May 21, 2016
Freight Train: route 25-km34 to route 23-km32.
Those friendly Chileans didn't come in the night with white sheets draped over their heads and scare the living daylights out of me for a prank. No, instead I'm woken early by the eerie shudder and clank of a freight train passing. Must have been 5 AM. Seems they roll round the clock. A god almighty diesel engine hum echoing across the otherwise silence desert.
On the road the traffic is lighter this morning, so I leave the parallel track, which soon ends anyway and continue on the road until the paved shoulder returns at 30 kilometres after it ended as per sign. The activity to the side is a return to modern mining. There's a regular rectangle spoil heap, the size of a mountain literally, a kilometre or so in length. On the high rim can be seen dumper-trucks tipping their load from the crater within down the screed, the load rising in a trail of dust. I pass through a village, Serra Gorda serving this mine. Then ahead there's a broad inclined plain upon which is a fog of dust and immense spoil holes. The sign at the access road in says "Minera Spence" a very Anglo name, indicating foreign ownership. I am worried the road will pass through the haze of dust, but a little farther the road curves round well to the right and away from the drifting dust clouds.
By noon having climbed the long incline pass the mining area and reached the high point at a layby along the parallel rail tracks, I'm in need of a thirst quenching break. It is good timing as there is a train approaching down the track, so I grab my camera ready for a photo. The driver sees me and sounds the long siren horn as the diesel lurches by drawing flatbed carriage after carriage of finished sheet copper, perhaps from the biggest copper mine in the world, north of Calama.
I had planned on staying in the campsite in Calama, but I arrive at two o'clock and after I've had lunch in a Peruvian eating place, where there's a supermercado further along in the same street. I decide to go there afterwards and stock up on plenty of fluids, by which time its half three with another three hours of daylight, so I ride out of town taking route 23 toward San Pedro de Atacama, riding to sunset when I find a place to camp behind a roadside mound.
Today's ride: 108 km (67 miles)
Total: 10,265 km (6,375 miles)
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