Late at night of the evening after leaving Iquique the lights of two towns close together were visible on shore. These were Junin and Pisagua, the last mentioned being a few miles north of its neighbor. Pisagua is a nitrate port with 4089 inhabitants. Bubonic plague was formerly so bad there that the town had to be burned down twice.
CHAPTER XIII
ARICA TO ILO OVERLAND, VIA TACNA, TARATA, AND MOQUEGUA
Arica is seven hours north of Pisagua. Its population is 4886. It is the pleasantest port on the rainless coast for in its neighborhood is verdure due to irrigation from the Lluta River. It looks nice from the steamer's deck, which appearance is not belied by a visit to the lower town. The upper town, which extends to the desert, is a compactly built place of low buildings, but is far superior to the other coast towns of its size. In the lower town are the banks, shipping offices, and government buildings. Its streets are bordered with pepper trees and it has two cool and pleasant plazas in one of which the Italian residents have erected a bust to Columbus. Arica is the port of the provincial capital, Tacna, but its present importance is due to the opening in 1913 of a railroad to La Paz, Bolivia, of which city it is also a port. A traveler is carried to the Bolivian metropolis in twenty-four hours over a pass thirteen thousand feet high.
One of the first things that I did when I arrived in Arica was to go to the steamship office to find out about the sailings of the ships on the Chilean Line and of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company. The agent for both these lines was the American consul, a man whose name I believe was Smith. As I was waiting for information, Smith himself appeared and he was in an ugly mood. He was a thin blonde man about fifty years old, bespectacled, and had red blotches on his face which showed that he was a heavy drinker. In fact he stunk of liquor. He was an Englishman and was acting as representative for the United States.
Custom House, Arica
This building was designed and built by Eiffel, who built the tower named after him in Paris.
