Palegoldenrod

OK, OK. You’ve come to expect everything a little late with me. I’m sorry. Again.

So here is a bit of a spiel about my recent wanderings around the north of Chile. I booked a loop tour with a company called Pachamama By Bus. Now I prefer not to travel with tours, but these guys are good because they take you to places that a direct bus can’t, and also you can jump on and off whenever you want and often as you want. You just need to wait for the next bus to come through, which in winter is weekly.

Some background info (very rough). Chile is roughly divided into two contrasting climates - desert to the North of Santiago (in fact the driest desert in the world) and temperate fertility and greenness in the South. As Santiago was getting cold I decided to take refuge in the desert!

Here is a very brief rundown for you

My friend Beatrice had just finished her internship on Friday afternoon, so we decided on Friday night that we would leave with the tour on Saturday morning. All very last minute, haha.

Day 1 - Santiago to La Serena

We left from Barrio Brasil, hostel La Casa Roja (looks like a really awesome place) at 9ish am. Our tour guide was Maria Jose (nick name Cote) a young woman who looks like she has character, though a bit tired. Our driver was Marco, who seemed fun from the start. Cote spoke English very well, Marco knew a little. Beatrice and I, having spoken an awful lot of English and not enough Spanish, determined to try and speak Spanish as much as we could.

Our travelling companions consisted of:

• a group of 3 English girls travelling together
• a group of 3 English boys travelling together
• a group of 2 English girls who had run into the 3 English boys in the past
• an Australian girl
• a solo travelling English girl

The trip took us to a small town for lunch, where we had a peek at a cool little church that is built into the rock right on the beach. Then we went straight through to La Serena where we arrived just in time for sunset on the beach.

We have a short amount of time for a bit of shopping and then to dinner. A few of the less tired of us go out for a few drinks but generally everyone ends up in bed at a reasonable hour. Aburridisimo

Day 2 - La Serena to Bahia Iglesa

In the morning we had a newcomer to our midst. Chrissie, a german girl, had arrived overnight. She originally intended to join us for the departure from Santiago but had become stuck in Argentina and had only just managed to join us in time in La Serena.

From La Serena we went north along the coast to Punta Choros, where we went for a boat tour to a few protected islands (including Isla Demas) to check out the penguins and other birds and plant life. On the way to the islands we saw a bunch of dolphins and everyone get very excited and started taking photos of empty water or whitewash, haha. We jumped off on the only island we could (the others are completely protected) and had some lunch and a wander around before we went back to the bus and pushed through to Bahia Iglesa.

Our accommodation in Bahia Iglesa was cabins on the beach - simple, but clean and warm. And did I mention it was close to the beach?

Day 3 - Bahia Iglesa

The weather was pretty nice so Beatrice and I went for a walk down to the beach. The sand is really white (its not really sand, it is crushed shells) the water is very blue; the rocks are black. The sun was out. It was nice.

The interesting thing for me was seeing the desert extend right down to the ocean. Having grown up on the East coast of Australia, I am mentally conditioned to expect coastal areas to be greener than the interior of a continent. But here… there is nothing. In many areas absolutely no vegetation at all.

We went for a short trip to nearby Caldera, to visit the internet cafe and pick up some groceries for dinner.

In the afternoon Beatrice and I went for a walk through other parts of Bahia Iglesa. We climbed a hill with the cross on it and got a nice view over the village and into the desert. We then had a pack of dogs follow us back to the campsite. Beatrice was terrified.

Later in the evening everyone helped prepare food and Marco cooked us a barbeque (yorm). Drinking games ensued, spearheaded by the English. The highlights of the evening included several climbings of the tree, several fallings from the tree, and one incident of Carly being kicked in the head by a person in the process of falling. All in all it was a big, good night.

Day 4 - Bahia Iglesa to Antofogasta

We hauled ourselves out of bed to shower and made our way to Antofogasta. On the way the bus stopped in the middle of nowhere in the desert and bought icecreams from a man on the side of the road with a freezer box.

We also went to a sculpture of a giant hand. Cote told us that there is another hand in the very south of Chile, in the lush landscape, with only its fingers showing. These two hands show the contrasts of Chile - desert and lush green.

We arrived late in Antofogasta and missed out on the light to get decent photographs of the Arch, a naturally formed archway of sandstone just off the coast which is a famous landmark of the area.

The hostel in Antofogasta was very nice

Day 5 - Antofogasta to San Pedro de Atacama

From Antofagasta we set off for San Pedro. I found it unbelievable how much time could be spent driving through a desert… it is HUGE.

