Santiago de Chile

We took a bus from La Serena to Santiago. The landscape got steadily greener, though still pretty desert-like, as we went south. As soon as we turned inland from the coast road, however, it also started getting hotter. Our bus driver seemed to think no one needed the fans running, so we all cooked as we drove along. Toasty.

We arrived a little late, but had plenty of time to cool off and shower before heading east along the Metro to meet up with Rodrigo and his wife for dinner, mead, and wine. We had a great time. The mead was really good despite its young age (only 18 months), and we also enjoyed the Chilean Carmenere. We were sent away with a bottle from Argentina, which we plan on drinking with New Year's Eve dinner.

Rachel arrived early the next morning. After breakfast, we met up with Rachel's friend-of-a-friend who lives in Santiago for some touristing around the city. We visited a museum, took the Funicular up to a viewpoint of the city, went to the Mercado Central for lunch, and saw some of the other sights. For dinner we found Las Vacas Gordas and got some excellent meat and a bottle of Carmenere/Syrah. In the morning was our bus to Mendoza, Argentina.

La Serena

La Serena is a Chilean beach town and a popular vacation spot for Chileans. We decided to spend Christmas there. Our flight from Antofagasta arrived on time, even slightly early, and we got to our hostal around 8pm. Unfortunately for us, this holiday is taken really seriously and everything was closed. Oh and by the way, everything is closed on the 25th too (naturally), so good luck with the eating.

Needless to say, we didn't do much on Christmas itself. We walked around town a little, got some ice cream at the gas station (which was open), and hung out under the palm trees. We got dinner at the Chinese restaurant (the same one we ate at the night before). Very low key.

The next day we decided to go to the supermarket now that it was finally open. Our map (given to us by the hostal) indicated we could swing by the Faro (lighthouse), along the beach, and to the market in about a half-hour walking loop. Turns out the map was comically out-of-scale, with the blocks near town center given in one scale and the surrounding ones in an entirely different one, with no indication this was so. We wound up walking for 3 hours. As we were prepared for only a short walk, we got absolutely scorched by the sun. We spent the rest of the day feeling crispy.

Overall La Serena was a decent place to stay, only it sucked that everything was closed for the holiday. It was a much bigger city than we had anticipated, complete with suburbs and condo farms. Parts of the city felt just like walking around in the US, not at all like the rest of our South America experience. It's almost like Chile is a world apart.

San Pedro de Atacama y Antofagasta

San Pedro is, unsurprisingly, in the middle of the Atacama desert. One wonders who put it there. [Though we did see lots of mines in the desert, so that probably explains it.] One small walk through town makes it clear that San Pedro is a tourist town and not much else. Among the few dozen hostals and hotels, you can find restaurants, tour operators, and artisan shops. There are some mini-markets too. And that's it. Go a few blocks in any direction, and you're in the middle of the driest desert in the world. Nice place. Moreover, it's really weird to see Christmas decorations while you're sweating and walking around the desert.

Actually San Pedro was kind of a cute little town. The square has whitewashed buildings around it and is populated by peppercorn trees. The restaurants seemed pretty good (we only went to one and cooked the rest of the time) and some of the hostals were very nice looking. You can rent bikes or get a lesson on sandboarding (like snowboarding, only with sand). However it is the desert, and many of the streets are dirt (read: dust). From noon to about 5pm it's brutally hot, and outside those hours it's just normally hot until it gets dark and kind of cold. Since we had just left the desert in Bolivia, we weren't too keen on seeing more of it, which leaves one with not much to do in San Pedro.

We stayed at Hostal Juriques, due to its pricepoint of "cheaper than everywhere else in town without being a dorm". The rooms had a thick layer of dust, blown in from the gravel/dirt courtyard, and the kitchen was abysmal. Hilary spent the first day cleaning it so we could cook without picking up a tropical disease. The kitchen was also not stocked with things like dish soap or matches (for the gas range), and the bathrooms ran out of toilet paper. A few of these things were eventually remedied. So, not the greatest place.

We went one night to the local "observatory", which is some guy's house. He's actually a Canadian astronomer and has some very nice telescopes. The Atacama has something like 320 clear nights a year, so of course we got some low cloud cover the night we went. Still, we got some nice views of stuff in the sky, including Jupiter with 3 moons (and a shadow!); several "famous" stars like Betelgeuse, Sirius, and the Pleiades; and several nebulae. Our favorite was the Tarantula Nebula, though it didn't look anything like a spider. Jupiter was a bit too bright to look at for long, which is kind of crazy.

