Road trip: hunting for old Minis in the Chilean desert

It was around 2am I first noticed the glowing crucifixes.

Whipping north along the Pan-American highway in the dead of night, somewhere deep in the Atacama, they came looming from the roadside black: eight foot high, luminous, lurid. Driving for 18 hours straight tends to do odd things to the brain, but glowing crosses were, I confess, a new one. Slowing in preparation to summon the Lord and recant my earthly sins, I realised with relief that the crosses weren't otherwordly apparitions, but rather the strangest of memorials: giant homemade crucifixes wrapped in reflective bike tape. Some say it with flowers...

Still, if the aim of the lumi-fixes is to remind night-time drivers of their own mortality, it sure as hell works. During the thousand miles we'd travelled north from the capital Santiago, I'd been trying to figure out how, exactly, quite so many motorists had apparently managed to meet their fate on Chilean highways. After all, there's not much in the way of plummeting drops or lethal, blind bends. Chile's roads tend very much towards the straight and featureless: even if you veered off the tarmac, you'd likely end up annoyingly sandy rather than wrapped round a lamp post. But in that utter desert darkness, amid the glowing crosses, the culprits became clear. Trucks. Lorries of varying vintage comprise the vast bulk of Chile's rural road traffic, chugging their way up gentle inclines at barely walking pace. Unless you want to arrive at your intended destination some decades behind schedule, eventually you have to overtake. And at this moment, every time, on even the apparently straightest of roads, another truck will rear up from behind an unseen dip in the landscape in the opposite direction, bearing down at unseemly speed, honking and flashing yet manifestly failing to slow down. Mistime a passing manoeuvre, and all that'll remain is your luminous crucifix.
 

Pictures: Mark Fagelson

This feature originally appeared in Top Gear magazine.

The Atacama requires a car fit for overtaking, and we had one: the new Mini Cooper S five-door. A fizzy little lump of turbo'd Britishness with, mercifully, a more than healthy turn of pace when you're attempting to thread a needle between two lorries with a closing speed of some 150mph. True, a gentrified little Brit hatch might seem an oddball choice for the Chilean wilds, but this little Cooper was to be the final piece in a strange, cross-continental story stretching back 50 years. This little Cooper was, in fact, on its way to meet its ancestors. Well, hopefully.

We were heading to the site of one the oddest chapters in British car-building history (and let's be honest: there have been more than a few). In the Sixties, in a bid to stimulate the growth of industry in Arica - a wild coastal outpost five days north of Santiago, tucked right up on the Peruvian border on the far side of a hostile expanse of desert - the Chilean government designated the town a free port, offering massive tax breaks to anyone willing to build cars there. So the Chileans called up the British Motor Corporation, which had been rolling in the profits of its ground-breaking, wildly successful Mini since 1959, and said, "Fancy building some Minis out here?" And BMC said, "Sure, why not? You've got plenty of steel, right?" And the Chileans said, "Ah, no. No steel in Arica, actually. But we could build 'em in fibreglass?"

Which they did. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this didn't prove the most successful business venture - not least because Arica was so far from Chile's major car markets that the cost of air-freighting down to Santiago for sale pretty much eradicated any profit margin, which is perhaps a salutary lesson in not building your car factory in the middle of the desert. In just over a decade of production, BMC built just a few thousand Minis in Arica (no one seems certain precisely how many), before quietly closing the factory doors in the early Seventies. It wasn't, however, a totally fruitless project. The fibreglass Minis were hailed for their rustproof bodywork - not that rust was much of an issue in a region with no rain or humidity - and happy tendency not to ding in the event of a minor parking scuff. Unfortunately the fibreglass bodies, in the words of one contemporary, had a tendency to "snap in half" in the event of a major accident. This may help to explain why those few Minis that sprung forth from the Arica factory were the only ones of the five million-odd ‘original' Minis to be made of fibreglass in that car's five-decade production history. Which makes them collectors' items, of a sort. Ambitious but rubbish. A very TopGear sort of limited edition.

Hence our mission to pilot a new (definitely not fibreglass) Mini from Santiago, 1,600 miles across the Atacama desert, to Arica and hunt down an original fibreglass Mini when we get there. A simple plan, with just a few flaws. One, the murderous trucks. Two, no one had any idea whether any Arica Minis still existed. And three, Chile's utter, extraordinary vastness.

Chile is big. Beyond Santiago's green valleys and into the Atacama, there's a town every hundred or so miles and, in between, a mighty expanse of literally nothing at all: sand, rock, mountain, more sand. If that makes the landscape sound dull, it isn't. Chile is, for almost all of its vast length (it covers 38 degrees of latitude, making it the longest north-south country on the planet) a masterwork of turn-it-up-to-11 geography: snow-capped volcanoes standing four miles tall; great salt pans of cracked-white crust; elegant, endless sandy dunes. It's mesmerising on the most primal of levels, savage serenity rendered in a prehistoric palette.

