What would you say if your parents, or your aunts or uncles or your teacher or any other adult spat on your hands?  Yuk!  That’s what I’d say.  But we’ve been to see a special place where the walls are covered with painting of hands created by people spitting on their own hands and the hands of their children.

Archaeologists are modern people who study the lives of ancient people by looking at the paintings they did, the tools they used and the places they lived.  Thanks to the archaeologists we know that these rocks covered with pictures of hands were created by people who lived in this area between 9,000 and 1,300 years ago. 

These ancient peoples slept in caves where they had fires for cooking.  They mainly hunted an animal called a Guanaco.  The Guanaco is a member of the camel family and if you look at it closely you can see it looks a bit like a camel.  Like camels they are curious creatures.  Except the Guanaco is much smaller, about half the size of a camel.  When the people caught a Guanaco they used almost all the animal, they did not waste anything.  They used the meat for food, the skins for clothing and blankets to keep warm.  They even used the tendons from the backs of the legs of the Guanaco to make weapons to hunt more animals.

Like a lot of ancient peoples they painted lots of scenes on the walls of the caves where they lived.  Some of these are of Guanaco and hunting scenes.  But the thing that really makes these people famous is the hands.  Sometimes they drew hands, using their fingers to spread the dye on the wall.  The colours of the dyes mostly came from the minerals in the rocks around them.  Often they created a ‘negative’ picture of their hands by filling their mouths with the dry dusty dye, mixing it with the saliva in their mouths and then spitting it out around the edges of their hands.  Lots of the hands are big hands – adult hands.  But there are quite a few very small children’s hands too.  These were probably done by adults spitting on their children’s hands.

What do you think of that then?

They are called antipodal points.

We visited the first one in northern Mongolia near the beginning of our adventure.

Well, today, we visited the second one in southern Chile.

World globe

Did you read our other blog when we talked about the difference between the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere? The world is round and when you look at a globe (a big ball that shows all the countries of the world) Mongolia is in the top half – the northern hemisphere – and Chile is in the bottom half – the southern hemisphere.

Here’s what our two antipodal points look like on the map. Chile is the map on the left. Mongolia is the map on the right.

Here is Chile on the left and Mongolia on the right again.  Now you can see the two roads where they cross.

sheep shearing in Chile from Going Overland (KidSpace) on Vimeo.

Some facts:

Almost all sheep have WOOL not hair (some special breeds have hair but not many)

The cutting of the wool is called SHEARING

The wool that has been cut off each sheep is called a FLEECE

After shearing the fleece is cleaned, spun into woollen yarn and can made into things like clothes, blankets and carpets

Sheep are normally SHEARED in Spring when the weather is warm, but the sheep in the video are being sheared in autumn.  That’s why the young ones have not been sheared.  It will be harder on them with the winter if their wool coats are too short.

After the sheep have been sheared they are said to have been SHORN - that is where Sean the Sheep got his name from.  Shorn and Sean sound the same.

Then I realised. Normally there is a snowdrop in my garden in February but I’ve not seen any snowdrops here. There aren’t any signs of daffodil leaves in the parks. In fact there are no signs of Spring at all!

Blackberries ripening on the bush at the end of summer in Chile in February.

Instead I’ve been eating fresh raspberries picked from the raspberry bush next to my tent. And I’ve been eating apples and plums picked straight from the trees. The blackberries are nearly ripe. Soon I’ll be eating them too. These are all fruits that are ready to eat in late summer.

And here’s another sign: leaves are dropping from the trees as the trees prepare for winter.

Here the children have not yet started looking forward to their next holiday at Easter. First they are getting ready to back to school after their long summer holidays!

How can it be the end of summer and the beginning of autumn in February?

World Globe. You can see South America here. South America is in the bottom half of the globe, called the southern hemisphere.

I am in Chile in South America.  South America is in the southern half of the world – called the southern hemisphere.  And in the southern hemisphere the seasons are opposite to the northern half of the world, the northern hemisphere. You might have seen a world globe at school: see how most countries are opposite another country.You might not have recognised picking and eating fresh apples and blackberries straight from the tree or bush is a sign of the end of summer. That is because we can buy fresh apples, plums and blackberries in our shops in winter. The reason we can do that is because they have been grown in another part of the world where it is summer. Then they are picked and quickly flown to us for us to buy and eat even when it is winter where we are.

What other fruits and vegetables can you think of that might be grown somewhere else and flown to you so you can eat them all year round?

We’ve been to see an amazing place today.  Here in Chile we are close to lots of volcanoes (remember we talked about them before?).  Very very deep under the ground it gets very very hot.  Too hot for us to even imagine!  600 degrees centigrade in some places!!  That’s very very deep though.  It’s not that hot nearer the surface so don’t worry about burning your toes.

Sometimes that very hot ground comes to the surface and bursts out in volcanoes.  But sometimes, in places where there are lots of volcanoes, very hot water comes out of the earth in what are called “hot springs”.  Another name is “fumaroles”.

We hiked up a steep mountainside, through lots of forest.  Eventually we reached the top and found the hot springs.  We could see the water bubbling up out of the ground, making small pools of hot water.  We paddled in some of the pools.  Then we got some mud out of the bottom of the pool and painted our faces!

The Atacama Desert is HUGE! from Going Overland (KidSpace) on Vimeo.

Do you think of scary sounds in the night?  Do you think of white sheets floating through houses and scaring the people there?

Well, we’ve been to a different type of ghost town.  One where people used to live many years ago.  Now all the houses and shops are empty.  Nobody lives there.  Very few people visit these towns.