Our last night in San Pedro we moved to Hostal Campo Base, a block down the street from Juriques. Wow, so nice! The room was big and not full of dust, and breakfast served by a super-nice lady was included. Too bad they were full the other 3 nights we were in town. It was open for the most important night, though, since Hil picked up an infection, had to stop in for some extra drugs at the hospital, and really needed a nice, quiet, clean place to stay the last night.

We had planned on catching an overnight bus from San Pedro to La Serena, but our travel agent muffed the tickets. [As a foreigner, you can't buy bus tickets in Chile without physically being in Chile, so we were stuck using an international agent. This is at least twice as annoying as it sounds.] So we missed out on those buses and instead got plan B: bus to Antofagasta and fly to La Serena. [You can buy plane tickets from anywhere, and the bus to Antofagasta is a short and easy trip, doesn't sell out.] So we got our bus to Antofagasta, where they don't have hostals. Instead we are in the Radisson, which is actually one of the cheaper places to stay. Wow, so nice! We've got an ocean view and can hear the waves and sea birds. Our room is gimongous. There is a bathtub. [This fact cannot be overstated.] And that's really it for Antofagasta, we've just got our one-night stand and the flight to the beach is tomorrow.

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivian Altiplano, and the Reserva de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa

We debated briefly about going on a tour of the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt lake/flat/thing. After reading several guidebooks, blogs, and talking to folks who had taken the tour--all declaring it "the most amazing thing" ever to be seen by human eyes--we figured we should go. For Bolivia, this kind of tour is expensive, but for a tour in general they run pretty cheap.

We read that the best thing to do is just show up in Uyuni and start tour shopping. Every tour operator (and there are about 70 of them) does essentially the same tour, so the goal is to find one with the little differences that skew in your favor. For some, this is an English speaking guide. For some, this is particular accommodations. For us, it was less about finding a tour operator and more about finding some tourists. We wanted to do the 4-day tour, while the standard is a 3-day tour. We also wanted to only have 4 of us in the car, vs. the normal 6. This made us something of a rarity. After visiting 6 or 8 tour operators and realizing that this was the barrier, we started stalking gringos. This is fairly easy to do, though it makes one feel a little creepy. We made a sign "Looking for 2 more people for a 4-day tour", walked around, and accosted passersby. Around noon, after no luck, we gave up for awhile and decided to wait for the afternoon buses to come in. At 5 the buses start arriving again and we went fishing. At some point we actually hit every gringo in town and started doubling back, realizing this only when one of us was given a description of the other for "someone else was looking for a 4-day tour too". Oops.

After a long and hot day in the very boring and dusty town of Uyuni, we wandered back into the only tour operator who seemed to think it plausible that we could in fact find others for a 4-day tour: Blue Line. We were discussing our chances when two young European women walked in. After some cajoling, we all decided to do the 4-day tour. Hooray! We went for a celebratory beer, and as we walked through the square we got some congratulations from the random strangers we met for finding another pair for our tour. We had perhaps become a public nuisance. [Shop owners who didn't speak English did stop us to ask what our sign said. At least we were infamous, if not famous, in Uyuni that day.]

So we had one last dinner at our rather nice hotel, Tonito, which also houses the "best" restaurant in town: a pizza joint. The owner is from western Massachusetts, so the pizza is actually quite good. The breakfast there is included with the room and is a buffet of also rather good stuff, including American pancakes! ["pancake" often translates to "crepe" here.] We also enjoyed the cactus chairs, tables, and chair-rails that served as furniture. Use what you've got? Our tour left in the late morning the next day.

The details of the route are kind of boring, and as mentioned everyone does the same thing. The one difference was our extra day, which got us to visit the Vulcan Thunupa on the north end of the salar. Otherwise we did the same stuff: train cemetary, salt processing and chotski stands, salt hotel/museum, Isla Incahuasi, San Juan, altiplano lagunas, deserts, and sightseeing in the Reserva before crossing the border into Chile. So, pictures instead.

Here is the obligatory image of the old and rusting trains on the tracks to Antofagasta. Uyuni used to be a major rail hub. Now it's a tourist hub.

