La Garúa

My friend Nels in Lima commented about the unusually clear weather. Having been on the coastal plateau of the western slope of the Andes in winter, all I can say is, make the most of that sunshine. You may not see it again for six months. Because: La Garúa.

La garúa is a thick sea mist caused by warm tropical winds interacting with the Pacific ocean chilled by the Humboldt current. A thermal inversion. La garúa is a persistent low-level cloud cover, or fog, that blocks out the sun on the western Andes for months on end. Officially, it's winter from May to December. No matter that you're close to the equator. No sun means it's cold and damp and gray.

At sea level, la garúa drizzle evaporates, so there's no rainfall. It's an odd sensation. You can feel some dampness on your face, but if you sit on the ground, it never reaches you. Sort of like San Francisco's June Gloom on steroids. La garúa is bone-chillingly SAD—as in Seasonal Affect Disorder. A soul-smothering purgatorial greyness seemingly without end, without benefit of the delightfully earthy odor of petrichor.

The greater Atacama Desert is the driest place in the world—3 million years' worth of extreme hyperaridity. A rainshadow desert caused by the extreme height of the Andes. There is almost no rainfall along that entire thin strip of coastline that stretches the length of South America from Chile to Perú. It hasn't rained in some places in over 400 years.

The Peruvian Coastal Desert and the Sechura/Nazca Desert are northern extensions of the Atacama—by right it should be called the Sechura-Atacama desert. Bolivia lost its coastline in a Chilean-British conflict over guano during the War of the Pacific, (1879–83). Normal precipitation (in the from of fog) in the Atacama is about 0.07 inches (1.7 mm) a year.

When it does rain in the desert, the ground is so dry and hard as pavement, even an inch of rain can cause colossal flash floods. Like in 2012 and 2015. A freak snowstorm in 2011 dumped 31" of snow. I'll leave you to imagine the catastrophe that caused. (see my post Atacama Floods). Less than an inch of rain in March of 2015 (first rain in 80 years), caused not only mudflows, but an aftermath of colossal bloom of magenta flowers, the WA Post identified as desert mallow (malvia), but I suspect that might be Calandrinia, or Chilean rockrose as well.

Even the driest desert will bloom. The Atacama after a freak rain—a once-in-a-lifetime malvia bloom —Washington Post

But I digress, lost in the dizzying tracts of flowers... on the lower slopes of the western Andes, where the cloud cover kisses the mountains, a heavy fog drizzle also creates some biomes, or lomas —seasonal oases of unusual flora. A desert cloud forest.

La garúa makes Lima a damp place to be in winter. So if you've got sunny skies, pack all that sightseeing in, pronto.

What the travel guidebooks don't tell you is that la garúa makes it difficult to handwash your clothes—unless you have access to a clothes dryer. We never found any laundromats in Lima. Try drying your clothes on the clothesline during la garúa. Not gonna happen for at least six months. I melted a hair dryer trying to dry my clothes. Nae knickers and I was one cross camper.

Most people don't have washing machines, let alone clothes dryers. Some natives wear their clothes until they can stand up on their own, and just buy more when the dirty clothes run off on their own. The region is dry and dusty to boot, and aquifer water is scarce. Everybody else uses the drycleaners.

Going to the drycleaners at rush hour qualifies as a contact sport. My feet never even touched the ground as that seething mass of humanity inexorably pushed us forward to the counter to pick up our clothes. Added a whole 'nother dimension to Take me to the cleaners. I must admit I felt sheepish taking my underwear to the cleaners. But I was a much happier camper with clean knickers.

Atacama Floods

Dear CBS,

The thunderstorm wasn't the worst storm to hit Chile in seven years, it was the ONLY real rainfall to hit northern Chile in over a hundred year. You do know it's the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth?

The last recorded rainfall was about 80 years ago. According to the Chilean deputy interior minister, Mahmud Aleuy, it's also “the worst rain disaster to fall on the north in 80 years.”

But any rain in the Atacama region is a disaster waiting to happen. When the rain falls, it has nowhere to go. No vegetation, no soil. Nothing to absorb rain. So, it's all runoff. Rain never ever falls on the Atacama. Not even on the plain.

