It has been a long day full of sitting in planes, airports, baggage claim areas and immigration lines. Our travel took us through 7 airports over a period of 36 hours before we reached Antofagasta. We will be traveling by car or van the rest of the way to our expedition site in Bolivia. I created some updates to this document as our day progressed while sitting in planes, airports and edited the final version at our hotel in Antofagasta. We have great Internet bandwidth at our Antofagasta hotel and so this update will contain a lot more imagery than usual. Once we are in the field, we will be sending these updates through a lower bandwidth satellite phone.

The Day Starts



The majority of the expedition team started their journey in San Jose, California and then grouped up with the rest of the team at Los Angeles International Airport [LAX] at 1PM on October 20 to embark on our journey to Bolivia.

As I write this note we are deep into our flight from Los Angeles and headed for brief stop in Lima Peru. From there we will fly to Santiago Chile. From Santiago we will then fly to Antofagasta Chile and then go by land to La Paz in Bolivia.

This flight spans close to 6,000 miles, and takes us across the equator and into South America.



Afternoon

Our flight was diverted due to fog at our intended Santiago destination. We landed at another airport at a town called Conception, refueled and then landed in Santiago later in the day at 9:30 AM local time. During this leg of our journey, immigration into Chile was very time consuming but fortunately none of our baggage was misplaced!



Early Evening

We are now in the last leg of our flight to Antofagasta Chile. Rob and Clay are playing some kind of dice game that works well on airplane flights and also apparently works as a spectator sport! Later Andy is sleeping and the rest off the team are out of site in other parts of the plane. We note that the further we get from the U.S. and deeper into South America, the more plentiful the airplane food is and is of higher quality! Though it is still airplane food, it is more plentiful than our flights in the United States.

We also notice that that the towns are getting smaller and the airstrips are getting rougher during this leg of our journey.



[Video: "In-flight Entertainment"]

Landing



We started cruising in low over the desert and then had a quick landing at a small Chilean town (Conception) to pick up and let off passengers. At this point we are really starting to feel the impact of the beautiful starkness of the desert features. For me personally, I have been staring at this desert for years without ever having been here while we were developing the telepresence interface for the Zoë rover. A lot of the desert was communicated through that interface, but I am starting to get impressions that I did not get through the interface. The biggest one is that our interface did not focus on people [it was designed to visualize terrain and microbial organisms], but now I look out the window from the air and from our brief stop at the airport. I see glimpses of people and the structures that they build.



The purpose of our trip to Bolivia and the rover project in Chile is to study the kind of life that lives in extreme environments. However, from the perspective of the plane I remember that life survives in extreme environments at multiple scales, from the human and all the way down to the microbial. I see ports at key junctures between the ocean and the land. I see villages tucked into valleys and places where there might be natural resources that human society needs to survive [in contrast to microbial]. But mainly what I see is open space and desert. Why human life exists in one place and not in others probably says a lot about life at the human or microbial scale.







Immediately after landing we headed through the airport and met Cristian who has arranged much of the logistics in Bolivia. Cristian is chief of logistics and has been working with Nathalie for several years by arranging local logistics and going with her on expeditions. He had a van waiting for us and we quickly loaded our gear into the van and headed to our hotel.

[Video: In the Van]

Education Meeting

Later after we landed at the hotel, I met Nathalie and Edmond to discuss this Education and Public outreach update that you are reading right now. Andy showed up with some additional imagery and joined the discussion. Rob and Clay are recharging in the lounge across the room.

We talked about why life that survives in a desert is so interesting. Could desert life be interesting to us because it survives with only the bare essential ingredients for life? Perhaps abundance distracts from our study of essential elements?

Nathalie and Edmond talked about phenomena that one can observe in the Southern Hemisphere that can't be seen in the north (such as two galaxies Magellanic Clouds) that are easily observed here.

Right now it is 6:46 AM local time on October 22 as I edit this update from our hotel. I hear waves crashing outside and a truck pass by every now and then.

These are all first impressions: I love the landscape, and I wandered around town last night for a bit with some other team members. I saw late night restaurants and mopeds. Earlier today there was more espresso around than coffee. I see plenty of late night buses and cabs. So far, Chile has a European feel to it.

Today we will have a team meeting/breakfast at 8:30 AM and will then head out into the town to get food and other supplies.

Quote of the day:

"If I had to choose between good runways and good airplane food, I would choose the food."