The sheer scale doesn't half mess with your sense of perspective. Even in daylight, the road north (yep, there's only one) is so long and devoid of reference point, the heat-haze on the road so disorienting, that you lose any comprehension of distance: how far you've gone, how far you have to go. The Mini shouldn't, by rights, be a good car for this sort of cross-country mission. The old three-door Cooper S was, though unquestionably entertaining, a scrabbly, hard-sprung hot hatch, a car for B-roads, not arid badlands. But the MkIII Mini - especially in five-door guise - exhibits a newfound and welcome maturity, the ability to absorb big miles rather than start a scrap with every inch of tarmac. And, thankfully, passable economy too. Gas stations don't come around too often out here. You top up your tank when you can.

And your water bottles. The Atacama is, with the arguable exception of Antarctica, the driest place on Earth. Parts haven't seen rain in half a millennium. It's uninhabitable, almost extraterrestrial. We crossed the aptly named Valley of the Moon, a psychedelic, purple-tinged Dali concoction of sand and stone upon which NASA tested its prototype Mars rovers. That pretty much sums up northern Chile. But Mars, so far as we know, boasts neither llamas nor flamingos. Chile has both.

For there were llamas and there were flamingos and, lo, they did not smell good. The next day, we stumbled across a dozen llamas (a herd? A flock? A panorama?) nibbling on salty, scrubby vegetation south of San Pedro de Atacama, two miles up on the arid altiplano, giant volcanos fringing the horizon, the breeze whipping dust high into the air. Parked downwind, it was apparent llamas do not take great pride in personal hygiene. Then again, if I were wearing a giant, fluffy coat in 35°C heat, I suspect I wouldn't smell too fragrant, either.

The biggest of the herd (rapidly christened ‘Dalai', naturally) tilted his head towards the Mini, offering a well-practised harrumph, before nudging his harem west across the pan. "Sure, you think you're quite the lads about town, with your ‘air-conditioning' and your ‘cruise control', don't you?" the harrumph seemed to say. "Well, you're not in Kensington any more. We've been here three million years, sonny, and we'll be here in three million more. On yer bike." Apparently, some people get strange visions at altitude. Glad I'm not one of them.

The flamingos seemed less dismissive of the Mini, craning their long necks our way for a few seconds before dunking their heads back into the cool blue water of their salt lagoon. Come to think of it, flamingos have a bit of the Mini about them, the tarty pink show-offs. They didn't, however, smell much fresher, clustering in a sulphurous lagoon with the odour of a long-haul jumbo cabin after a 12-hour flight. Flamingo eggs must be the eggiest eggs in the world.

The policeman who stopped us near the Bolivian border looked angry. Llama-angry. Big sunglasses, big gun, big moustache. He motioned us to lower the window. "Documentos," he barked, rapping the roof of the Mini with a hefty knuckle. I handed over the Mini's papers, and the cop leafed through them for a couple of minutes in stony silence, no doubt debating which of my cavities to search for prime Bolivian cocaine. He shook his head slowly and exhaled.

"Farzan. Few-rouse," he pronounced, solemnly."Farzan few-rouse?" I asked, presuming this to be Spanish for ‘drop the trousers, boyo, and make it snappy.' And then the cop's face broke out into a wide smile. "Farzan. Few-rouse!" he repeated, banging the Mini with a fist. "Farzan few-rouse!" It clicked. "Oh, Fast and Furious?" "Si!" he thumped the Mini's sunroof so hard, I expected his fist to go through. "Nice car. Vin Diesel! Fast and Furious!"

Beyond the ubiquitous trucks, the Chilean desert tends towards the pickup and wagon end of the automotive spectrum, a sprawl of old Toyotas and Nissans addended by modern Chinese fare of dubious styling. Amid such practicality, a Mini bedecked in the full range of go-faster bits - chin spoiler, fat alloys, the works - looks indeed like something from a Hollywood car chase.

We knew the Dakar rally caravan was somewhere in the vicinity, running north across the desert from Antofagasta to Iquique. But ‘somewhere in the vicinity' in Chilean terms might well mean 200 miles away from the road, the other side of a significant mountain range. So it came as something of a surprise when, pulled over at the roadside in the deepest nowhere, we were passed by a Mini Dakar Countryman, Chilean flag across its bonnet, chuntering along the highway between stages. We gave chase - Dakar competitors are limited to 120kph on public roads, or we'd never have stood a chance - and finally caught the hulking racer on a particularly wild stretch of road. The driver and navigator returned a massive thumbs-up, treating us to a friendly game of cat and mouse until the carabineros waved them from the road and onto another arduous desert stage. Boris Galafulić and Filipe Palmeiro, thanks for being such utter gents, and letting us get a few photos. And only slightly running us off the road.

