Posted by: Jenn
We arrived in San Pedro de Atacama late morning on November 19th and headed straight for the only tourist office offering star gazing tours, our main mission in this touristy pueblo village. San Pedro offers some of the best star gazing in the world due to the cloudless desert nights. To give you an idea of how incredible the star gazing is in this desert, in 2011 the largest radio telescope ever built will be completed (ALMA - Atacama Large Milimetre Array) and is located just 40 kilometers outside the city. Anyways, we walked up to the agency door and to our surprise it was closed for the full moon. What luck!? We arrived on the day of the start of the full moon and the tours wouldn't start up again until the end of the full moon, November 24th. Therefore, we had a few days to spare. Luckily San Pedro offers more than just star gazing and after visiting a few more tourist offices, we booked a sunset tour through a stretch of land called the Valley of the Moon for that night. The landscape was unlike anything we had ever seen and you really felt like you were on a different planet.
After our Valley of the Moon tour we decided that there was no way we would be able to stay busy for four days in San Pedro (well, I probably could have with all the shops, but that would be torture for Jonathan) so we booked a four day tour of the Salar de Uyuni, which Jonathan will write about in our next post.
When we got back from our four day tour, we were happy to find the Star Gazing office open and offering tours that night in English. We set off at around 8:30 PM for the observatory and a French man named Alain Maury greeting our bus. Jonathan and I decided that this man has it good...he is the only person offering this type of tour and his perfect english in combination with is sarcastic sense of humor and knowledge of astronomy made for a very interesting, funny tour. We calculated that he probably makes about $500,000 US dollars per year by just showing people constellations. Anyways, he went on to explain to us how big the Milky Way (our galaxy) is. If the Milky Way Galaxy were reduced to 110 yards in diameter, our solar system (the sun, 8 planets and their moons and stars) would be a grain of sand on a football field. He then took us outside to is his array of telescopes and pointed out several constellations such as Orion's Belt and several zodiac symbols. The sky was amazing and so many stars were visible. I was in awe with how many stars you could see in the smog-less desert night. We also got to view Jupiter and three of Jupiter's 63 moons through a telescope. Oprah's vision isn't good enough to capture this but it was pretty incredible.
When we got back from our four day tour, we were happy to find the Star Gazing office open and offering tours that night in English. We set off at around 8:30 PM for the observatory and a French man named Alain Maury greeting our bus. Jonathan and I decided that this man has it good...he is the only person offering this type of tour and his perfect english in combination with is sarcastic sense of humor and knowledge of astronomy made for a very interesting, funny tour. We calculated that he probably makes about $500,000 US dollars per year by just showing people constellations. Anyways, he went on to explain to us how big the Milky Way (our galaxy) is. If the Milky Way Galaxy were reduced to 110 yards in diameter, our solar system (the sun, 8 planets and their moons and stars) would be a grain of sand on a football field. He then took us outside to is his array of telescopes and pointed out several constellations such as Orion's Belt and several zodiac symbols. The sky was amazing and so many stars were visible. I was in awe with how many stars you could see in the smog-less desert night. We also got to view Jupiter and three of Jupiter's 63 moons through a telescope. Oprah's vision isn't good enough to capture this but it was pretty incredible.
My favorite part of the night was when we got to watch the moon rise. I am sure I have seen a moon rise before but not like this one. It was amazing how bright the night got when the moon was coming up.
Once the moon was high enough, Alain was able to take a photo of it through one of the telescopes with our camera.
We felt bad for the group that had the 11 PM tour because you could hardly see any stars once the moon had risen. We had it pretty perfect - star gazing until the moon rise. And to top it all off, I saw two shooting stars! The tour ended with the best cup of hot cocoa we've had since we left the states.
The next day we headed out of San Pedro to Calama where we would catch our next bus north to head for the Peruvian border. We scheduled our bus for late that night so we could go on a free tour of the largest copper mine in the world - Calama's only offering to tourists. Jonathan was more interested in this than I was but it was a free tour so why pass it up? We boarded a bus with a few other people and headed for the mine. Surprisingly enough, I was not bored out of my mind at all. I found the tour very interesting and informative. Americans owned the mine from 1915 to 1971. In 1971 Chileans decided that we were making too much money off of their natural minerals and took it over.