OK, so there was a freak snowstorm in 2011. Now that was an anomaly. It was meant for the southern Andes but the high pressure marine layer was disrupted. And it snowed and snowed. No flash floods were recorded but no one knew how to drive in snow.

CBS reported that thunderstorms dumped the equivalent of 7 years' worth of rain in 12 hours. That's technically true. But how you presented the facts was a bit skewed. How much rain? Seven years' worth of rain is 24 millimeters which is 0.94488189 inches. OK, so that's almost an inch of rain (divided by seven years), not a lot of rain, but it had nowhere to go, and the desert certainly wasn't going to soak up that weird, alien stuff. Think of thick dust on on pavement. Now add water. what happens next? Flash floods.

Normal precipitation (in the from of fog) in the Atacama is about 0.07 inches (1.7 mm) a year. And the southern region's been experiencing a huge drought. But if normal is 0.07", then I guess it's been about 0.1" moisture a year in the Atacama for quite some while. 

The Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, has been deluged by torrential rains and floods have caused at least two deaths, swept away homes and left the region without power or infrastructure. So, yes, horrific flash floods were in order. And sadly lives and homes were lost. Seven rivers, including the Copiapo River all leapt their ancient banks, such as they were. The rivers don't get much of a workout as most of the Andes rain and snowmelt runs east to the Amazon.

What's weird about this weather is that virtually no rain ever falls this time of year. If it ever falls at all. That's the real story. The sudden autumn downpour on the heels of an unusually hot, dry summer in the throes of an eight-year drought, has left parched fields. A disaster waiting to happen.

Northern Chile is normally cloudy (la garúa), but it never rains, as the marine front blocks all showers and thunderstorms. No moisture makes it over the Andes from the east, the mountains are too tall. According to a Chilean expert, Sagliani. "It is estimated that it has not rained in some places in the Atacama Desert in hundreds, even thousands of years." The surface is so like Mars that the Mars expedition test drove its robocars in the Atacama.

I was in Lima one winter, and there was no rain there either, but la garúa, the thick fog cap, blocked the sun for weeks on end. The only precipitation along the entire South American coast from Perú to Chile, is the condensation from la garúa. Not exactly rain falling in a rainshadow.

It's so weird to walk on bone dry dirt, there is no soil. It crunches under your feet like dried clay tailings or saltine crackers. I met people in Nazca who had never seen rain in living memory. But they told stories of deluges in Biblical proportions. And there are numerous ancient flash flood scars on the desert floor to support their stories. 

Sometimes rain happens in the Atacama Desert. It may not be related to global warming.

But the drought in southern Chile is certainly related to global warming. And this storm, destined for the Maipo vineyards of southern Chile, snuck past the desert goal keepers to weep in the driest of deserts and the world's largest open copper pits. Meanwhile, Villarica, a volcano in the south, which erupted on March 3rd, is rumbling again.

Lima, portrait of a city

“When you no longer see any trees you will be in Peru.”
—Simón Bolîvar's boat pilot, 1823

From the air, the outskirts of Lima, even the multitudes of red and white Peruvian flags fluttering over the pueblos jovenes, the shanty settlements don’t hide the smoldering heaps of garbage lining the dry banks of the Rímac River. In Quechua, the Inca tongue, Rímac means talking, or singing river.

If the river could speak, it would not have much to commend during the 400 turbulent years of European settlement. Twelve degrees south of the equator, Lima, the capital of Peru, is situated on the great coastal desert, the driest in the world, where precious rain is measured in millimeters a year.

South America’s Gran Liberator, Simón Bolîvar described it in letters as “the land was almost impossible to believe. Along the coast it was not only dead— for dead implied having once lived— it was unlacing, desolate, without trees, grass, or even cactus. The air was chilled; a cold ocean current prevented the fall of rain, and transformed a thousand miles of coastline into an utter wasteland.”

Though the explorer Pizarro is credited with the founding of Lima in 1535, there are huacas, adobe pyramids that predate our current calendar (Año Domini) by 1000 years.

For 400 years Spain generously suckled riches from Peru’s golden breasts until there was nothing left. I imagine most of that melted gold still slumbers in the tombs of numbered Swiss vaults.

Some Peruvians claim the Incas, with subtle revenge in mind, suggested the site to Pizarro, because, unlike the rest of the coast, it was so gloomy and cold five months of the year. Perhaps the Inca’s best revenge is that Pizarro's mummified body is on permanent public display.

