Northern Chile

Soon after completing our mountain mission, it was finally time to move on from Bolivia, and into Chile. We took a bus all the way from La Paz down to the coastal town of Arica, where we spent a night in the grimmest and dirtiest guesthouse I have ever stepped into! Our neighbour spent a good hour as we were trying to get to sleep making so much noise that the only thing I could imagine he was doing was breaking up all the furniture in his room! However, the town was pretty, and even boasts a church designed by Gustave Eiffel and constructed in separate units in his Paris studio, before being sent out to be assembled in situ. It was lovely to be by the sea again, and the weather was certainly much milder than in La Paz! The sea itself was wild, and we spent the afternoon walking down the beaches watching the waves crash against the rocks.

That evening, we took a short five hour bus ride down to the larger town of Iquique, which also sits along the sea. The waves here were even bigger, and we were informed that surfers were even being fined for attempting to go in the water as the coast guard considered it too dangerous. It was incredible to watch those brave or stupid enough to head out though!

Iquique is home to a duty free mall, and we were excited at the prospect of finding some cheap electronics. Disappointingly however, the prices seemed the same if not inflated from those at home! We also visited the abandoned nitrate processing plant and associated village in the desert just outside Iquique, called Humberstone. It was an eerie place, filled with huge empty warehouses and some of the old machinery, including several steam engines. Surrounding the factory was an entire small town, where the workers and their families lived. There were two schools, two squares, quite a large hotel and a swimming pool, so it had been no small village. It was very interesting to see the different types of dwellings for the overseers and the workers, which you could still see furnished as they would have been. 

From Iquique, we headed to one of Chile's most important tourist destination: San Pedro de Atacama, in the middle of the Atacama desert. The town itself is small and rather uninteresting, built to cater solely for tourists. We found a quaint residencial run by a French lady and her Chilean partner, who is a musician. The house was constantly filled with music, with the whole family and friends practicing and performing all through the day and night. It was lovely to stay in a less faceless and emotionless place than a lot of the hostels we pass through. 

There are countless travel agents in San Pedro which run many tours in the surrounding area. Our first outing consisted of hiring some bikes and cycling throug the Valle de la Luna (the Valley of the Moon), so named for the moon like appearance of the landscape produced by the solidification of the sand in strange structures, and covered by a dusting of salt. We stopped off at various view points through the park, and even went through a few caves under the sand. At sunset, we walked up to the top of a dune for an amazing view over the while area. The only flaw in this plan was the lack of lights on our bikes for the hour long cycle back to the town, but thankfully we made it back alive! 

The second tour we took was to the SPACE observatory that very evening, where an excellent astronomer guide gave us a talk on astronomy in general and specifically the sky you see in the Southern Hemisphere. We even had a chance to look through the teb telescopes they had set up, and saw some incredible sights such as clusters of stars which shone like gems in different colours, and a pair of stars orbiting around a point together. The best of all however was a perfect view of Saturn, complete with its ring. It was so clear, it simply looked like a cartoon drawing! To round off the night, we sat around wrapped up in blankets with hot chocolate asking any last minute questions about the sky, stars, suns, moons and planets. It was certainly an eye opener, and I am so glad that we had the chance to see the beautiful sky, full of so many stars, in a place with so little light pollution. 

The next day, we woke up at 4am to head out into the highlands and see the Tatio Geysers. Due to having missed the geysers on the salt flat tour thanks to the blizzard (see two posts previous), we were very keen to see those near to San Pedro, and we were not disappointed! After the two hour drive up to the altiplano from San Pedro, the sight of the tall columns of steam rising up from the ground in the early morning light was something to behold. We spent a couple of hours listening to the explanations of the various type of geysers and how they are formed from our guide. We had a lovely breakfast out of the back of our jeep and even took a dip in a natural thermal pool fed from the geysers. The morning ended with a visit to a tiny indigenous village, where only about eight people live at any one time to tend to the llamas, while the other fifteen or so inhabitants live down the valley in order for the kids to be able to go to school. 

After a couple of fantastic days in San Pedro, it was time to keep moving south. We took a night bus to Calama, from where we traveled to the tiny beach resort of Bahia Inglesa for the day. We had a lovely, relaxing day, and it was even warm enough (for us tough English girls!) to sunbathe for a while. We treated ourselves to a scrumptious seafood meal, sampling local scallops and sea snails, which were surprisingly good! In the afternoon, we meet some hippies who were setting up a drug rehabilitation centre in the bay, and ate more scallops and a gorgeous home made soup. One of them was a jewellery artist, and we bought a couple pairs of lovely earrings from him. That evening, we hopped on another bus, this time with destination Santiago, from where I write this post. There are several things to do and places we'd like to visit around here, and I will be sure keep you updated on our progress in the next post. 

Lots of love,

Emma