[thechat] the driest spot in the world

[javier velasco]

since i was a kid, i was told that the desert of Atacama, high in the
north of Chile, was the driest desert in the world.

later i started doubting the veracity of this fact but had no way of
knowing if it was real or not, and i considered in one of the classical
chillean 'ranking myths', like having the 3rd worst polluted air in our
capital, and that we are the country where people work the most hours
every month, 1st place in friuts, 2-3 in wine, etc.

this weekend i was zapping on my TV set, and caught a freaky englishman
placed in the north of chile on the national geographic channel - i get
very curious whenever i see foreign reports of my own country, i imagine
the same thing happens to most of you - so then i found out that this
guy had been searching for the driest place in the world, and now he had
been told that it was there in the desert of Atacama, in an old
abandoned mine called Maria Elena, but he needed proof.

There was no pluviometer in Maria Elena and therefore no records, so
they told him to go to Quillagua, a town near by. He was very impressed
to find out that quillagua is actually an osasis. After talking to
almost every person in the small town, the town major opened the book of
rain records. They all remebered it had rained in 1987, just in the same
days when Pinochet went to visit - town women said the rain came to
clean his trace away, hehe - the book of records was full of null marks,
for many pages. then he found another rain in 1940, and another in 1930.
Then he asked the major for documents from the govenrment to validate
these records, and became all cheerful by declaring Quillagua the driest
place in the world with an average of 0.53 mm of rainfall per year. next
he went to see the world's most inactive pluviometer, and kissed it, it
was very funny.

i don't know if this is interesting to any of you, but i thought i'd
just share...