In the middle of nowhere we arrived at the town Baquedano, important because it marks the entry into the heart of the desert (our guides needed to provide the police with a list of passenger names) but also the junction of two important rail lines through the desert. I think one runs north-south and the other east-west. At Baquedano we had lunch and visited a railway museum which was pretty cool.

We continued on for hours and eventually stopped at a few different places in the salt flats followed by the tiny Oasis village of Peine. We learned that a lot of water in the area comes from subterranean supplies and is heavy in arsenic among other things.

For sunset we went to Chaxa Lagoon, a reserve for flamingos. It was beautiful. I was just saying so when my camera’s battery ran out, so unfortunately I missed the opportunity to photograph a lot of the event. But the experience was well worth it.

We arrived at San Pedro early - our hostel greeted us with a warm fire and warm red wine with cinnamon and lemon I think. It tasted interesting but nice.

We all went out for dinner, a few of us came back early and I sat and drank and talked with Marco and some other hostel residents around the fire for a few hours. It was a nice night.

Day 6 - San Pedro de Atacama

I woke in the morning to find Beatrice and one of the other girls had been violently ill through the night and were still unwell. We weren’t sure if it was altitude (San Pedro is quite high - about 2300m above sea level), food poisoning or a viral bug. Those two girls had gone to bed fairly early - the others were also feeling a little under the weather but due to a big night rather than anything else.

We had a free morning, where I wandered around the village and jumped on the interwebs. Some of us had lunch at a local cafe (the food was sooo nice) and then we went to the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) in the afternoon.

First we went through some cool little caves near the entrance of the valley, then checked out some cool rock formations, and then on to the main viewpoint for the sunset.

We needed to climb a large sand dune and then part of a mountain ridge for the best view. It was well worth it, even though the altitude was effecting most of us. The view from this ridge at sunset is the view seen on so many postcards from Chile.

There were a lot of people up on the ridge, but it was still awesome. We took the shortcut way down (ran down a steep part of the sand dune) and then it was back in the bus to San Pedro and out for dinner again.

I told Cote and Marco that I wanted to stay in San Pedro for a week and get the next bus. I needed a break from travel and San Pedro was beautiful - both the village and the area around it.

Unfortunately Beatrice was too ill to stay with me. We agreed to catch up again, either in Santiago or Germany (when I finally get there) and in the morning I said goodbye to most of my new friends.

Visit my flickr area for more (many more) photos. Coming up next: my week in San Pedro de Atacama and my return trip.

I was told that travel is an experience. I thought “oh yeah, you get to see stuff, and do stuff, and stuff goes wrong and you have to deal with it and all that”.

But I was not prepared for this feeling, so hard to describe. Maybe its the solo travel that is adding this new aspect for me. I am alone. Now don’t get me wrong - this isn’t the same feeling you get when you are at home and bored and you decide to start calling your friends. That happens, and then you transcend that, and arrive where I am now.

A fundamental understanding of the value of being alone.

Don’t mistake this for being lonely, I’m not. This is an appreciation of the quality of that feeling. Becoming comfortable with that feeling - even in a city of six million. I guess on some level becoming comfortable with oneself, which (I noted last night) was something that I haven’t done very well in the past. Actually it quite probably interfered with my brain in such a fundamental way that I would make poor decisions because of it.

Last night I went to the local Irish pub (yes, in Santiago, Chile, there are Irish pubs). I tried a local beer (Kuntsmann Miel if you are interested) and I sat in a corner seat and watched the football (soccer). Now, if I had been sitting alone in a pub in Australia - even as recently as 3 months ago… well, I wouldn’t have been sitting there. I would need a reason to be there: waiting for someone maybe. And if I were waiting I would fidget. I would get self conscious. I would feel like I needed to be doing something, talk on my phone, read a book, something.

Last night I sat and watched football. I thought. A lot. I felt. Maybe not a lot (not strong feelings), but many different things. I thought about what I wanted, which is (for me) one of two big questions of my life. “What do I want?” and “Who am I?”. (I figured that one defines the other so I just picked the one that seems easier to tackle).

I came to a few conclusions that surprised me. I hadn’t thought that the answers would be so… concrete for me, especially when I am usually such a fence-sitter. Other things arose as a result of those conclusions, and I’ve yet to tackle those, but the feeling I had after this initial realisation was of being grounded. Stable.

