1. Chile - San Pedro de Atacama to Santiago

Covering 31 Dec 2018 – 14 Jan 2019    

some more of that fabulous scenery - upstairs front seats on the coach

just waiting for midnight

Our first stop in Chile was San Pedro de Atacama, an isolated town and a tourist hub between the Chilean Atacama Desert and Bolivia’s Altiplano and Salar de Uyuni.  So it’s pricey.  We were in a very pleasant hostal half a mile or so outside the centre but it cost us as much as an average US hotel would.   We’d decided on a few days quieter time here and if weather conditions permitted we would be off on a Dark Sky trip into the Atacama Desert with telescopes.  As it happened every night we were there it was cloudy so we weren’t able to see tiny pinpricks of light a tiny bit larger.  We found out while we were here that a New Year’s Eve custom in San Pedro was to burn guys/effigies in the street.  We saw several impressive ones as we walked around on Old Year’s Night (as my mother called it) looking for a suitable restaurant.  In the morning these ex-guys were marked by burnt marks and ashes on the pavement .

While we were waiting to cross the border from Bolivia, Heather had been talking to a Taiwanese woman whose Salt Flats trip had involved a car crash when driving in dense dust. The vehicle she was a passenger in had run into the back of a truck.  She was unhurt but a fellow passenger broke an arm.  We met her again because she was staying in the same place as us in San Pedro.  As an indication of her irrational attitude to risk we saw her setting off to walk into town wearing a cotton facemask.  This was the woman who was happy to be driven at speed on a dirt track littered with rocks while not wearing a seat belt.

'London' poster with a picture of Paris
- at our hotel in San Pedro

Chile is a strangely shaped very long and narrow country over 2,600 miles (4,200kms) from north to south sandwiched between the Andes and the Pacific.  I know that distance doesn’t mean much but as a comparison that’s more than Los Angeles to New York and about the same as London to Istanbul and three quarters of the way back to London.  At the narrowest, the country is just 40 miles wide.  The whole northern part of Chile had been Bolivian and Peruvian territory until the late 1800s when Chile began the Pacific war and ended up with a lot of immensely valuable land because of the huge mineral deposits, particularly of copper.  Bolivia lost all of its coastline and the minerals and that must be a couple of the reasons the country is so impoverished today.  Bolivia does however have vast Lithium deposits under the Salar de Uyuni which should make the country a lot of money, depending on the level of corruption.

Once we’d left San Pedro we were back on the long coach rides through the desert.  Anyone wanting to play i-spy on these journeys would only have initials S and M to play with and that would be Sand and More sand although some of you may think Sado and Masochism would be more appropriate.  It wasn’t attractive, just miles of gently undulating greyish-tan landscape with a pretty heavy scattering of litter.  However, we were headed towards the coast and when we got there it was just wonderful to smell the sea again.  We turned south and the sandy and rocky landscape was to continue almost as far south as the capital Santiago over 900 miles (1,500kms) away.  Just to point out that wasn’t one journey, we took some time to get to Santiago.

the bay at Caldera from our hotel - note the landscape beyond, 
this is still a long way north in Chile

getting further away from the deserts - the beach at La Serena

Among other places as we moved south we’d decided to spend a few days at a place called La Serena where we had some excitement at the bus station on arrival.  I’d gone to the luggage bay of the bus to collect our bags and was pushed slightly by someone to my right.  I looked in that direction and the next moment heard Heather shout NO ! and saw another man staggering

the unexpected Japanese garden in La Serena

backwards looking very surprised.  I’d been targeted by two pickpockets and my eagle-eyed fellow traveller had spotted one trying to get my wallet from my back trouser pocket.  A split second later him and his accomplice (the pusher) ran off round the back of the bus.  The amusing thing was he was going for the pocket with the obvious wallet which was my dummy one, not the real wallet.  So he would have had several withdrawn Malaysian banknotes and a selection of mutilated credit cards as loot. 

a Turkey Vulture resenting our presence on the hotel roof terrace

Southern Lapwing

There is a Chilean sales tax and it would cause an uproar if our VAT was applied in the same way in the UK.  It’s 19% compared to our 20% VAT but for hotel accommodation it’s only applicable to Chileans.  Us foreigners don’t pay it although almost every hotel has a slightly different understanding of how it  works.  Some insist that if we pay with a credit card we have to pay the tax, some claim that if we get a paper receipt we have to pay the tax and some try to apply it without saying anything.  There have been ‘discussions’ in most if not all hotels but we haven’t paid the tax yet.  I’m certain that lots of foreign tourists will be paying an unnecessary extra 19% on their bills and somehow, call me cynical, I doubt that the government ever sees it.

a small bit of the 7 million population Santiago

and the inevitable sunset from our hotel

We had been taking our time to get to Santiago because we had arranged meeting up with our Massachusetts friends, Bonnie and Newt with whom we were to spend several weeks in Chile.  Our six hour ride from La Serena to Santiago was with the unfortunately named company Cikbus, we were pronouncing it with an S.  So we arrived on the appointed day to find that their plane had been delayed, they’d missed their Panama connection and would be twenty four hours late.  It was a sunday and as far as we could see Santiago closes on a sunday.  We had real trouble just finding somewhere to eat.  B & N finally arrived, tired but pleased about 10.00pm.  On monday we all wandered around what turned out to be a clean, prosperous looking city with now, plenty of cafes and restaurants open.  After all of two days experience I’d sum it up as OK but not particularly interesting.

From the heat and deserts of northern Chile and the Mediterranean climate of Santiago we were now going to fly way down south to Punto Arenas for the glaciers, snow and fjords.  Coaches would have taken several days to cover the 1,700 miles (2,800kms) but we do plan to return to Santiago as much as we can on terra firma, working our way back north in a number of stages.  However, Chile is so narrow and mountainous in the south that there are no roads connecting Punto Arenas to the rest of the country except through Argentina.