Chapter Seventeen

HEADING south and out of Peru our first stop was the city of Ica, a seven-hour bus journey which took us through the city of Pisco, badly damaged in the August, 2007 earthquake in which more than 500 people died and 100,000 were left homeless. More than a year after the disaster, evidence of the quake is still visable in Pisco with piles of rubble on sites where buildings once stood. One of the local Catholic churches in Ica is cl0sed, never again to house worshipers, with its belfry exhibiting fatal life-threatening cracks.

At the bus station in Ica to meet and give us a warm hug was Ronnie Salazar, Gonzala´s brother and after seeing us safely into a local hotel, we all adjourned for a meal and a few beers. Next day Ronnie, a former sports coach, brought us to a local lagoon, artificially built into the surrounding desert landscape and around which tourists and locals are taken, for a price, in monster dune buggies powered by 8-litre engines and capable of carrying 15 or more people. Although all the passengers are strapped in and fixed steel tube-piping is wrapped around the exterior of these vehicles, accidents still happen though most people survive the experience without a scratch. We decided to pass up on the experience.

Next it was on to Araquipa, the city built of white-stone volcanic material . Our travels now took us through mile after mile of dry coastal desert in which nothing grew, except in well watered valleys with snow from the surrounding mountains. Outside the green and lush valleys where every inch of soil is cultivated, little grows. Even cactus has to be artificially cultivated and watered if it is to survive in such a hostile landscape. The desert landscape continues into Chile where is known as the Atacama Desert, the second driest in the world after the McMurdo dry valleys in Antartica. In Chile, this desert is almost 600 miles long.


Trish and I now joined three young American women who were planning to cross over into Chile. Together, all five of us hired this man driving an old American Ford Mercury six-seater limousine to carry us from Tacna in southern Peru to Arica in northern Chile and to help negotiate all the exit and entry paperwork requirements at both Border posts. We (Trish and I) paid 40 per cent of the cost (40 Peruvian soles or less than 10 Euros) for the 60 km drive during which he drove at what seemed like speeds of up to 80 mph which for such an old vehicle seemed like its limit. We were now in our sixth South American country and our last before flying out to New Zeland at the start of November.

Next day, we went sunbathing on the beach in Arica and discussed what we might be doing in a year´s time. Our chat was a long one - there were so many possibilities ! Next we travelled on to a city with a great name.....Antofagasta. And all the time the weather is wonderful, dry, bright and not a hint of rain on this northern coast of Chile which is fringed by the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Andes to the east. The real purpose of tis trip down the north coast of Chile was to get to the capital, Santiago, from where we planned to fly to Auckland.

But first, I had to visit the coastal city of Valparaiso to follow a dream which has possessed my spirit and imagination for almost half a century. A poem by Padraig de Brun included the lines:


"A ship arrived from Valparaiso,


"Dropped its anchor in the bay........",


and a young teenage boy in Colaiste Criost Ri college in Cork became forever hooked on the romance and the far-away possibilities this name conjured up in his fantasies and imagination.

The poem itself was forgotten as was its author, but the mystery of this far-away place about which little was known in those pre-Internet and television days remained, to be explored in the mind in due course through the world of books, little imagining that one day I would walk its city streets and breath in the history of this historic port. The poem which died a death in my boyish mind now assumed a signifiance it did not have half a century earlier. Such is the power of words. One word. Valparaiso.

This cental Chilean city played an important role in the second half of the 19th century when it became the stop-over and provisioning port for ships travelling between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans through the Straits of Magellan. But the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 soon changed this and dealt a near fatal blow to this thriving trade. Now, however, the city has been rescued from obscurity by being dessignated a World Heritage site in 2003. It is also the home of the Chilean Parliament which was moved there in the late 1980s during the final years of the Pinochet military dictatorship, the blood-staind walls of the original parliament building in Santiago being too much of a powerful reminder and symbol of the temporary death of democracy in this country.

Trish and I went to the National Parliament building in Valparaiso and were given a conducted tour of the building by its Public Relations Manager. A massive mural in the lobby contained the words of Irishman Bernardo O´Higgins, a hero in Chilean history, and the primary author of that country´s independnce from Spain in 1817. He was, incidentally, the son of a Sligoman, Ambrosio O´Higggins who enrolled in the Spanish Army, and who had an affair with but never married a Chilean beauty.

The previous day, a Sunday, we visited a street antiques and second-hand fair which is held on one side of the Plaza O´Higgins in the city. In reality, it is like a flea market. Only one item excited me. Carelessly thrown up on a piece of furniture was an old British children´s story book. I looked at the title. "Gollywogg and the Auto Go Kart." Immediately, I realised its significance. "Golly" was now a word that was political taboo in Britain, and "Wogg" was a description that could lead one into the criminal courts.

But the book itself was what attracted our attention. It was a first edition, dated 1901 and inside the cover was a dedication to a little girl dated January, 1902. The book was 106 years old and for sale for 12,000 Chilean pesoes or about 14 Euros, just over Ten Pounds Sterling ! Trish immedately fell in love with the book and checked to see all its pages were still there. They were. All sixty six of them. A Finnish young lady who was attending the stall on behalf of its Chilean owners clearly had no knowledge of its significance and its collectability-value in Britain. She neither knew the author or the place "Gollywogg" once had in the British psyche.

But to be certain, we had to check things properly. So straight into an Internet cafe across the road from the market. And there it was, a similar copy of the book that was available to us for over Ten British Pounds was for sale on the Internet at Two Hundred and Seventy Five British Pounds, not including post and packaging ! We couldn´t believe our eyes.

Back across the road, this time up to the stall-holder. She could not sell it for less than 10,000 Chilean pesoes, she told me. I told her she had a deal. And immediately Trish and I became the new owners of a highly collectable and valuable British children´s storybook in, above all places, Valparaiso in Chile. We went to sleep that night overjoyed with a sense of discovery that had turned tourists into street-side discoverers !

Next day, we went by metro train to a sister city called Vina del Mar and after lunch lay on the beach. The following day we visited a National Park up in the foothills of the Andes. Wouldn´t you think we had done enough mountain and hill climbing by now ?

But our time in South America was coming to an end. Another country and another Continent were calling.

We were due to meet our South African friends and travel with them on one of the longest air journeys in the world. It is 13 hours non-stop in the air from Santiago to Auckland, all of it over the Pacific Ocean ! Even now, before take-off, we are already looking forward to getting our feet on the ground, and being with good friends there.

We can´t wait!