Our first stop on the tour was Chuquicamata, a town one kilometer from the mine. It is now a ghost town due to new regulations stating that you must live 20 kilometers away from a mine. The last family moved out of Chuquicamata to Calama in 2008. It was a little spooky to walk through.
The next day we headed out of San Pedro to Calama where we would catch our next bus north to head for the Peruvian border. We scheduled our bus for late that night so we could go on a free tour of the largest copper mine in the world - Calama's only offering to tourists. Jonathan was more interested in this than I was but it was a free tour so why pass it up? We boarded a bus with a few other people and headed for the mine. Surprisingly enough, I was not bored out of my mind at all. I found the tour very interesting and informative. Americans owned the mine from 1915 to 1971. In 1971 Chileans decided that we were making too much money off of their natural minerals and took it over.
Our first stop on the tour was Chuquicamata, a town one kilometer from the mine. It is now a ghost town due to new regulations stating that you must live 20 kilometers away from a mine. The last family moved out of Chuquicamata to Calama in 2008. It was a little spooky to walk through.
From the ghost town the bus clamored up to the top of the mine. It looked like a horrible gouge in the earth's crust, the wound unable to heal as trucks continually hauled more and more of the earth's flesh away.
The open pit measured 28 million feet squared and 2,800 feet deep and produces 630,000 tons of copper each year. Asia being the largest customer purchasing roughly 50% of the copper. Originally the rocks mined contained about 60% copper but now it is less than one percent. This has pressed the mine into creating 12-kilometers of underground tunnels from the bottom of the open pit in order to find better quality rocks. They guesstimate there is enough copper there to keep them busy until 2060. In the next few years, they plan to abandon the open pit mine and only draw from the underground sources, transporting it via conveyor belt. This would eliminate the mines greatest expense - the trucks.
They are some of the biggest in the world - the size of a two story house with the tires alone being 13-feet tall. They cost about $5,000,000 each, need new tires yearly ($500,000), and are serviced weekly (about $25,000). The 3,600 hp engine burns three liters of diesel per minute, and a hundred of them running 24/7 are needed for the mine to run smoothly. In an eight hour shift, one truck burns more fuel than the average driver does in a year.
After the tour Jonathan hung around and asked 1,349,305 more questions. First he asked a lot about the waste. If only one percent of what is brought to the surface is copper, what is done with the rest of it? The answer was complex. Another one percent of the rock is a mixture of gold, silver and other useful minerals which is sold to other nearby companies for further processing. Why don't they process it there? Because they have maxed out their allowed pollution so they sell it to another company who has the ability to pollute. I'm not sure how this really saves the environment, but okay. So that leaves 98% total waste which is carted off as a powder/sand and is dumped nearby creating huge mountains of displaced earth. This leads into another reason the town was moved. The dumped piles were encroaching on the town and it was easier for the company to move the town than pay for the gas guzzling trucks to haul it past the town. Also, their last recordable accident was a whopping six days ago - the tour guide had no real comment on that but did say that they were a little better than one death per month, which has come a long way from several years ago.
After the tour Jonathan hung around and asked 1,349,305 more questions. First he asked a lot about the waste. If only one percent of what is brought to the surface is copper, what is done with the rest of it? The answer was complex. Another one percent of the rock is a mixture of gold, silver and other useful minerals which is sold to other nearby companies for further processing. Why don't they process it there? Because they have maxed out their allowed pollution so they sell it to another company who has the ability to pollute. I'm not sure how this really saves the environment, but okay. So that leaves 98% total waste which is carted off as a powder/sand and is dumped nearby creating huge mountains of displaced earth. This leads into another reason the town was moved. The dumped piles were encroaching on the town and it was easier for the company to move the town than pay for the gas guzzling trucks to haul it past the town. Also, their last recordable accident was a whopping six days ago - the tour guide had no real comment on that but did say that they were a little better than one death per month, which has come a long way from several years ago.