Because of the Arctic Humboldt current, Lima is blanketed with heavy fog, the garuá, which lets in little sun from June to October. In 1823, Liberator of Colombia, Simón Bolîvar described Lima— once considered the Paris of South America, “Lima had a down at the heel look. The avenues were filled with filth and the water which ran down the gutters in the centers of the streets was dammed with a concentration of litter.” Not much has changed.

Santa Rosa de Lima

Blonde haired beauty, Isabela Flores Olivia was the firstborn of 11 children. Her father, was an official of Lima and an honor guard of the Viceroy. When she was confirmed, she was upset by her name change to Rosa. She cried herself to sleep thinking of all the unsaved souls in the mountains, in the jungles in in China. 

She wanted to preach the gospel to the Indians but she stayed in Lima because of a vision of roses. Instead she helped the poor and the sick of Lima. In a bamboo and and banana leaf covered alcove Hermitage Rosa and the nightingale took turns singing. 

Some say she slept two hours a night in a bed made out of two branches and three stones. She hung her hair on a heavy nail so that she wouldn’t sleep. She kept the key to the well on a chain around her waist. She was thirsty, and said Christ gave her a drink from his side.

Hoping to get a palm frond on Palm Sunday, she got to the crowded church too late. instead Jesus said to her, Rose of my heart, be my wife. Rosa de mi corazón, se tu mi esposa. She was 29. She died at 31, in 1617. Her bones on the altar of the church of Santo Domingo like stars glistening in the dark. Her house was turned into a church after her death.

Lima Journal 7/26?

7/26? We walked past the American ambassador‘s residence, one couldn’t call the imposing colonial structure painted Naples yellow, a house. More like a fortress. A soldier at his kiosk stands guard. This place was mortared by the Tupac Amaru liberation front. 

Tupaq Amaru, last Inca King, prisoner, 1572 (Guaman Poma de Ayala)

The first Túpac Amaru was the last Inca king, from Vilcabamba in the 1570s. His name means royal, or shining plus mythical snake, kind of like Quetzalcoatl. Some 40 years after the Spanish conquest, he rebelled against the Spanish and lost. Then the second Tupac Amaru, 1780, also a count of royal Incan descendent, whose likeness is on the $500 inti, led another rebellion and lost. 

And then there’s the current rebellion led by the Sendero Luminoso, the shining path, they seem to be winning. All car chassis and undercarriages are checked with mirrors before they are allowed to park. There is so much unrest here, the air is seething like cicadas.

Soldiers armed with Uzis in a country the size of California and Texas combined, with a total population of 19 million, some 6 million people live in this city where it never rains. There are buildings covered with 2 to 4 1/2 centuries’ worth of grime. Quechua Lima was founded by Francisco Pizarro in 1535 after the conquest of 1533-34. From Colombia to Chile, there were many organized wars led by the Incas in the late 1500s.

Lima Journal 7/25?

7/25, I think…. Lima de Santa Rosa, named after the first woman saint, the only woman saint of the new world. I can’t help comparing Santa Rosa‘s namesake.

From the air one can see the desolate landscape, the mountains of feral sand, tiny irrigated plots along a dry cobblestone riverbed akin to Baja and Southern California. The Rimac, the speaking river, speaks no more. Her mouth is full of garbage and human waste. Ecuador’s prosperity and lushness does not survive this far south.

From the air one can see immense piles of human waste and burning garbage heaps. I did not want the plane to land. From Jorge Chavez International Airport it’s a grim and dismal ride. The waste disposal system in a Third World country is its precious rivers. Ecuador hardly seems Third World by comparison. Slums surround the city, this is much worse than Mexico City or even Guatemala City.

Jesus, our taxi driver, lives up to his name, and becomes a savior indeed when he drives us to yet another full hotel. Our ride through the working class slums along the Rimac, is a horror to behold. The river is a cesspool and garbage dump all at once. No matter how hard you squint, you cannot envision what it once looked like.

Water, this precious commodity by which the Inca, and the pre-Inca civilizations arose, is fouled and dirtied at the nest. This is pollution to the extreme. Garbage burnt by the river shores stinks like a tannery.

