I am writing this from an airplane thousands of feet over the driest desert in the world. It is somewhere between Arica in the North of Chile and Santiago in the Center. The terrain is astonishing—miles and miles of nothingness. Somewhere on this trip, the mountains of sandstone will turn to mountains of some other kind of stone, and they will be covered in snow. And imagine that the same country, as far south from the center as I am now north, is covered in glaciers like Alaska.
Here's a picture of us in the desert around Arica.
In Arica, it never rains. I don’t know if it ever has in history. But today, I met a girl of 20 years old and she has never seen rain in her life.
