sound track blaring so I could keep at bay a closer examination of our obsessive routine.

Cactus in Pan de Azucar

Signs of a tsunami?

Learning to handle the big bike

Of course we did eventually call our friends, and I am writing this on the patio of Cristian Bauza's lovely home where we first visited three years ago for an amazing barbecue.  This house, a series of different buildings, has stayed in my mind a one of my favorite design-build homes.  He has since married and moved into Vina del Mar about 30k from here with his new wife, and her daughter and mother.  They come out here on the weekends he comes down from Valle Nevado.  We met them here two days ago for another incredible Chilean barbecue, and after a few beers he offered to let us stay here for a long as we like.  He and his family headed back to Vina that night, and well, here we still are.

Cristian and Kata

with Soledad and Cristian

The next morning I woke up to realize that waking up later (and staying up later) feels normal, and that the haze between here an the dunes and the strip of ocean we can see is exactly that, and not another day of decalage.

Tomorrow, Christmas eve, we will make our way to Vina, probably by bus rather than fret in the taco (traffic jam) with the van or the bike, and join Cristian and Sole and Kata and Gloria for Chilean Christmas.

Christmas Music by the pool

On the 26th, we'll head into Santiago to visit our friends Diego and Katrina and their kids, then rev up the Chilean version of our desert by day ocean by night routine and drive south to the lakes.