I was waiting hours in San Pedro but Jack and Gen had still not arrived. I was quite anxious that something may have happened but there was no way of finding out. Having left the bus station a third time I returned to the bar where Sarah and Fiona were eating. But before I had time to think that perhaps they are not arriving tonight my phone was ringing "Hi Jen were in the main square." "I will be two minutes." We stayed in San Pedro for a further two nights allowing them to recover from their 50 hour bus journey north! We visited some salt flats and spotted a few flamingoes. Then took a trip to Calama (the nearest largest town) in the hope of a connection that day to Bolivia or at least to the border. However, as it turned out on arrival in Calama all buses and trains do go to Uyuni in Bolivia but on the same days and at the same times wednesdays and Sundays...we had arrived on Monday!!!! Options were scarce no one was heading in that direction. Not sure what to do, we went to have some lunch. The menu of the day was three courses all for 1300 pesos (about 1.30p)The waitress recommmended a special dish called La Guanita, my translation was "a part of the cow." Jack decided to go for it but when it arrived it turned out to be cow´s stomach meshed in amongst mashed potato and vegetables...yuck! He said it was quite rubbery ha!ha! In the late afternoon we took a collectivo to a small village "Chui-Chui" about an hour from Calama in the hope that it would bring us closer to getting transport and therefore, closer to Bolivia. The collectivo passed the largest copper mine in the world and by the time we had arrived it was dark. The hotel was ´completo´ but this was simply due to the fact that the lady who owned the hotel was re-painting and she was in a boiler suit covered head-to-toe in paint. Having gone up and down the streets frantically looking for accommodation not hoping for anything special, I asked a man on the corner of the street and he took us to a ´residentiale´ which from the outside didn´t look like anything special but when the owner opened the door it was heavenly! Behind the doors in this dark street lay this gorgeous courtyard. There was a small kitchen lit up to the left with nets covering the window, and straight ahead were plenty of rooms. It was such a pleasant surprise to see clean, tradtional, yet modern rooms with decent beds and duvets! That evening we finally found somewhere to eat. Despite the fact that there were no lights the door was slightly open so we walked in to the restaurant "El Mauley" to find an elderly couple in the kitchen who prepared us a simple but satisfying meal. On the way back that night it was bitter cold but kids were playing football in the street and men talking on the street corners. We returned to a warmer and quite cosy environment. Jack suggested we have a few pisco sours so I went to look for glasses. I knocked on the door of the kitchen, a man appeared his name was Santiago, and he was the local bread man. He was busy kneading dough for the following day. This didn´t however stop him from joining us for a night cap. He seemed a lovely gentle character who used to work for a large bakery but had left to work locally in Chui-Chui. We told him that we were trying to get to Bolivia and his advice was to go back to Calama on Wednesday, there was no transport heading to the border from here! We discussed the Salt lakes between Chile and Bolivia and that we were going to visit them once we arrived in Bolivia. He told us a story about a family hiring a vehicle to visit the salt lakes two years ago and there was a flood. The two children stayed behind whilst the parents left to get help but both the children and the father died and the mother could not return to the site until a week later when the flooding was over.
I enjoyed the time I spent in Chui-Chui. we were the only visitors there. It was such a contrast to the time spent in San Pedro. It had its claim to fame as the oldest church in Chile as well as a lagoon that was on the visitors to do list. We walked for hours in the desert to find this lagoon but it couldn´t have been more of an anti-climax it was a small pool of water! We hitched the last part back to Chui-Chui on the back of a pick-up. It was incredible to look back at the mountains amidst the desert as the sun was setting.
