JOEL GRIFFETT

Pre-order ‘Long Road to Nowhere: The Lost Years of Richard Trevithick (Part One)’ now, HERE.

I don’t know how I managed it but I did. Halfway round the world, as far from Makkah as possible and here I was on a Saturday afternoon sat outside an Egyptian’s shop with Nelson drinking thick black coffee flavoured with cardamom. The three of us perched in tiny plastic chairs and passers by looked mildly confused by this ragtag band of men. Me the much younger white boy, Nelson the local, and the shop owner dressed in his long flowing robe and cap. Whenever someone strolled into the shop, he reluctantly stood up, walked past the speaker that stood against the door and turned down the sonorous wail of the Islamic singing for a brief moment until money had changed hands. He then walked back turned it up and slumped back in his chair to roll a cigarette. In the 3 hours I lounged there business seemed steady and I was pleasantly surprised

The humid early afternoon felt oddly symbolic. For many years I’ve been an extremely interested onlooker into the Islamic faith but not once did I think that here in South America, where the Islamic presence is almost non-existent, that I’d be passing time in the company of a Muslim. If anything was a sign that Allah had a place somewhere in my heart, it was this chance encounter. The only religion that has ever truly interested me was always right behind me wherever I went.

Allah in Antofagasta

I have Nelson to thank once more for this encounter. We were walking back into the city after the last futile attempt to find a museum that was open late on a Friday afternoon. We crossed the road and up ahead was a man shutting up his shop for the day.
“El árabe,” Nelson said, pointing ahead.
“Hm?” I responded, my mind elsewhere. But before he’d heard me he’d already walked ahead and shook hands with the man. He introduced himself to me with an outstretched hand as Ahmed, a name I forgot immediately until I asked him again the day after. Ahmed ushered us into his shop and the two spoke at length while I perused the selection of goods available, wandering whether they were authentic. Even if they weren’t who would know the difference here? For all I knew he could just be a man of Spanish descent masquerading as an Arab, not beyond the realm of possibility given the close links between the Arab world and Spain.
All the while, Ahmed noticed my silence.
“He doesn’t speak Spanish?” he asked Nelson, glancing in my direction.
“Un poco,” he said on my behalf.
“Un poquito,” I added, ensuring he didn’t expect much of my ability.
“If you speak slowly, he understands,” Nelson continued.
As Ahmed continued pottering a small bald man emerged from the cupboard sized toilet in the corner and starting shouting at nothing in particular. Ahmed shouted back, telling him to be quiet before pointing at me, “Inglés,”
The man switched to English and his American accent shone through, “English huh? First time here?” he asked me,
I nodded.
“How long you been here now?”
“About 7 weeks,”
“And how are you finding it?” he inquired. Good question, I thought, how was I finding it?
“It’s all a bit confusing to be honest. Nothing really makes sense to me yet. Chileans talk fast but walk slow.”
I had to repeat myself a few times because in my experience, Americans can’t seem to understand me, ironically because I speak fast myself while also mumbling a lot. Once he’d understood me, he looked at me thoughtfully, as if comparing his own experience.
“Bunch of fuckin’ retards,” he eventually exclaimed.
“Who?” I asked.
“All of them. Mentally retarded,” he continued. I didn’t reply, I knew this was just the beginning.
“You know some days I just wake up and wish that I was on the plane back to California. No one here has any common sense”
California…common sense…not that I was aware of
“And California is a sensible place?” I scoffed.
“More than here,” he insisted. Maybe he was right. He probably wasn’t from LA; he didn’t have access to Illuminati level skin cream nor was he a guilty white liberal – he looked like some kind of Latino, with dark eyes hidden behind the transition lenses of his glasses.
Ahmed decided he’d had enough of this English language complaints hotline and ushered everyone back out of the shop, carrying a huge metal bar out to slide across the double doors and padlocking both ends. He told us to come back tomorrow and he would prepare some coffee for us. Real coffee, he assured us, nothing milky and weak. I accepted the offer enthusiastically and bade him farewell. I watched the old man hop into a clapped out Fiat that was wedged between two pickup trucks and debated watching him trying and manouvre out of this space but instead Nelson and I headed for the Central Market to eat. We agreed to meet at Ahmed’s shop at midday tomorrow.

The Arab of Antofagasta

I arrived first on Saturday morning and had many questions to ask the Arab of Antofagasta. He had arrived in December 2014 and managed to keep his wife satisfied from afar: he had a child on the way somehow, even though she was back in Egypt. Strong swimmers. He was one of only two Arabs in the city but despite this there was a humble mosque further north, a small building owing to the precious few followers of the faith this far from home.  

As Ahmed spoke about his faith and his homeland after Nelson sat down, it became apparent how little South Americans knew of Islam but this was unsurprising given how far removed they are from it’s influence.

