CHILE – Arica and San Pedro de Atacama

Our time in Peru was up, and it was time for us to head over the border to Chile. Bolivia was always the next plan, but we were racing to the south before the weather felt Antarctic. It was a two stage plan, we get a bus to a place in Peru called Tacna from Arequipa, and then get a shared taxi over the border where we’d arrive in the border town of Arica. Easy peasy, we should be there with plenty of time to spare.

The bus journey itself was reasonably dull. Long, vast flat landscapes, all desert, occasionally a fancy shaped rock or two. One collision between a truck and a van, and a small sandstorm were about all the entertainment we got until Tacna. Once here, we swapped up as many of our Peruvian Soles into Chilean Pesos (which look remarkably like coloured monopoly money, especially when the smallest note is for 1000) and found ourselves a shared taxi. Within a half hour or so, we were at the border.

The queue here was pretty long, and along the way were plenty of signs about customs laws of Chile. Having a huge export of fruit and vegetables, it is a country with a huge ban on ecological goods. This means you can’t import any fruit, veg, animal products, seeds etc, for fear of importing any disease or insects, so all food items need to be declared or eaten before entry.

Off in the distance, we saw a cute sniffer dog. Debating for a moment how unfair it was we couldn’t just drop everything to go give it attention because it had a job to do, it slowly made it’s way through the crowd towards us. Upon approaching Diana, it was definitely interested in hanging around, which was odd, we had no drugs, or certainly none we knew of. ‘Tiene frutas?’ the guy asked us. Ah.. It was a fruit sniffer dog, charged with hunting down cherries rather than cocaine. We explained we had some on the bus but not now and all was well, off he went to sniff out bananas and apples and all sorts.

Eventually we crossed into Chile and headed into Arica. Unfortunately, there was an issue we hadn’t completely considered. See, in Peru, the time is GMT-5, so 5 hours behind. Once we crossed the border however, we moved into GMT-3, so we gained 2 hours. This means we arrived at the border at around 5.30pm, and didn’t arrive in Arica until gone 8pm, when the sun was only just setting in the sky. Very confusing, and meant that by the time we’d arrived, got to a cash machine, checked into our hostel and gone out to find dinner, it was already 9pm.

We never did get to sample the delights of 'Big Fat Llama'!

WHAT COUNTRY IS THIS!?

First impressions of Chile were good. Whilst things were more expensive, they were also generally better quality. Traffic was a lot calmer, and actually gave way at pedestrian crossings (apart from the odd car with Peruvian plates). Arica is a port town and not a huge tourist location, but there was a museum in town which revealed that the entire area had previously been a graveyard for pre-hispanic tribes. Rather than move these bodies, they had built the museum around them, and explained that there could easily be more bodies buried under each building and road in the rest of the region.

Wonderfully stylish!

An archaeologist in the making 

We then took a walk to the top of the hill, where a museum existed explaining the conflict in this area between Peru and Chile. Whilst we didn’t enter the museum itself, a lot of information was outside, explaining that tens of thousands of people from both Peru and Chile had died in a conflict over this region, with Chile eventually winning the claim for it.

Finally we worked on establishing a plan for Chile. There was one more place in the north we wanted to visit, the Atacama desert. From here, we decided to avoid 20+ hour buses and fly to Santiago, as the price was practically the same. We’d spend a few days in Santiago and then fly as far south as we could to Punta Arenas, to start Patagonia. Then, we would take a bus to Puerto Natales, rent a car for three days, and visit the Torres del Paine national park. By the time we’d finished, every day was planned and booked. Diana found great calm in this, I found more stress, things rarely go perfectly smoothly when we are on the road. We treated ourselves to a walk along the beach before dinner.

I'd rather we didn't

Next, we had a night bus to Calama, the city closest to San Pedro de Atacama, a small town in the Atacama desert with some interesting areas to cycle to nearby. After a reasonable sleep, we arrived in Calama and after grabbing our bags and asking where we could get a bus to San Pedro, we wandered around the corner only to find we had about 1 minute before the next bus was leaving. Just reaching it in time, we were on our way.

We had booked an Airbnb in the area, about 30 minutes walk from the bus station. It was fairly warm around here, being the desert, so it felt like a pretty long 30 minutes. It felt even longer when we arrived in the area, only to realise that there was no way of knowing which house we were going to, they all looked fairly similar and it seemed the entire area was still under construction with the roads all dug up. Fortunately we were able to drop a message to the lady who sent her mother out to greet us. We were just over the road and not too far away.

These guys were useless at directions

Not many obvious markers...

The house consisted of a lady, her mother, her 1 year old baby boy and the most licky rescued dog we’d met so far. All very lovely, although the baby was very wary of us for a while, absolutely fine and easy to make him laugh from about 3 metres, but if he accidentally wandered within a metre of us, on went the waterworks!

