Mark Johanson uncovers the fascinating details & dark history of one of the planet’s driest deserts, the Atacama
By Shafik Meghji
A realm of wind-whipped plateaus, glistening salt flats and smouldering volcanoes, the Atacama is the driest desert on Earth outside the poles. Stretching across northern Chile, the region is so extreme and otherworldly that NASA uses it to test instruments for Mars. But while the desert may be inhospitable, Mark Johanson’s insightful and engaging book shows ‘it is anything but lifeless’.
An American journalist and co-author of Lonely Planet Chile (a book I also co-authored), Johanson settled in Santiago a decade ago with his Chilean partner. As he journeys through the Atacama, he weaves in personal elements – writing powerfully about code switching as a gay man, learning ‘workarounds to thrive out of my element’ – with reportage about Chile at a time of strife thanks to mass protests and a contentious referendum, not to mention the pandemic.
On the Atacama’s southern tip, Johanson encounters a mystic writer-poet-musician dressed in a white robe and Crocs, a reminder that ‘deserts can become oases for outcasts’. Near Copiapo, he speaks to one of the 33 San José miners who spent 69 days trapped ‘in the deepest stone tomb in human history’. Further north, Johanson meets members of the Indigenous Likan Antai community, taking part in a coca leaves ceremony and learning about water management. And on the breathless Altiplano, he finds himself suddenly ‘a young man prematurely aged’ as his body struggles with 30 per cent less oxygen.
Mars on Earth examines the Atacama’s future. The desert’s vast lithium reserves are essential for the global transition to a low-carbon economy but their extraction threatens local communities and ecosystems. Meanwhile, the region’s clear skies have made it a haven for astronomers, with the imminent arrival of the Extremely Large Telescope observatory set to revolutionise our understanding of the universe.
Johanson also delves into the desert’s fascinating, and often dark, history. From the ghost town of Humberstone, a relic of the nitrate boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to grim Pisagua, used as a concentration camp for gay men and opponents of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship.
This excellent book is both an evocative piece of travel writing and an illuminating account of a long-overlooked region.
