From the Salar de Tunupa, I drove seven long, slow days over the incredibly rough roads of the southern Bolivian mountains. Gas stations were rare, for it is a remote and seldom visited region, and I carried extra fuel in plastic jugs inside the van. The nights were the coldest I had experienced so far on my South American journey and my supplies of drinking water were frozen solid when I awoke in the mornings. So frigid were these mornings in fact, that I could not start the engine until the sun had been up for an hour and shown its warming rays upon the cold steel of the motor. But peaceful times they were. Bundled against the dawn cold; sitting in meditation in the van. Then a simple breakfast and the day of driving begins.

For food I had brought a few dozen boiled eggs, cucumbers and cookies, and some stale bread. That was pretty much all that was available in the small town of Uyuni. These basic staples fed me until I crossed the border into the Chilean village of San Pedro de Atacama. What a relief that place was. My bones were aching from a thousand miles of hard driving and I needed a hot shower. I rested in San Pedro a few days, sleeping not in the van but in the soft comfort of a warm, hotel bed. And once again (I get this quite a lot), I found myself consciously enjoying the rapid switching of extremes of experience that my frequent movement brings. From cold mountains and trekking rations to a warm town and ten trendy restaurants. What a fun transition.

I had come to the northern part of Chile for two purposes. One was to view the enigmatic display of geoglyphs carved upon the desert hills. Geoglyphs are very large carvings, some a hundred feet in size, of animals and strange humanoid creatures. They are etched on the surface of the ground by clearing away some stones and stacking others. Similar to the better known Nazca lines of southern Peru, the Chilean geoglyphs were left by an unknown people at an unknown time, by an unknown technology for an unknown reason.

It would have been rewarding to have stayed a few weeks in order to photograph the great figures from the air. I would hire a pilot to fly the plane just the way I like (I have done quite a bit of aerial photography), shoot a bunch of pictures in the early morning and afternoon light, and then feed those pictures through a few different computer programs. These programs would recognize, if there were any, graphic evidences of mathematical and astronomical significance in the directional layout of the geoglyphic lines and figures. Then, using the myth-interpretation models of a few very clever archaeoastronomers (William Sullivan, Giorgio de Santillana, and Carl Munck, for example), I would speculate on the identity of the various animal and humanoid figures, and on the planets and stars they might represent. Integrating all this information might reveal a message left by some people of an ancient time.

This is one of the most fascinating things about the study of the astronomical alignments of sacred sites. Encoded in the location of the site, the orientation of the site to particular celestial objects, and the characters in the cosmogenic myths about the site are distinct and purposely placed bits of information (and occasionally whole data bases). But that research project will have to wait until I someday return with a bit more time on my hands.

My other purpose in visiting northern Chile was to visit its regional desert, the Atacama, said to be the "driest place on earth." Evidently, for nearly four hundred years of recorded history, there had not been a single drop of rain in large portions of the Atacama. Even the Sahara in Africa gets rain off and on nearly every year. Southern Bolivia had already been the driest place I had ever been. But when I drove across the Bolivian border into the Atacama, the dryness increased by a palpable order of magnitude. It was beyond what I conceived of as dryness. Another word is surely needed to describe the thick sort of parched feeling on my skin and in my lungs. The dryness was so extreme, in fact, that it seemed to do strange things to the air. There was an awesome silence hovering over the sands and odd cracking-snapping noises came from some unseen source. Yet it is stunningly beautiful place. Soaring dunes disappear into hazy distances and the sands are dyed strange colors by the minerals they contain. The other-worldliness of the vast desert reminded me of parts of western Tibet, where I had spent a month journeying to Mount Kailash. It would be a good place to come for a few weeks on a solitary vision quest. The power and stillness of the desert would strengthen those same qualities in the mind.

Departing San Pedro and the Atacama, I finished four months of hard travel in the high Andean mountains. In five hours of driving I dropped several thousand feet into the wet forests of northern Argentina. It felt good to be among trees again. I had not seen living green since the jungles of Ecuador and I drank the color with a hungry delight. Heading quickly south through the rich agricultural lands of northern Argentina, I made day-stops in the modern cities of Salta, Tucuman, and Mendoza. Strangely, it seemed that I had left South America and entered a different land; so accustomed had I become to high-mountain peasants, dry earth, and a culture of a thousand years ago.

Now I am in Santiago for a few days. I need to write and answer some emails at an internet place, have some mechanical work done on the van, and complete this current series of writings. Checking my email messages today, I learned that the robbers who had stolen all my cameras in Ecuador had also used some stolen bank checks to steal all my remaining money from a bank in the states. Great timing, getting this message this morning. Today, the seventeenth, is the eleven month anniversary of the beginning of my current travels. When you are almost always in a new place every day like I am, you fashion and enjoy certain mini-rituals that place-bound folk aren’t as likely to use. One of these is my rather silly tradition of celebrating on my monthly anniversary days. But this does not necessarily mean that I get outrageously drunk or visit a brothel. I may go on an especially hard run in the mountains or have some strong coffee and write about my recent experiences. Such was the nature of my celebratory rite today.

The emotions with me now are a mix of sadness and happiness. Why sadness? As the end of each of my long pilgrimages has approached, I have felt a sadness because my wandering, holy-man style of life would soon come to an end. Traveling to and living at a hundred sacred sites, and steeping myself in literature about them, has altered my consciousness to a powerful degree. I live in the present, but equally so, in the distant past. I am an American but also an ancient indigenous dweller of the virgin earth. I feel a resonance with great variety of human ways. Pilgrimage. So much more than merely travel; pilgrimage is truly an outer journey leading to an inner state. It yields an experience of a certain rare richness that no life lived in a settled way ever can. Yes, there have been problems on this current journey: four robberies, a bout of sickness, and a bit of loneliness. But the time has been wondrously good for me. I have seen deeper into myself and learned more of human nature. I have thought long about love and power, about the apparent crisis and possible perfection of the present world, and about how to bring more peace to humans and the earth. And, I have learned a few things from all this thinking too!

And why happiness? Because I am tired of seeing so many new places and things, and want a bit of sameness for awhile. Because I am tired of not understanding the rapid Spanish spoken to me and tired of my poor ability of reply. It will be grand to speak my native tongue again and as quickly as I want. Because I am feeling some pangs of loneliness and wish to see old friends. One certainly meets interesting people on the traveler’s path but too soon they go their way and you go yours. The impermanence and shallowness of relationships on the road leave my heart aching for something more. Because my back is sore from 20,000 miles of rough driving and 200 sagging beds in dirty hotels. Being in one place for awhile will cure my aches and pains. Because I am tired of reading and rereading only my books on Andean archaeology and want to visit a well-stocked bookstore with novels and writings about other things. Because I am weary of always being on the lookout for robbers and worrying about the van. But mostly I am happy because with the end of my South American travels, I complete sixteen years of pilgrimage and can soon begin the next phase of my life work. A few months after my return to the states, I will begin the organization of my next big slide show tour (20 cities in the west coast in September and October). Thinking about this brings me great delight. I have truly loved my year of pilgrimage through Latin America and now I am excited to share with others what I have learned.

Difunta Correa shrine, San Juan, Argentina