How do you go about finding an old car that might or might not exist, in a city on the edge of a desert in the middle of nowhere? In the five days and 1,600 miles it took us to reach Arica, I'd got no closer to figuring out how we might hunt down an original fibreglass Mini. There's no Arica Mini owners club, and even BMW's own spies in Chile had failed to locate an Arica-built car, or even ascertain if any survive. Scientific coves that we are, we started by simply trawling back and forth through the town's residential districts, where it soon became apparent that Arica has an awful lot of streets, and that attempting a toothcomb search would result in a) full madness and b) likely a lynching at the hands of suspicious locals. Knowing the old Mini's reputation for mechanical fortitude, we switched our focus to local scrapyards, where it soon became apparent that Arica has a lot of scrapyards, and that attempting a toothcomb search would result in a) tetanus and b) being devoured by the socking great birds of prey wheeling above.

Short on leads, we aimed for the location of the original Mini factory, a block somewhere in the old industrial area by the seafront. This was, surely, the oddest spot on the planet ever to have hosted Mini production. Perhaps the oddest spot to have hosted car production of any kind. A few laps of said block revealed no Mini-ish clues of any kind, so we resorted to knocking on every door, asking if anyone remembered the old factory, or happened to have spotted an old Mini recently. The first five guys we spoke to looked at us as if we'd asked to borrow their youngest daughters for a spot of jelly-wrestling, but the sixth threw us a dusty bone.

Sure, he said, the Mini factory was just there, behind that wall. But if you want to find one of the old cars, you'd best talk to this guy who lives out of town and has a lock-up of old cars; maybe he'll know. So we went tearing out of town to, eventually, a chain-link compound packed with weird old metal - a Fifties Studebaker, a '42 Chevrolet, a pair of inter-war Fords, even a BMW Isetta. But no Arica Mini. No Mini of any kind. Sixteen hundred miles of desert on a wild, extinct goose chase. Time to concede defeat.

"So you're looking for a Mini?" A tanned gent with an American accent emerged from a barn across the road. Word gets around quickly in Arica, it seems. "Neighbour's got one in his workshop. It's not in... mint condition, I'm afraid. Follow me..."

The gent - a Chilean-Canadian petrolhead named Pier, it transpired - hopped on a motorbike and went screaming off up the road. We scrambled after him, up a mountainside track and came to a slithering halt on a farm overlooking Arica. And there, under a dusty lean-to, it was: an original Mini, unmistakably fibreglass, unmistakably in a state of some disrepair. In fact, in a state well west of disrepair and rather closer to ‘non-existent'. No interior to speak of, caked in at least a decade of greyish desert grime and cobwebs. But, no question, an Arica Mini, its baby-blue fibreglass body as solid and, of course, rust-free as the day it left the factory just a few miles down the road. A suitably lo-fi memento of a strange little chapter in car-building history.

Gazing upon the old Mini's tiny, grimy form, two thoughts occur. One: what an extraordinary, timeless piece of design the original Mini was. Two: I really, really wouldn't want to drive one 1,600 miles across the Chilean desert.

True, the new Mini may not boast the elegant simplicity of its forebear, but consider this. This small, posh British car - a car designed for the boroughs of north London rather than the badlands of north Chile - saw us across some of the wildest landscape on Earth, tackled gravel roads and dirt tracks and sand trails without incident. OK, a Defender or a Hilux may have coped with the roughest stuff a little less shakily, but neither would have been half so adept at vanquishing trucks on the highway.

In recent years, BMW has been at risk of undoing all its good early work with Mini, the Countryman, Paceman, Roadster and Coupe hardly bolstering the cachet of the badge. But this five-door is, at last, a truly worthy addition to the Mini stable. It drives as sweetly as the three-door, there's room on board for a whole bunch of camera equipment and the odd dusty hitch-hiker, and, best of all, it almost definitely won't snap in half in event of an accident. An export of which Britain can be properly proud, it's a cracker.

As is Chile itself. What a country: stupefying of scenery, friendly of people, gloriously deserted in every sense. It offers road-tripping at its purest: the freedom to drive to the very edge of civilisation and, should you so desire, beyond. If you do, remember this: pack plenty of water, top up at every fuel station and stay upwind of the llamas.

TopGear would like to thank: Fito Santa Maria at chilebackcountry.com, Rodrigo Vega, Pier Lombardi and Ernesto Lopez.