“Mars on Earth: Wanderings in the World’s Driest Desert” – An Interview with Mark Johanson About His New Book on Chile’s Atacama Desert

Posted by on October 1st, 2024

Home to the oldest mummies on Earth as well as where NASA conducts rover trial runs for the red planet – would you like to know more about Chile’s otherworldly Atacama Desert?

I recently sat down with esteemed travel writer and dear friend Mark Johanson, who has a new book, Mars on Earth – Wanderings in the World’s Driest Desert, coming out on October 8th, 2024, published by Rocky Mountain Books.

Mark is originally from the USA but lives in Chile. Many moons ago, while traveling in New Zealand, he met his Chilean boyfriend and decided to have a go at making Santiago home. Mark has since traveled this long skinny country extensively and even helped put Chile on many travelers’ lists. His work with Lonely Planet named Chile the top country to visit in 2018. Mark’s writing has also been featured in internationally renowned publications such as National Geographic, Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, AFAR, Food & Wine, Dwell, CNN, Bloomberg, Newsweek, the BBC, etc.

I was honored to be invited to read his first book prior to print last year. I read Mars on Earth while I was traveling for work with Vaya, and it immediately became the only thing I wanted to read in my free time. It is an intoxicating travel log that takes the reader along for a deep dive into the history and hopes of the people in Chile’s desert. His storytelling weaves facts with personal ponderings in a captivating way that paints a beautiful yet brutal picture of this extraordinary unknown landscape.

How did you come to write a book about the Atacama Desert?

“I think for me, it all started with the “estallido social” which is the social uprising we had in Chile in 2019, and it was this moment where I really, for the first time, realized that I didn’t understand the country that I was living in, in a way that I really needed to understand it.

I’d been living in Chile at that time for five years. And you know, after five years, you’re not just out there experiencing things on the surface level anymore… And the fact that the social uprising took me by such surprise was sort of a big, shocking moment for me that I just didn’t really understand Chile like I should.

And then the pandemic came, and all that came with that. And it got me thinking, you know, wide open spaces… a place that I could go in Chile and perhaps try to find answers to some of the questions I had. I know the South pretty well, everyone in Santiago always looks south to the greener parts of Chile, to Patagonia, to the places where they go on their typical vacations. But nobody really looks to the north from Santiago, which is where most of the money in Chile is generated. It runs the economy. It’s the place that launched a lot of the social movements in the country throughout its history. It’s home to much of its indigenous communities. So, I really wanted to focus on the North, because it was a place not only that I didn’t understand, but I felt like a lot of my friends here in the Capital didn’t understand either.”

You interviewed a bunch of people, from a shaman-type character to a copper miner (one of the famed 33 to be trapped underground), to scientists – how did you select the people that you interviewed?

“I think when I set out on this trip, I didn’t necessarily have a whole lot of subjects in mind. I wanted to see what I found along the way. You’ll notice in some of the earlier chapters, there’s not as many strong characters. This is my first book. As I learned what I was doing, I kind of set out to select more specific characters along the way… So, when we get further north in the book, you have a scientist guarding the oldest mummies in the world, or a woman who cooks with solar ovens. These were people that I had sort of intentionally sought out, because I thought they could speak to specific themes that spoke to larger topics about what’s happening in the Atacama either today or has happened there in the past, or how we’re trying to uncover the past to make sense of the future.

But yeah, some of the earlier chapters, the people, I just kind of stumbled upon. This guru in chapter two, you know, came to me by surprise… that’s the joy of the book too! Because you don’t want to plan it out too much. You want to let the journey take you where the journey is going to take you. And I think one thing that I was always conscious to do is just never say no. If somebody wanted to take me away, show me something, I just let that take my trip in a different direction. Whatever the opportunity was!”

 

That’s awesome. So that leads into my next question. What was one of the most surprising things you learned?

“Going back to what I said earlier, I think one of the things that I didn’t realize when I set off on this trip was how much the North has played a role in the social movements, especially labor movements, leftist movements, that have really shaped the country in the past 100 years. It really set the stage for a lot of the things that people were out on the streets complaining about back in 2019. So, it really came full circle when I started learning about some of those social movements that began at the nitrate mines and mining towns in the desert.

Other surprising things, I think… a lot of times when, when we go into remote areas and we meet with indigenous communities, we often go in with this lens of people living out of a culture in the way that you read about in the history book. I think going into a lot of these indigenous communities that I was able to see and meet people who showed me what their hopes and dreams and desires of the indigenous communities in Chile are for the future. It’s not just about what the past represents for them. It’s about what they want now. Who they are now… I think that that’s something that often gets lost in the narrative about many countries’ indigenous communities.”

Traveling in the Atacama and in Northern Chile, it’s not necessarily always comfortable. What was the most extreme environment you were in during your travels?

