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.

 

Soaring with the eagles – or should that be not eagles

We were picked up from our hostel ½ hour early much to our shock, as we were still eating lunch counting on the normal, tardy practices that much of our trip has demonstrated.  As our vehicle wound it’s way up the hairpins along the hill facing the upper suburbs. (Iquique ran out of space along the coast and so has many of it’s suburbs separated by a 500m high escarpment – according to my pilot anyway.  Ellen’s pilot said it was a separate town). We got to have a much better view of the city in the daylight, bands of houses/apartments were painted one bright colour or another, one swathe green another blue, but for some reason all the roofs were the same desert brown iron roof.  Reaching the top of the escarpment we bundled out and were assigned our pilots, while they readied the chutes we had a bit more of a look at the lower part of Iquique.  Strapped into our seats and attached to our pilots we were ready. Ellen took off first, no running required just up up and away, while my pilot fiddled a bit longer and when it came for take off we went up, but only just my feet barely brushed the ground even on tip toes but I was being instructed to run.  “HOW?” with what little grip I managed to get us moving forward enough to launch into the air.

This experience of paragliding was very different to our previous one, where before we raced down to the bottom as quick as possible (so the next person could hand over money) we instead spent time competing with the birds for the thermals.  There were two species of eagle sharing the thermals but they were heavily out numbered by another species that our guides informed us where “not eagles” but as neither Ellen or I can find an image of the birds they shall have to remain anonymous.  We followed the escarpment along finding different patches that allowed our pilots to spin and gain us the altitude to glide over the city to the beach.

As my pilot and I crossed the beach to start our decent I was lucky enough to spot some seals playing in the ocean.  Landing was a breeze but one of the pilot’s dogs was there to greet us noisily and there was a moment where it looked like we would be landing on the dog’s back!  It was a wonderful experience but we decided that it wasn’t as exciting as we may have hoped so it is now off our list of skills to acquire.   

Don’t fall in, the nearest hospital is 137km away

Today we went to El Tatio Geisers about 100km from San Pedro.  All I can say is WOW!!  Just an amazing day.  All the tour companies in San Pedro obviously got together at some point and decide to get some of their own back at the stupid tourists by deciding that you just have to be at the Geysers at sunrise.  This means getting picked up at 4am and waking up at 3:45am (that seems more like a time I should be going to bed on holiday, not waking up!!).  Every single tour company only runs it at that time.  Definitely a conspiracy.  So the night before we dutifully tried to go to bed early, meaning we weren’t tired enough to sleep and we were both so worried we would miss Jason’s rather subtle watch alarm that we kept waking up all night.  When it finally did go off we stumbled out of bed into some clothes and onto the street to wait.  The other person from our hostel who was waiting and wearing a lot more clothes then informed us she had been told it’s around -10 at the geysers.  WHAT?! We had been told to dress warmly, but it’s rather chilly at 4am in San Pedro and no further explanation had been given.  Jason quickly rushed back in and put on trainers rather than sandals, and grabbed a thermal top which I put on underneath the two jumpers I was already wearing.  We were as ready as we were going to be and on our way. 

 

Nearly 3 hours of very bumpy twisty mountain roads later we reached the geysers just as the sun was beginning to light the sky.   It was indeed around -10, if not colder.  We fought over who should take photos as neither of us wanted to risk frostbite from holding the camera too long.  “No, you take it… you’ll do a much better job.”  Our very thin travel pants didn’t give much warmth to the legs either and we began to wonder how susceptible legs were to frostbite.  But enough about the temperature… onto the geysers.  The whole area looked like something from another planet.  We were at 4320m  but it looked like we were in a depression as the area was surrounded with volcanoes and snow covered mountains that top 6000m.  The ground was issuing steam all around and as you got closer you could hear the boiling water under the ground that would suddenly burst forth and threaten to scald those standing too close.  The minerals from the water had left interesting shaped and coloured deposits which further led to the alien feel.  Words can’t really do it justice but hopefully our photos do a better job. 