“The American arrived again in a cloud of cigarette smoke and distaste for the country he was living in.
Look at this,” he said when he arrived, “living like a local, you lazy fuck,”
“When in Egypt…”
“That’s all they do there, and here” he complained, sitting down to join us in this venture. Clearly it didn’t count if he did it.
“Isn’t that your Western mindset,” I teased.
“Huh?”
“The devil makes work for idle hands,” I said, almost quoting Morrissey.
He stared at me for a moment and then looked away lamenting this silly Englishman and his ideas, before lighting another Pall Mall cigarette.
Between yesterday and the present moment he had learnt of my intentions and we had a very similar conversation where he reiterated his opinions of Chile.
“A collection of mentally retarded men” he declared. He laughed to himself, “put that in your fucking book!”
“Well I wouldn’t want to needlessly offend anyone,” I replied, “I am a guest after all,”
“Pah, fuck ‘em. They don’t feed ya,”
Sometimes they do, when I go out to eat.
At some point during the idling I’m pretty sure he threatened to beat the shit out of Ahmed. I didn’t catch why but he switched to English when he said “don’t fuck with me, I may be an old man but I’m dangerous.”

For an incredibly jaded man he was surprisingly nice to me. He didn’t once threaten to break me and even bought me a ‘soda’ when I stood up to leave.

I went inside to piss but Ahmed stopped me before I closed the door. He pointed at my bag, which I had naively left on the floor by my chair, thinking it was safe given Nelson and Eugenio both sat there.
“Are there valuable things in your bag?” he asked sternly.
“A few” I said.
“Don’t leave your bag there, bring it with you. There are thieves everywhere,”
I nodded. Wise move, and naïve of me to think otherwise. I soon realised my wallet was in there, not in my pocket. Very wise move.

Hicks, Harvey and the Ruins of Huanchaca

After far too much coffee and the impending threat of violence from Eugenio, I decided it was time to visit the ruins of Huanchaca and the museum, the only thing open at the weekend related to the mining trade. I said farewell to Eugenio and Ahmed, the latter telling me to just ask if I needed anything during my time here, that unerring Muslim hospitality still burning bright so far from home.

I paid the entrance fee of 2,000 pesos (£2ish) and entered the museum. After three hours speaking Spanish my brain was already fried and now I was accosted with endless text about the nitrate industry, packed to the brim with technical words that were both useless and useful to me, none of which I remember. A grand timeline from the beginning of the nitrate industry in the 18^th century to the present day spanned the far wall. Curious to see if Hicks got a mention I walked over to the left hand side and slowly shuffled along.

Trevithick wasn’t even on my mind but here I was once more, face to face with disrespect for the big man. Obviously, the history of steam and mining are interlinked but given my callous disinterest towards the inner workings of the subject matter upon which I am basing my own project I often forget this, so it was a nice surprise for there to be absolutely no mention of Trevithick.
The two that got a mention were of course James Watt’s 1782 invention and George Stephenson’s developments of 1825 that blew everything else out of the water. Trevithick wasn’t the first to make a steam engine, but his experiments with high-pressure steam made Watt’s pathetic machines look medieval and he did create the first locomotive. In that 43-year gap, isn’t it odd that no other improvements or innovations were introduced, going from weak to incredibly powerful in just two steps without any intermediary. Similarly, my friend sent me a podcast on the birth of the railways, purely because Trevithick’s work was equally disrespected. I listened to it in anticipation but they barely even mentioned Trevithick except to dismiss his steam engines as mere ‘novelty’ that were akin to fairground rides rather than engines to pull cargo. Big disrespect for a big man who was too far ahead of his time.

I had come here in the hope of finding Hicks but instead as I sat down in the museum café with my notebook I felt personally offended by the Trevithick disrespect. Even on this extended Chilean zigzag I am undertaking in search of other fascinating Cornish stories, I still can’t escape the fact that Trevithick is cruelly ignored by historians all over the world. His presence is unescapable even if his influence is understated. Every train, every railway, every abandoned carriage and derelict station can be traced back to his racket sized Cornish hands, hence why I’ve become a trainspotter; all these relics of the mighty railway boom and subsequent bust would’ve been, at the very least, delayed without his early 19^th locomotives.

All was not lost, one other name appeared in the museum, one I was also vaguely acquainted with: Robert Harvey. Not as interesting as Hicks or Trevithick but worth a mention nevertheless. Working in the nitrate industry, further north in Iquique, then in Peru, he had the misfortune of being arrested and imprisoned by the Chileans at the beginning War of the Pacific in 1879 in a classic case of ‘wrong place, wrong time.’ He was held captive by Chile at Iquique until it became plainly obvious that he was an expert on nitrates and in the newly acquired Chilean province of Tarapacá, his skills were vital to the continued prosperity of the industry. After marrying a local girl, he was appointed Inspector General of Salitres by the Chilean government, a big honour for a foreigner, who despite being a well respected figure, was known to the Chileans as ‘El Gringo Colorado’ (The Red Gringo). Just like Hicks and unlike Trevithick, he returned home handsomely rich and retired into the countryside.

Walking back in the town once more, I looked up at the Martian red hills that rise so steeply a mere one or two kilometres inland from the coast. It is these hills that dictate the odd shape of Antofagasta, long and thin just like Chile and here for the first time I saw something I’d read about before but had completely forgotten about until now.

At the very top of the hill overlooking the port, there was a giant white anchor set upside down into the cliff. Who ordered its construction in 1868? None other than your man George Hicks…

If you liked this article please like, share, comment and follow so you never miss a post! the zigzag method has been taken to new extremes – a new country I hadn’t even planned on visiting…