Here are the salt piles made by the workers. Once the piles are dry (the salt contains a fair bit of water), they are scooped up, piled on a truck, and brought back to the village for processing.

A little way into the salar itself is an old hotel made of salt bricks. Props for local building material! These hotels on the salar are now illegal, and now this one is a museum and a place where tours stop for lunch. The sign might seem unnecessary, but in reality it is tempting.

The salar itself is massive, but so large that it actually gets a little boring driving across it. Look, more salt! We did hit the beginning of the wet season, so portions of the salar were flooded. This made driving a bit slow (and some companies refused to cross the salar at all due to the corrosive saltwater) but also created a very cool mirror in the few-inches deep water.

Our favorite parts of the salar were the things around it that were not the salar, perhaps because it gave you something else to look at. The whole area is rimmed with quinoa farms and llama ranchers, which is a little weird considering how little water there is available most of the year. We encountered a very playful baby llama.

There are several islands within the salar, one of which we visited: Incahuasi. It was a cool place with cactus growing on an old coral atoll. How strange is that? The edges (shores?) of the island looked like frozen beaches, with the white salt permanently stuck almost washing ashore.

We also got to see sunrise on the salar. We had been wearing sunglasses all the previous day, but we figured sunrise is pretty tame in terms of blinding light. Not so! It was by far the brightest sunrise ever. And cold; the salar is quite freezing at night and the sun doesn't do much to warm it up. Looking away from the sun across the salar is blinding, and looking anywhere near the direction of the sun without sunglasses is like stabbing your eyes with red-hot pokers. It's the whitest object we've ever attempted to view.

After leaving the salar, we spent the night in San Juan, a little town of seemingly no consequence other than as a stop for tour groups. Our hotel had a stone foundation surmounted by salt bricks held together by salt mortar. [salt hotels off the salar are legal.] The floor was also crushed salt, which got everywhere and was kind of annoying. After breakfast at the salt tables we headed south across the desert, stopping occasionally at the typically tourist spots along with the long line of LandCruisers before and behind us. We did see a lot of vicunas and flamencos. The big draw of the day was the several altiplano lakes, often rimmed with borax and stained odd colors by either minerals or algae, and in some cases had some steaming volcanic spring action complete with the lovely sulfur odor. Lots of flamencos. Also an obligatory stop with a view of a volcano sporting a slightly smoking summit and at the Arbol de Piedra [stone tree], which frankly doesn't look much like a tree but is neat anyway. We spent the night at 4300 m near Laguna Colorada, a red lake full of phytoplankton that the flamingos eat.

The next day we got up at 4, along with everyone else in town, in order to visit the geysers. Our guide Edgar told us to be packed in the car at 4:30, and we were, but we didn't leave. Edgar was nowhere to be found. Eventually we did find him and we got going around 5am. We're not really sure what the deal is with seeing the geysers at sunrise, other than as a way to get you either to Chile or back to Uyuni before too late in the afternoon (most guides will have another group the next day). But there we were, at 4900 m, freezing our asses off in the predawn looking at some steaming rocks. By the time the sun came up fully we were on our way to the last few stops: hot springs, more rocks in the desert billed at the Salvador Dali Desert (no idea why), and a couple more colored lakes (Blanca y Verde).

We got to the Bolivian side of the border at 8:20, and our bus to San Pedro was supposed to be there at 9. We were told sometimes the bus is late since it comes through Argentina first. Great. We wound up stuck at the border, sitting at 4000 or so meters and totally exposed to the very cold wind, for 3 hours. Edgar left after about 40 minutes with a carload of locals going back to Uyuni. Our bus finally got there, last of all the transfer buses (we had tickets for a particular bus ahead of time, seemed like a good idea), and then we got to watch the people getting off the bus eat breakfast for half an hour. WTF? Well anyway we eventually got on, filled out lots of forms, and drove to Chile.

The guidebooks say this particular border crossing is easy. Technically it was, we had no real problems. However, we were stuck at the Chilean immigration office for 4 hours. There were 2 buses ahead of us (one of which arrived after us, but it's best if we just don't talk about that part), but really that's only like 75 people. Slowest. Border. Ever.

Got our hotel in San Pedro, got some Chilean pesos, and got some drinks. Un largo dia. We're also getting a bit chafed by the dry air. San Pedro de Atacama, being of course in the Atacama desert, doesn't seem like a good place to recover our skin moisture. Hopefully sunscreen counts.