If You Feed a Chinchilla a Whole Potato, It Gets Diarrhea

Studying up on Chinchillas

It was four in the morning when we reached Illupel, a small town four hours north of Santiago.  It seemed instantly like I had made a mistake having told all the taxis that I was waiting for Fernando.  Yes, old trusty Fernando who I’d never met, but who had assured me over the phone that he knew where we were and that he would pick us up shortly.  Trusty Fernando who kept asking me the same questions when we talked on the phone; there had been loud music in the background and much clinking of glasses.  It was dark in the town and when I looked up I could see the stars for the first time in months.  I was wary of passersby, just a natural reaction at that time in the morning I suppose, though they were all fairly kind.  In fact one young guy asked us if we had enough to eat or needed a place to stay.  Just asked and when he was assured of our safety continued down the empty street.

Half an hour later, Tali and I were in the back of Fernando’s taxi bouncing up and down on the back roads.  Fernando was drunk.  My first clue of this had been the car load of people who preceded our pick up.  They reeked of a night out and told us Fernando was on his way.  Fernando, to his credit, had convinced a friend to drive with him and make sure he was okay.  Said friend kept translating our Spanish questions to Fernando, whose country dialect was likely hard to understand even when sober—I wouldn’t know.

Thirty minutes outside of the town, having seen no signs of life whatsoever we came upon a locked gate and a farmhouse.  The gate was locked and we’d have to hike from here on in.  Scores of dogs started barking at the car and I was wary about leaving it.  In the end, they seemed more frightened of us…there aren’t many visitors in the desert.  The four of us (my wife, Fernando, his companion, and I) walked around the fence and into the canyons.  Luckily I had a headlamp in my pack, or we would have been left with only Fernando’s friend’s keychain that lit up like a Christmas ornament. 

The Landscape

We were all carrying large jugs of water, which slowed us down.  Occasionally Fernando, who I noticed at this point to be missing some teeth and to be balding, would stop to rest.  On such occasions he would mimic the sounds of distant goats or make jokes about cougars that live in the desert.  During one such rest I asked about the cacti that, even in the dark, were all over the landscape.  Cacti that were larger than a man and had reddened needles that denoted they were about to flower.  Neither of them knew the name for them, though they tried to remember for quite some time.

“No mas sexto!” Fernando screamed up towards our friends in the cabin when we finally got to our destination; it was about half past five and still as dark as midnight.

“Hola Tim, no mas sexto!” he repeated once more to the delight we who had been travelling with him. 

After this, and a few lion like roars, we walked up to the cabin and met my friends Goo and Hadley who were still in pajamas and looked a little groggy.  We sent Fernando and his friend back into the dawn with a few more beers and were surprised we had found the place so easily.  Looking around, there was nothing but cacti, foothills, and a few bushes.  It was exactly as I’d imagined it; a shack in the desert.

Hadley and Goo were spending a few weeks in the area doing environmental work.  The area is a chinchilla habitat, and this particular species is endangered.  About twenty five years ago some lady named Amy who was part of some organization (sorry I never did learn the details) built the shack and began trying to plant more of the woody bushes where the chinchillas usually live.  Amy hadn’t been there for fifteen years and the place wasn’t in the best of shape.  Occasionally, she funds people to stay at the cabin and keep the project going, but overall, it seemed pretty unorganized.  Our friends had arrived to find the shack a mess with unwashed dishes and blankets strewn about everywhere.  There were plastic bottles about the grounds that were melting in the sun and no water coming through the plastic piping.  This, of course, made it rather difficult to water seedlings and try and propagate selected areas with new plant life. 

Hadley and Goo had only been at the shack for about two weeks but had fixed the place up nicely.  Inside was tidy and they’d even built a hanging lantern fitted with candles that lit the place up at night.  Outside they’d started some new seedlings, built a covered shed for tools and materials, and given the place a good cleaning.  It all seemed so much fun, building contraptions and solving simple necessary problems, like Swiss Family Robinson or Robinson Crusoe.  By the end of the weekend I was convinced that I too wanted to live in complete isolation.

The morning of our arrival, it was cold in the desert and I had three cups of coffee and did a few jumping jacks to keep warm.  As soon as the sun made its way over the foothills, however, it was scorching.  So extreme was the difference that I found myself in want of shorts and flip flops.  We fried up some flatbread and ate with the woodpeckers, who were busily searching for grubs in the only tree in the area.  We sat for hours mesmerized by the vast nothingness and watching as the farmer’s goats came in to pasture.  They were left to themselves, no one travelled with the goats except at night; and even then it was a lone dog that rounded them up.

Not wanting to be in our guests way, we helped out with some routine chores.  One of which was transporting water from a nearby spring.  We decided to investigate the piping problem as well and so followed it through the brush, heading to the water source.  Large sections of the piping had been completely ripped out and tossed aside or stolen.  At one point we found about fifty meters of the plastic piping beside a dead dog that appeared to have been shot.  When we arrived at the water source we were able to get a small section of the water system working, but it was clear that someone had come and destroyed the system.  Who?  Why?  Why was there a dead dog?  The whole place was a mystery like that. 

When we headed back to the shack carrying large buckets of water, we came across a few cowboys who tipped their hats and kept their horses from spooking as we passed.  In the absence of any other people in the area one couldn’t help but place them in suspicion.  Also, I remembered a bit of graffiti back at the shack, a pen drawing of a cowboy with the caption “All the water is mine!” above him.  Mysterious etchings and drawings surrounded the place, but no answers would be found.  At least not by me, at least not in the short time I was staying there.  Instead, we drank.

There wasn’t any electricity or means of keeping things chilled so we drank straight whiskey out of metal cups.  We constructed a few things, seating areas, hook systems for swinging windows.  But mostly we just stared into the desert and played shotgun bocce.  Goo invented the game, it’s pretty much like bocce ball except with shotgun shells.  It got quite competitive.

As darkness came upon us once more we dined on mote (a sort of barley that is prepared in a way that has a consistency somewhere between rice and pasta) and a sort of tomato curry.  Given our remote location I was pleasantly surprised by the fine dining by candle light with wine and even music (Goo had his ukulele).  After dinner, boosted by the wine and the successful fixing of a pair of night vision binoculars we decided to search for chinchillas.



Hadley with a cactus



We huddled together in a grotto near some particularly large cacti and took turns with the night vision binoculars.  When we stopped talking the silence was deafening.  I looked through the binoculars moving my focus from area to area; the green tint and the small area of focus made me feel like I was on another planet.  I didn’t see any Chinchillas, at one point even forgot that I was looking for them – they are endangered after all.

The next day we hitchhiked back into town with a very quiet local.  Tali and I were extremely grateful as the alternative would’ve been a five hour walk in the hot sun.  I’d only been in the desert for a day, and Illupel is anything but a large town, still it was strange to be back in civilization.  Like returning to earth.