Maybe it is Chile (or South America) that is doing this to me. I have a scientific mind. I work with facts, unchanging. I think this approach has caused problems with things like “what do you want?” because the answer is based on feeling (unpredictable) and not fact. This somewhat sterile approach is easy to get by with in Australia. Chileans, however, feel a lot more. They have “the passion”. The feel energy, they are open with their thoughts and feelings, they dance and make music and sing and love and compose poetry and are utterly unselfconscious about it. It is beautiful, and maybe contagious

So after all this thinking and conclusion making my brain produced a few lines of something and I’m not really sure what to do with it. As it is so rare for me to create such things I thought I’d put it up here. Its not like anyone reads this anyway, so I think I am pretty safe, haha.

Its not really very sensible, but hey. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

Love you guys.

I started walking on a long dirt road slowly with you years ago
and only now is the end starting to draw near
The dust is settling
I can tell which way is north
I can tell which way is north even without you.
even at night, sometimes
even though, right now, i don’t know where I am

The many stars still guide my way
but these are further from me.
They don’t blind me like the sun
they are gentle, beautiful
less intense
unreachable

Sometimes on nights like this I pause for a moment
In the silent darkness.
I let the dust swirl slowly to a halt around my ankles.
And I wonder if there is such a thing as middle ground
Or balance
Or perfection.

In those moments I feel like we are forced to choose between extremes:
like beauty untouchable and numerous
or blistering splendor in blinding proximity.
Neither satisfying.

But such a choice is impossible -
Preferences have no meaning here
On this road.
Things are not chosen, cannot be chosen
They just are.
Like you and I
and the dirt caked on my shoes.

Maybe my only hope for perfection is to watch for dawn and dusk
When part of the sun and the stars are obscured, but visible
When the sky itself manifests magnificence, even if only fleetingly.
A testament to the beauty of impermanence.
A twice-daily reminder of mortality.

So I have decided to stay for a week in San Pedro de Atacama, a small town in the middle of the desert.

The town is about 2km above sea level, is about 15-25°C during the day and between 0-10°C at night in the town. There is not a cloud in the sky during the day, the rooves of many houses are just sticks or are without much of a roof at all - it doesn’t rain here.

This place used to be home to a pre-columbian people. The museum here has information about the natives, their interaction with nearby Incas and other tribes, and finally with the Spanish. Now it is a tourist town - there is nothing else out here really for it. Maybe a mine or two nearby.

Because it is a tourist town, things cost more. Because it is isolated not all places have power or hot water all night. Water here isn’t potable - you need to buy bottled water. The sun is warm and the air is incredibly dry. But there are a bunch of things to do: sand boarding, cycling, nearby geyser viewing (4am start and -15°C OMG), flamingo viewing at sunset, sunset at ¨The Valley of the Moon¨which looks like a moon landscape, horse riding and other things.

There have been interesting things afoot in Chile (and I hear maybe even around the world?). The truck drivers are protesting the taxes on fuel because the fuel prices are incredibly high and are becoming unworkable. Their protest is enacted by blocking many major highways and connecting roads, mainly blocking food and fuel but in some cases we are hearing that all traffic has been turned back.

There have been some stories of stores not having produce and fuel shortages in some areas too. I have just read that the Chilean govt has agreed to discount fuel and that the road blocks are starting to be lifted, which is nice. Especially so for San Pedro - every single thing is imported as nothing grows here and there are no factories (there is barely enough power and water for the town, let alone a factory).

Today I said goodbye to the Pachamama tour group as they left to return to the south. I’ll jump on the next Pachamama bus that comes through here (hopefully in a week if the fuel and road access is not affected) and start my journey home.

On this tour I have met an Australian girl, a German girl (aside from Beatrice who I already knew from Santiago) and a whole bunch of English guys and girls. All of them were really nice and a load of fun. I am sorry I couldn’t spend more time with them but I think I may see some of them again in Argentina or in Europe if/when I finally get there.

Unfortunately some of them were a touch sick when they left (I think it may be a virus although were were wondering if it was caused by either food or altitude at one point). I hope you are all feeling better and have a great trip back!

Once again no photos at the moment (computer and internet is slow and I don´t have my laptop) but I will upload a heap when I get back to Santiago. The desert landscape is so beautiful!

Hi all.

This will be a quick and unfortunately boring post, just to let you all know that I am ok and the tour is going well. We arrived last night in San Pedro de Atacama, a small town in the middle of the Atacama Desert. The town exists pretty much just for tourism so it is a little expensive but it is beautiful.

I’d upload some pics for you now but the interweb here is slow, unreliable and expensive so I will have to wait until later. The place is so nice that I am thinking of staying here for a week and continuing the tour next Thursday

If I do stay, I´ll post again tomorrow.

Hope you are all well!

Carly