 

Following an hour or so wandering around the geysers we went for a quick dip in a hot spring.  Only 15 minutes was allowed though as otherwise the minerals start to do nasty things to your skin.  After this we thought the tour was over, but the drive down was just amazing.  Looking out from either side of the bus you could be mistaken for thinking it was two entirely different places.  One side would be covered in snow rising up to volcanoes or mountains whilst the other would be a typically desert scene with sand dunes and cacti dotting the landscape and bizarrely no snow in sight.  We were constantly snapping pictures out the window and almost as frequently stopping the bus to have a proper look.  The scenery was kind of expected, but we weren’t expecting a wildlife tour as well!  We saw herds of guanacos, vicuna and llamas (all closely related), multiple bird species and some very weird looking rabbit type animals that I’m pretty sure are called vizcacha.

How many stars do you thing you see at night?

One of the things we were really looking forward to doing was going out into the middle of the desert with a professional astronomer and gaze at millions of stars whilst having some of his knowledge passed to us.  When we got there we were told ‘millions of stars is what we say in the brochure.  You’ve paid now.  You can only ever see about 3,000 stars with the naked eye and tonight with the full moon it’s less than 1,000.’ Both he and his wife were incredibly interesting however and pointed out various constellations, the closest stars, the zodiac part of the sky – which is also the elliptical plane the only part of the sky where you will ever see planets.  He had an assortment of huge telescopes through which we were shown the moon, Saturn, nebulae, a globular cluster, the jewellery box (3 stars close together which are yellow, blue and red respectively) and a binary star.  Definitely something I would recommend!

Where shall we sleep?

San Pedro was not quite what we expected.  We knew it was a desert oasis town, but we also knew it was a major tourist centre, so the dusty mud brick homes that make up the entire town were a bit of a shock coming from very European Argentina.  We were a little concerned on the way about finding a room for the time we would be here.  Arriving at 6pm the day before Easter long weekend in a major tourist centre, that is also a very small town seemed to be a bad combination.  After wandering around San Pedro for an hour or more it seemed to be a complete disaster.  So we asked the hostel we had just found where else we could look, he called a friend and we were on our way to a room with a bed.  Woohoo!!  Our host is Nadia and we spent the walk to her house in very enjoyable conversation, her teaching us Spanish and us teaching her English.  She wants to set up her house as a hostel and as such currently only has one room available but I’m sure she plans more in the future. 

How high can you go?

The trip from Salta to San Pedro de Atacama was a jaw dropping, finger tingling, headache inducing experience.  Of course the later two were from altitude sickness, whilst the former was from the absolutely spectacular views.  The scenery didn’t really start to be anything special until we had made it past the blockade.  We aren’t quite sure what they were protesting about, but they were obviously camped out there and had blocked the roads with logs, branches, rocks and anything else they could find.  There were also a fair few armourned trucks with police or army men which I assume is why we did get through it eventually (2 hours later).   From there the road began to climb into the Andes, past mountains, canyons and salt plains.  At various points the effects of altitude became obvious, there was that moment when I tried to sit up and my vision went blurry and I thought I would pass out – we were eye level with snow at that point though.  Around 4pm we arrived at the border crossing… or at least the Argentinian side of it.  We were all stamped through fairly quickly but then had to wait forever for the paperwork on the bus to be completed.  Whilst we were waiting Jason made the suggestion that we really should all just walk across no-mans land and wait for the bus on the Chilean side of the border.  (Something we had done frequently in Africa).  Shortly thereafter we were all piled back on to the bus and given our lunch (yes, it was a very late lunch).  We weren’t sure at this point if we still had a really long wait before the bus was going to be able to move, or the lunch wasn’t allowed across the border and they had just forgotten to feed it to us earlier.  The bus did start moving though and we proceeded to go through the longest border crossing so far.  It was 2 hours driving later that we finally reached the Chilean immigration – actually in San Pedro de Atacama!