After nearly three months in South America, I have finally gotten to a place where you can´t drink the water. As an avid anti-bottled water, Nalgene user, I find this to be very problematic.

This is not intended to be advice to others on where to drink the water, but I have been told that it is fine - and not gotten sick from it - everywhere I went in Argentina, Uruguay and central Chile. Having arrived in northern Chile, in one of the driest parts of the world, however, the water starts to have a really terrible taste and can often make travelers - and even locals - sick.

You can drink a little of it from the tap, and it´s not so problematic as to cause problems when brushing your teeth. I even tried boiling it before drinking it, but the flavor remained so strongly that I had to force it down my throat.

The flavor comes from the piping, I´ve been told, that is needed to bring the water from the mountains, from Argentina or from the center of Chile to this desert zone. What´s most befundling about these northern Chilean cities and towns near the Atacama Desert, the driest in the world, is not the quality of the water but that they have enough to survive at all. Today, there´s water piped to houses, and bottled water can easily be purchased. An older local man recently told me that only 20 or 30 years ago, however, water was brought to the most northern city of Arica only twice a week in trucks. Let me reiterate that there is no water here naturally; Arica is the driest city (population almost 200,000) in the world. How people survived here 200 years ago is even more surprising.

And a sidenote about Nalgenes, those unbreakable, thick plastic bottles that can be used for carrying hot or cold drinks. Almost every person from the US, and most of those from Canada, I´ve met traveling carries one. They´re certainly popular in the US, especially among a population likely to backpack around South America. For me, carrying a non-disposable water bottle is as important as sunblock.

And yet, I have met ONE person not from the US or Canada carrying one - and he found his on the ground while hiking. Most non-north Americans don´t seem to know what it is, and I´ve gotten many questions about what it´s for and why I bother carrying it. ¨Isn´t it heavy?¨ is one of the most common. And, yes, it is, when it has a liter of water in it. But that´s just more encouragement to drink water!