Just a quick stop before driving off into the desert, only to descend a deep canyon, driving to a hidden beach where shore breakers pound. Here the salt spray and crying gray seagulls added sharpness, feeling the interface between the land and ocean, the dynamic swash zone where particles dance and energy exchange. To get of the dreary fog I took a long drive south of Arica and went off the Panamericana highway down the canyon to the beach.
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It is wrong on a foggy beach town morning to have to drink Nescafe. Arica has several beaches or playas Playa El Laucho, Playa La Lisera, Playa Corazones, Playa Brava, Playa Chinchorro, and Playa Arenillas Negras. The long open beach immediately north of Arica has fair quality surfing that is known for being the warmest of the cold water to surf in all of Chile.
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For those interested in ancient cultures of South America it is a must-do visit, worth putting up with the less than spectacular town of Arica, for more information visit Museo Universidad de Tarapaca San Miguel de Azapa. The museum houses 120 mummies, but only a subset of this is on display in the dark climate controlled showrooms. Mummies have been found in the Valleys of Azapa, Camarones, and Lluta. Their main population was established in what we know now as Arica. The Chinchorro culture was based on fishing, thus they occupied coastal areas from Ilo city in Peru to Antofagasta in Chile. The faces were painted with tar, and ornamented by shells and feathers. The mummification process was extensive, unlike other Andean mummies which mainly were the result of the hyper-arid climate the Chinchorros practice consisted of removing the organs and stuffing the body cavity with dried grasses. The mummies pre-date the Ancient Egyptian mummies by 2,000 years.
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These diminutive dried out human remains are the oldest mummies in the world, dating back some 7,000 years. A taxi ride going past the spread-out discotecas in the farmlands brings one to the museum housing a large collection of local Chinchorro mummies.
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To the east, up the arid Azapa Valley, the outskirts has a shanty town where not a single blade of grass or tree can be found, one can see hundreds of people living in plywood, plastic, sheet metal, and cardboard patchwork shacks…evidence for the lack of building codes and social programs to handle the masses, it basically equals California´s tent cities, only more permanent, but it is a magnitude of order more extreme in this climate. Arid Arica comes with surf, Morro de Arica, Chinchorro mummies, and traffic more akin to Peru than Chile.
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After leaving the Schopdog Bar, walking back to the hotel, the side street is dark, holes in the cracked concrete sidewalk, honking cars racing by, narrow roads, buildings making continuous barricade for the entire block, dangling electrical lines, odd mixture of residences and little businesses, both tagged with spray paint. Arica has just one nice street that is converted into an outdoor mall having tiled walkway that is well-lit by stylish street lamps. The northernmost city of Chile on the coast, Arica, is a jumble of broken glass, spray paint, and streets smelling of piss, which is semi-universal in Latin America.