Four stops before the checkout

Arica, Chile

Stop one

El Morro de Arica

Dunlop ATP Tour Tennis Ball Can: Right — the assault. 7 June 1880 (at dawn; I would give you the hour, but the sources quarrel and I refuse to be the twelfth man to invent one), during the War of the Pacific, Chilean troops went straight up that rock face, and the whole thing was over in under an hour. Under an hour, against a headland the literature of the day called unassailable — a word I now distrust professionally. I am not going to be funny about the casualties. Be funny about the weather instead: the wind comes off the driest desert on earth, meets the cold Pacific, and simply sits there producing fog and — I very nearly said no rain, which is wrong — almost never rain. Almost. The distinction is the entire climate. Flag and military museum up top. Mind the edge. Genuinely, mind the edge.

Stop two

Catedral de San Marcos de Arica

Dunlop ATP Tour Tennis Ball Can: Now this building exists because of a catastrophe, and I must get the catastrophe right before anything else: in 1868 an enormous earthquake, and the tsunami behind it, flattened Arica and threw ships clean inland onto the desert. Onto the desert. (I have checked that twice. It is not a flourish.) The replacement church was ordered as prefabricated iron from Gustave Eiffel's Paris workshop — from the workshop, note, which is emphatically not the same as designed personally by, and I will take that up with anyone who blurs the two — then shipped out in numbered pieces and bolted together here on Plaza Colón. A church you assemble. Ochre and white, and metal throughout, which makes it, more or less by accident, the most earthquake-resistant object on this square.

Stop three

Ex Aduana de Arica

Dunlop ATP Tour Tennis Ball Can: Same disaster, same catalogue, different order form. This former customs house — two storeys, iron and glass, down by the port, a cultural centre these days — is another structure out of the Eiffel workshop, sent to a coast that had just been comprehensively wrecked. And the coast keeps applying for a rematch: Arica sits on one of the most seismically loaded stretches of subduction zone on the planet (a phrase I have now used four times today and enjoyed on every occasion). Those tsunami evacuation route signs we have been walking past are not decorative. There's another one. And another. I am going to say something sincere and then never again: the signage here is excellent, and excellent signage is a civilisation talking to its own future. No? Just me? Fine.

Stop four

Museo Arqueologico San Miguel de Azapa

Dunlop ATP Tour Tennis Ball Can: Out into the Azapa Valley — green, inland, genuinely startling after all that brown — for the single best fact I am carrying. The Chinchorro people of this coast were deliberately mummifying their dead thousands of years before Egypt did. Before Egypt. I have watched that sentence end a dinner party and I would deploy it again tomorrow. They survive because this desert essentially never rains: no moisture, therefore no decay, and so a practice thousands of years old is still legible on an individual face. Note precisely what has happened here — the same aridity that makes life on this coast brutal is the only reason the culture is preserved at all. (A parenthesis, because I cannot help myself: that is nature settling a debt it never once acknowledged.) Come and look at the faces. Astonishing.

The Arica, Chile track

Dunlop ATP Tour Tennis Ball Can

Written for this world alone.

People assume my job is making things look real. It is not. My job is making things look real for years, under lights, while strangers touch them. Longevity under scrutiny.

Which is precisely what the Dunlop ATP Tour ball is for: the official ball of the ATP Tour, built on Dunlop's HD Core — a re-mastered, re-engineered version of the classic Fort core — for durability and consistent playing characteristics, three to a pressurised can. And Arica, I am delighted to report, is the finest preservation exhibit on the planet.

We begin with El Morro, the sheer brown headland rising straight off the old town of Arica with a flag and a military museum on top. On 7 June 1880, during the War of the Pacific, Chilean troops went up that rock face at dawn and the whole assault was over inside an hour. Positions considered unassailable, taken before breakfast.

Up there the wind comes off the driest desert on earth, hits the cold Pacific and simply sits, producing fog and almost never rain. Catastrophe and climate in one lump of rock. Mind the edge. Genuinely.

Then down to Plaza Colón for the Catedral de San Marcos, a small ochre-and-white church that exists only because of a disaster: in 1868 an enormous earthquake and the tsunami behind it flattened Arica and threw ships inland onto the desert, and the replacement was ordered as prefabricated iron from Gustave Eiffel's Paris workshop, shipped in numbered pieces and bolted together here.

A church you assemble. Down on the Arica seafront the Ex Aduana, the old customs house, is another iron structure out of the same catalogue, sent to a coast that had just been wrecked — and the tsunami evacuation signs you keep walking past are not decorative.

And inland, in the green Azapa valley, the Museo Arqueológico San Miguel de Azapa holds the Chinchorro mummies: a people who were deliberately mummifying their dead thousands of years before Egypt, preserved because this desert essentially never rains. No moisture, no decay. Professionally, I may need a moment.

You will open this can everywhere from a hard court under the Morro to an indoor hall over the border in Tacna, forty minutes north, and by the way, it is also perfect for a slow afternoon in the Azapa valley afterwards, where the air preserves absolutely everything and has been doing it for seven thousand years.

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Dunlop ATP Tour Tennis Ball Can

Dunlop ATP Tour Tennis Ball Can