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At the End of a Long Drive


Shreesh and Neena Taskar

We didn't make the decision, the decision made us. On October 20th, 2007, we left our comfortable city of San Francisco to follow a simple algorithm - go North till the road ends then turn around and then go as far South. In between those two points was the stage, the timeline, the space, where we made things happen and things happened to us.

The past is fleeting and the stories, the sights and the feelings are perishable. One sees what one wants to see, and perhaps we are not capable of more. We saw that people are kind and helpful even if they were not materially rich. Some we could understand even though we didn't speak the same language, the motivations of others were incomprehensible even though we did. In the end fragments remain - the smell of roasting chocolate, a flock of snow Ptarmigians on snow, the creaking of the rainforest, the rough feathers of penguins, and the intoxication of Curanto.


So these are our stories. Every time you visit the site you will see a random post below. Each starts with Lo que pasa es que...

Videoblog: Ghost town in the Atacama

Oct 15th, 2008 by

Click to Enlarge

Humberstone, Chile

Nitrate crisis – Crumbling buildings – Magnificent ruins.
(Map this!)

I have found ghost towns fascinating but until now I have never had the opportunity to visit one. The closest I ever got was old abandoned warehouses, which are species of mini ghost town unto themselves. The northern part of Chile has quite a distribution of ghost towns, mostly related to the nitrate industry that operated in the Atacama desert from the latter part of the 19th century to the early part of the 20th. The development of the Haber process in the 1910’s provided for a more economical way to make fertilizer and the nitrate industry went into decline and eventual extinction.

Humberstone, Ghost Town

For a higher resolution video click here

Today in the desert one can find crumbling buildings, rusty heavy machinery, and decrepit power plants and ovens. What once was so vital to Chile that it fought two wars with its neighbors Peru and Bolivia lays strewn across the sands of the Atacama. Eventually the same will happen to the artifacts of our current civilization and some future humans will have the pleasure of rooting through our ghost towns. I hope we leave behind magnificent ruins…

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