Finally, a beach!

We have been longing to get to a  beach nearly since Christmas, so Iquique seemed like the perfect place to hang out, relax and spend some time listening to the waves crash on the sand.  The hostel here is very different to others we’ve stayed at in South America.  For one thing it’s full of Aussies!! This is a place for surf, so no real surprise there.  It’s a social place and the tiny kitchen is almost always full as people cook most meals.   Everyone hangs out at the hostel in the evenings, reading, watching TV and chatting.  One such evening on our second night we suddenly felt something… Jason thought a train was speeding by, I thought the wind was picking up… and then half a second after that we realised that no, this is an earthquake.  So we sat there whilst for 30 seconds the entire building shook, afterwhich everyone started making those inane comments when you’ve just experiencing something new and slightly scary.  “Did you feel that?”  “Was that an earthquake” “Cool!”.

 

One of the other big things to do here is to paraglide.  The guidebook mentions 3 day courses from $140, which sounds like a lot of fun.  However, when we started trying to find one of these courses we turned up nothing.  That is, nothing that short.  The shortest course we found was for 10 days, which is a bit long as we have a deadline for getting to Lima, not to mention an awful lot more expensive.  So instead of learning how to jump by ourselves, we will be strapped to the front of someone else as we take to the skies this afternoon.