Our first afternoon we popped to the tourist information area to find out what we could do. We found out all the attractions in the area were closed, which was a bit of an issue as we had another couple of days here and there’s not really much else to do in the desert. We decided to do the free walking tour in the afternoon, which went over the history of the area (which was once owned by Bolivia until Chile took it and removed Bolivia’s connection to the sea, something still being contested today). We were also told a story about why some of the area, although desert, was green and lush, involving a condor and a fox. The jist of it was that there was a big bird party happening, the fox wanted to sneak in to eat all the food, the condor agreed reluctantly to fly him to the party up the big mountain, the fox hid under the tables and refused to leave when the condors did so it could eat all the food that was left over, it ate so much that it couldn’t get down the mountain easily anymore and as it was climbing down it was pecked by lots of little birds, fell to the ground and exploded, throwing seeds and nutrients all over the land. I’m not sure I believe it, but he told the story much better than that!

The following day we figured we’d rent bicycles anyway just to at least see some of the sights even if nothing was open. To our surprise, we were told that actually everything was open again, but at this point it was nearly midday and the cycling took at least 6 hours, so we hurried to go rent bikes, stock up on lunch (empanadas, in Chile these are the equivalent of a pasty), work out a route and scoot off. The journey there was easy, a small uphill at the start with a long decline all the way down to the start of the valley, known as ‘valle de la luna’, or the valley of the moon. There were a number of points of interest along here, so after registering ourselves in and paying the entrance fee, we set off. Our first stop was a salt cave.

They didn’t really mention that if you were claustrophobic, scared of the dark, or particularly inflexible that this would be quite a challenge. What initially looked like just a small walk about to see some salty rocks quickly turned into trying to walk whilst folded in half through areas where the ceiling was only 3ft high, and using our phone torches to try and scramble even a tiny amount of light to work out where we were going. After that, a small amount of rock climbing to try and navigate to the rest of the path. But, sure enough, a lot of the walls consisted of salt, so we hadn’t been lied to!

Salt!

Next, a looooong uphill. One of two we had to tackle, this one leading to a huge sand dune and views over the valley. We arrived, locked up the bikes and started walking. Wearing sandals and flipflops, we quickly found out just how hot the sand was. Eventually though, we managed to get to the top and see the view.

It was around this time I realised I hadn’t got the key to the bike locks. I was faaaairly confident I’d just stupidly left the key in the lock, but seeing as we’d walked across probably half a mile of sand to get to this point, we were a little concerned it could be missing completely. No bother, we’d just spend the whole walk back staring at the ground just in case.

Fortunately the result was indeed simply that I had been an idiot, and our bikes were still sat there with the key sitting in the lock waiting for someone to come along and steal them. Lucky we were in the middle of a desert rather than a city. Anyway, onwards we went to the next part, another viewpoint over the desert, remembering to bring the keys with me this time.

The view, whilst good, was also a bit confusing. See, the Atacama desert is known as one of the driest places on earth. Very, very little rainfall per year. Except of course on the day we arrive, when, walking back down the hill, it started absolutely chucking it down. We took shelter for a good 10 minutes before deciding it may be just parting enough to get to our next destination, but the moment we grabbed our bags the heavens opened for a second time, heavier than before and with an almost sideways wind to slow us down. I chivalrously shot off ahead to get cover, and by the time Diana arrived she was coated in mud.

Moments later of course, the rain disappeared and it went back to stupidly hot again. We followed the path to the end so we could say we did it (all that was there were three big rocks, nothing so exceptional we HAD to do it), then headed back so as not to be late for the return time for the bikes. Naturally with the nice easy down hill we’d had on the way here, the way back was far less forgiving, almost entirely uphill the whole way. Yippee!

Just a load of old rocks really

The next day, with all the appropriate aches that come from a few hours of riding a bicycle, we were planning to head into town and ride the second main attraction of the area, ‘valle del muerte’ or Valley of Death. However, upon arriving in town we were told once again that everything was closed, for reasons we aren’t entirely sure of, although in the middle of the night all of our phones had gone crazy with alarm sounds indicating there was some sort of flood risk somewhere. We presumed it was that, and instead took a walk.

Yep, dry!

The place we walked to was supposedly accessible across a river by a bridge. However, upon getting closer, there was no bridge, only the option to wade across it. We decided against this idea and carried along the road instead, where we found once of the entrances (exits?) to the valley of death. Here we found cyclists, indicating that perhaps the route wasn’t quite as closed as we’d been led to believe, but either way, we were out of time to do it now.

Tiny pear!

We arranged a bus back to Calama, where we had a flight down to Santiago to avoid another 24 hour bus where possible. It was practically the same price as the bus anyway, so seemed a better idea. Once we got on the bus however, we wondered if we’d have had a decent nights sleep on it, as it had totally flat beds, screens built into the walls infront with movies, music and games, onboard food… Luxury for the entire hour and a half we had it..! Onwards to our next stop, Santiago!