Iquique

March 5, 2017 SouthAmerica

https://www.southamericatotheworld.com/ — Iquique coast – Chile 2010

It turns out that Iquique is weird and funky, having piss odor in the streets, dogs humping in the plaza, and sidewalk bars crowded with Chileans drinking beer. Watching the sunset from the eighth floor balcony of the Hotel Gavina, looking over the rocky beach curving away to the south, the town appears to desperately hold onto the barren coast, clinging against mega-earthquakes and tsunamis. Tall hotels and apartments stand oddly above the shore, the slopes behind crowded with lower structures, making a concrete carpet across the sandy coastal plain.

Everywhere one looks the buildings make box shapes of different colors, the angles to ponder, uniform, oblique vantage, peeling paint, contrasting colors, inviting, and repeating throughout cultures, a box fascination, windows to another view, placing the box within a box, reality boiled down to simplicity, thus the attraction, and riding the linear transgressive wave until it boxes you in. A photographer’s city, one could make a gallery of colors and textures from this old mining port. Such we have done with photos of the colorful historic doors. Things for the imagination, such as ghosts, creaking wood, peeling paint, rusting metal, honking horns, spray-painted walls, and Colonial balconies, collectively are aging in the Pacific breeze. And one notices the small details that were better off overlooked, the burden of truth hindering the dream.

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Iquique encompasses a long history of humans building and expanding, growing, making infrastructure, millions of orgasms, culminating in a tangled mess of concrete, roads, wires, buildings, signs, names, laws, cultures, food, fashion, mixed drinks, fine steak with goats cheese and toasted almonds, imported specialty coffee, the latest model of automobile, and gas stations. It is nuts driving in this town, being totally lost, navigation in chaos, only half the streets posted with signs, and the traffic so erratic that one can hardly glance to look for the signs anyways…major headaches with the basics of trying to get money, buy gas for the rental car, and shop for field lunches.

During diner in the Española Club, the historic building from 1908 made of imported Oregon timber and meticulously painted in Spanish Moorish motifs, they are playing Michael Jackson tunes and the Beatles, which do not match the paintings of Columbus discovering the new world and Don Quijote de la Mancha. Then there is the Iquiqueña cerveza, a fizzy drink that went wrong, nectar not the lupulo mixed with Atacama hard water and lack of talent. During sunset the massive sand dunes piled at the base of the coast range to the east light up in fiery rose colors. Para-gliders hovering like condors, and sometimes people boarding down the sand, I guess imagining what snow would be like. And a couple of prime surf breaks near the rocky points season the city with recreation. Iquique, locals with lifted 4×4’s modified for desert runs, beaches and surfing, small fishing vessels, the operation center for the 19^th century Nitrite Barons from England, the nightlife bars on Avenida Baquedano, the city makes an oasis in the Atacama Desert, existing more through human energy than any gifts from nature.