John says any port in a storm when the hotels of our choice are filled. But this shitstorm is too much to bear. The alternative, another downtrodden dive, if we reject it, will we have no place to stay? We’re afraid we won’t find lodgings until Jesus delivers us to a residency in the embassy section with classical Greek inspired fin-de-ciclé Edwardian residencies on a tree-lined cul-de-sac, replete with marbled balconies and stained glass windows.

We are told there is no room there either, and this time we truly despair, until Jesus speaks to the manager. Magically, a room appears vacant. We are led to a round room, once a foyer. We say goodbye to Jesus our milagro savior and begin the business of unpacking.

We have trouble squaring our beds in the round room, once a tower. We joke: how to drive a Pollack crazy: put him in a round room and tell him to stand in the corner. This place with its marble floors, bay windows and faux balcony truly is a refuge.

I cannot shake the images of the Rimac, an open cesspool and garbage dump, so like the Russian River.

Flying through the Andes from Quito to Lima, Ecuador Journal

At Guayaquil, the tectonic force of the Nazca Plate and the Cocos Plate disrupts the land. Isolated dome stratovolcanoes of Ecuador, not how I envisioned the Andes. Such enormous differences in structure, like comparing the coastal range to the Rockies or to the Cascades. Yet the name of our California andesite is derived from the Andes.

The plane takes off between the two ridges barely clearing the volcanoes. I find myself praying for safe passage, heart in throat, such vast girths. I am in awe. Cotacachi, near Otovalo, and sublime symmetrical cone Cotapaxi, Mt. Fuji's twin sister. Cotopaxi means "Neck of the Moon" and is worshiped as the “rain sender,” home of the gods. La Avenida de los Volcanes is aptly named.

One of the world's highest volcanoes, Cayembe shrouded with clouds, is the second highest in Ecuador, at 19,347 feet. But the tallest, Chimborazo at 20,548 feet, is perpetually hidden in cloud cover. Chimborazo is a massive double volcano. It was once thought that Chimborazo was the highest mountain on Earth.

Chimborazo means Snow on the other side. In Quechua it's called Urcurazu,  Urcu is mountain of ice. Chimborazo is the Taita (Father) and Tungurahua is Mama, hence Taita Chimborazo and Mama Tungurahua. Pachatata and Pachamama. A reference we'll hear again and again.

At the Equator, snow level begins at 15,000 feet. It is winter here, cold on the equator. We wear our winter clothes, and still we're cold. My blue Ecuadorian sweater weighs several pounds, I am glad for its warmth.

San Francisco de Quito, at 9,350 feet, is nestled between two long Andean ridges, and the páramo, the high semi-alpine grasslands or moors between timberline and snowline—with myriad strange plants that grow nowhere else in the world. Situated north-south in these pockets, is the old city. Quito, with its colonial architecture,  considered to be the most beautiful city in the Andes.

South of Guayaquil, and Ecuador, the terrain changes dramatically from coastal jungle to coastal desert. One bids goodbye to the equatorial Andes and its massive stratovolcanoes.

The contrast between Lima, Peru, and Quito is as startling as the cold weather. Lima sprawls on for miles at sea level along the coastal desert. The Cordillera Niegra at 15,000 feet on north-south block fault,  El Callejón de Huaylas. We are still on the avenue of the gods, la Avenida de los Volcanes. The Cordillera Blanca, long north-south block-fault ridges spreading out.

Escarpments and cirques, vast glacial walls. Cirques in every color of glacial blue imaginable, like blue-eyed tropical water beneath all that white. The Andes begin to look like how I imagine them to be in my dreams.

Beneath the plane, high ridges, eroded desert mountains, infrequent torrents, El Niño leaves scars, memories of riverbeds, and flashfloods, like Baja, like Death Valley, like Los Angeles Basin.

Lima is surrounded by real shantytowns, the Rímac River, the Babbling River, is a pit of burning garbage and devastation. I don't want the plane to land. The city center of Lima is inland. Lima is landlocked, while Miraflores, the place of flowers, is a long beach that we will escape to, and find blood blooming in the gutters of the Chorillos Tunnel. We have descended into the belly of the beast. Into hell. God help us.

7/25/1988
revised, added 10/16

*Rímac from the Quechua, rimaq, meaning "speaking" nicknamed El Río Hablador ("the talking river"). —Wiki