Calama

Trip Start Mar 31, 2010

109

Trip End Mar 31, 2011

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Flag of Chile Calama, Chile
Saturday, January 29, 2011

Looking out the window as we landed at Calama was a landscape as alien to us as Antarctica or the Moon. In fact it turns out that the ground near here is similar to that on Mars, and is used for filming and testing equipment for space missions. Everywhere was sand, or sand coloured rock, with no sign of any life. Occasionally dead straight dirt roads crossed the nothingness. Shortly before Calama we saw a huge hole in the ground which was Chuquicamata, the world's largest open face copper mine. Calama town largely exists to support this mine and most of it's male population worked shifts in the 24 hour a day mine: it was unusual to be in a place where all the taxi drivers were women.

We went for a tour of the mine which started with a brief look around the now-deserted town which had previously housed the 3,500 families of the miners. The town was 1km from the mine and new safety regulations in the 1990s had required a minimum distance of 10km, so the town had been abandoned and the workers relocated to Calama

Landing in Calama

. Although the mining company relocated the workers over several years, the town looked as though it had been abandoned in a hurry, it might have been Chernobyl, and had an eerie feel. On the other hand it was like a giant playground that would have been great fun to explore. This was enhanced by it looking rather like a theme park reconstruction of a past era, like the cinema which was itself a reconstruction of a 1950s American movie theatre.

The mine was unimaginably large - 4.3km long and 1km deep. Huge trucks drive up and down switchback tracks to the base of the mine to carry up rocks. The trucks had tyres 4m tall which cost $40,000 each, used 3 litres of diesel a minute and would crawl uphill loaded with up to 700 tonnes of rock. At the base of the mine these huge trucks were tiny specks. They carried their load to be processed into almost pure copper. 100kg of rock resulted in 1kg of copper. Much of the byproduct was sold, but there was also a huge pile of rock all around the mine, some of which had consumed part of the abandoned town.

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