We’ve also been to a ghost mine and followed the track of a ghost railway line.

Can you find Salta in Argentina and Antofagasta in Chile. The red line shows where the railway used to run between the two towns.

Way back in 1921 the people of Argentina and Chile started building a railway line.  It ran all the way from Salta in Argentina to Antofagasta in Chile.  It crossed a big line of mountains called the Andes.

The people finally finished building the railway in 1948. Can you imagine it taking 27 years to build a railway line?  A lot of things can happen in 27 years.  Do you know anyone who is 27 years old (an older brother or sister, or a parent, or an aunt or an uncle, or even one your teachers maybe)?  Ask them if they can remember some of the things that have happened to them in 27 years.

Not many trains carried people travelled along the railway.  The railway was used mainly for carrying freight. That means it carried lots of goods used in industry.  The most common goods it carried was for the mining industry.

We think the railway line was used for about 50 years. That doesn’t seem very long does it? Lots of things can change in 50 years.

We stopped to see two of the old towns that people used to live in alongside the railway line.

Paul is pretending to use the old machinery at abandoned town of Laguna Seca.

One was a tiny town with only 16 houses in it.  The town was built to provide a stopping point for the trains. There the trains could get water and repairs done there.  There were lots of towns along the way but the one we stopped at is called Laguna Seca. That means “dry lake”.

Here are the remains of the houses at Laguna Seca. It was a tiny town wasn't it?

Is there a railway station in your town?  Do trains still travel on the track there?

A bit further on we stopped at another town.  This one was called Tolar Grande.  It too used to be a railway town.  Now all the old railway buildings are broken down because they are not used any more.  But this town was not a ghost town.  There were people living and working there.  And we stopped to buy some cold drinks and some food to eat.

Can you find Mina la Casualidad on this map?

Along the railway line there used to be a big mine.  The miners took sulphur out of the ground.  Mostly the sulphur was used in agriculture (that’s farming).  But by 1992 the mine was not making enough money so it closed.

We went to see the old mine.  Right up close to the old mine was the town where the miners and their families lived.  At one time as many as 3,000 people lived in the town.  The men worked in the mine and lived there with their families.

We could see where there were all the usual things you might find in a town. Things like running water in the kitchens and bathrooms, and sewers to take all the waste away.  We saw an old abandoned church on top of the hill.  It overlooked the mine and the houses.  We went in the old community centre.  There people would have parties and celebrations. Sometimes visiting mine officials would stay and sleep in the special rooms set aside for visitors.  And there was a school for the children.

Most of the houses were built up on a hill but right down near the road that ran next to the mine were some more buildings.  These looked like old shops.

Here we are arriving at the abandoned mine called Mina la Casualidad.

Can you see the old houses in the front of this picture? What about the remains of the old mine in the distance?

Even these modern homes now stand empty.

The Atacama Desert is the driest place in the world.  The average rainfall in the Chilean part of the desert is 1mm per year.  There are some weather stations that have not recorded any rain at all.  It is so dry that even mountains as high as 6,885 metres don’t have any glaciers.  British scientists think that there were some rivers here 120,000 years ago.

In some places the soil of the Atacama Desert has been compared to the planet Mars.  Because of this film makers have used the Atacama Desert for filming Mars scenes (eg Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets).  In fact it’s not just how it looks that makes the Atacama Desert like Mars.  Just like Mars scientists have not been able to find any microbial life in the soil.  Scientists from NASA use the Atacama Desert to test the instruments they will put in the spaceships they plan to send to Mars in the future.

You would think that without any water and with such a dry soil people would not be able to live in the Atacama Desert.  But a very few have managed to live here.  The Atacemeno tribe have lived here for a long time.  We know the Spanish lived in San Pedro de Atacama since 1577 because they build the church here then.

People have also been finding precious minerals in the ground and

In the last hundred years there has been lots of mining done here.  People have been digging for copper, nitrate and other important minerals.  Small towns grew up around the mines but the people left the towns when the mines closed.  There are about 170 abandoned nitrate mining towns in the Atacama Desert.

Information taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert

We use maps printed on paper when we are driving.  It’s a bit old fashioned but we like it because we lay the map out on the floor and see where everything is in the country much more easily this way.

Maps of all different parts of the world can be seen on a website called Google Maps.  You can probably even see your house the maps are so detailed.

But how did we get maps in the first place?

Right now we are travelling in Chile in South America.  We are using modern paper maps but in the early 1800′s it took Alexander von Humboldt five years to prepare the maps of South America.

With two modern satellites it takes just three years to make a map of the whole world.

The satellites are called TanDem-X and TerraSAR-X.  They orbit the earth at a height of 319 miles.  That’s about the same distance as it is from London to Liverpool!!  Despite being so far away from the earth they can see reall good detail and scientists are using the data from the satellites to make a 3D map of the earth.

Over three years the two satellites will send 1,572,863 gigabytes of data.  That’s really hard to imagine.  If you were to put all that data on to DVD’s you would have so many DVDs that if you put them one on top of each other the pile would be 430 metres high!!

But there’s some other fantastic stuff here in Bolivia.

There are so many minerals in the soil that they turn the lakes different colours.  One is red and another is green.  All because of the minerals.  Hardly anybody lives here.  With all those minerals and salt the water is not very nice to drink and not even very good for you.

One night we parked and camped right next to ‘Red Lake’.  Look closely – those little dots are flamingoes.  They are a long way away from us though.