“I mean, definitely the Altiplano (the high desert) is the most extreme environment in any scenario, just because the altitude does a lot of weird things to your body. It messes with your brain. It makes you have weird dreams. It makes you feel prematurely aged. It makes you cold, it makes you hot. It makes you very uncomfortable, as you said. I think one thing that I learned about myself in this trip is how much I kind of enjoy those uncomfortable landscapes because they just really make you feel something, like deep down make you feel something. It’s not always a good something, but it makes it so it never leaves you untouched. The Altiplano, it always has this really strong, radiant sun that threatens to make you go crazy. You have these really powerful winds that threaten to knock you down. You just can’t simply be there. You have to be engaged. You have to be thinking about the landscape. You have to be interacting with the place that you are in, on a much deeper level than any other type of landscape that I know of on Earth. So definitely, the Altiplano is the most extreme. And within the Altiplano, I think I went up above 5000 meters, almost 5500 meters… the higher up you go, the less oxygen you have. I think throughout the trip, I thought that I was coming to terms with the altitude. By the end of it, I realized that there really is no coming to terms with that altitude. Hahaha.”

What was the biggest challenge about doing a deep dive into Northern Chile?

“I mean, one obvious challenge was the time frame with which I was doing this book. I started writing this book during 2020 to 2021. We were just coming out of the pandemic. Places were going in and out of lockdowns and there were just a lot of issues that I don’t necessarily describe within the book. But in order to research the book, there’s a lot of asking for permits to travel to different areas, getting denied permits, turning around, having to regroup, figure out what to do next. The pandemic made it strange in ways that you don’t know how close you should be with people… I mean, the whole reason I went to the Atacama was that it was a place where you could be far apart… I [went] for long periods of time without seeing anyone else, but the pandemic certainly put a challenge on certain aspects of it. Other than that, I think challenges were just writing a book in the first place. I had no idea what I was doing. This is my first book. So, figuring out how to structure a long form narrative, figuring out how to tie each chapter and the specific theme. Those are some of the bigger [issues], more so than the travel, just because that’s something I’m more used to.”

Where would you recommend for tourists to go explore that might not be on everyone’s radar?

“I think San Pedro is a great destination. There’s a reason that everyone goes there, but it’s also just about the only place that most people go to and it’s such a big and vast desert with so many other areas to explore. I think the area between Arica and Putre is a wonderful place for tourists because it does still have a little bit of tourism infrastructure. And you can see the change from the coast, because Arica lies on the coast, as you travel all the way up to the Bolivian border where Putre is you have two official national parks. And then if you keep going further away, there’s a whole string of national parks there, up on the Altiplano, where you have volcanoes, you have salt flats, you have thermal hot springs, you have all the stereotypical animals like flamingos, guanacos, alpacas and llamas, you have all the stereotypes of the Atacama in one place that isn’t San Pedro. This area sees far less tourism and could really use a bit more love.”

 

So, I know that you have stayed at some of the places that Vaya sends our clients. Which has been your favorite place to stay in luxury in San Pedro?

“I like Awasi and Explora for two different reasons. Awasi is great because it’s kind of secluded behind this little cliff wall, and they have their own observatory on site, and you’re a little bit outside of town, so you feel quite removed from whatever tiny hustle and bustle San Pedro has going on. By contrast, what I like about Explora is that you’re a little bit closer… you can walk into town if you want to. And I think that’s something that a lot of tourists staying at higher end properties in San Pedro can miss sometimes, is actually seeing downtown and historic architecture and getting to experience its charm.”

 

And just one last question, what are some of your favorite experiences that you have had in the Atacama?

“Some of my favorite experiences have been just resting in a thermal bath. There’s a lot of thermal baths all throughout the Atacama. Some of them are produced and architecturally beautiful, especially near San Pedro… but then there’s more remote ones that you can find yourself, in the middle of nowhere. Relaxing, floating in a hot thermal bath underneath a volcano! [Also], I think staring at flamingos never gets old. For me… flamingos are always kind of surprising, and they’re always so flamboyant and beautiful but they’re also such weird, weird creatures… they fascinate me. And other experiences, I think just stargazing… Looking up at the stars at night and learning how to see the stars in different ways, was really important and interesting to me in my travels! Because I learned how to see the stars from a scientific point of view when I was in Valle del Elqui. But then when I got closer to San Pedro, I got to see them from the Likan Antai perspective, from our indigenous ancestral perspective. Whereas the scientists are mostly looking at the bright parts of the sky, the Likan Antai are looking at the dark spots. So you can look at the sky in so many different ways, and it really opens your eyes to something that’s been there all the time that you’ve never really taken the time to look at before.”

 

Mars on Earth is out October 8th wherever you buy books.

Learn more about Mark here: https://markjohanson.com/author/markonthemap/

 

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