Hola from Chile! I finally made it to the 3rd of 5 countries and passed the halfway point of my journey.
Alter Machu Picchu and eating some of the largest, re-energizing meals of my life, I boarded a bus 10 hours south, overnight to Arequipa, Peru. My ultimate destination was Colca Canyon, the 2nd largest canyon in the World, twice as big as the Grand Canyon both wide and deep. Unfortunately to get there I had to take another 3 hour bus from Ariquipa to a city at the head of the canyon, Chivay. Once arriving, it was a quick afternoon of finding a hostel, planning the next day, and then up at 4am the following morning walking down the desolate, dark streets to the Chivay bus terminal. A police officer had told me to catch a 6am bus to the middle of the canyon...as it turned out, I found out the hard way that there was no bus until 8am! Once finally on my ride it dropped us off at ¨Cruz del Condor¨where visitors crammed into a small open-air monument to see the massive canyon and soaring Andean Condors, supposedly the largest flying birds(?) I was able to catch two of them on camera swooping overhead looking very similar to vultures. As you might expect, the canyon was indeed huge... to put things in perspective, as I stood at approximately 10,000 feet on the ledge and peered down to the thread-sized river widing at the bottom, I was looking nearly at sea level! After staring in awe for a while, I took off hiking with a german couple I met on the bus alongside the canyon for a couple of hours. While boasting some more great canyon views, it led us to the last small town of Cabanaconde to catch a ride back to the hostels.
Back in Chivay, some natural hotsprings outside of town was my next destination: a large swimming pool with a constant inlet stream of 100 degree, steaming water. It was the perfect follow-up to an all day hike.
The next day I again awoke early to catch a 9am bus to Ariquipa, then onward to Tacna, Peru´s southern-most major transportation hub. Arriving there at 10 pm, taxi drivers flooded me with offers across the border to Chile. I chose one thought to be a reasonable price- the driver then led me through the entire process: passport checking, fees, money exchange, and finally into a beatup 1970´s-ish cadillac crammed with 4 other people. I somehow managed to get stuck with front middle, grrr :(
First, 10 minutes down the road was the Peru exit checkpoint. Next at another 15 minutes was the Chile entry point & customs. This made me somewhat nervous recalling a story the german couple told me while hiking in Colca Canyon. Encountering Chile´s harsh ¨no-fruit-entry¨ rule, the couple had accidentally left 3 plums in their bag while crossing this checkpoint. They were fined 150 euros (approx $200 US dollars) and written up for an arrest warrant! They had to then clear this later at a local german embassy. To add to the nervousness while approaching the office, I suddenly remembered all those free bananas I received in Ecuador! Luckily over the last few hostels I have been ditching them one small pile at a time, but still fretted over forgetting just 1.
In short I made it through OK and rode another 20 minutes safely into Chile´s northern most transportation hub, Arica. It was nearly midnight once I finally arrived, so I hailed the first taxi and slept in a terrible but cheap hostel. The next morning I awoke and went straight to the bus station. Because it was a sunday, there was no available outbound ride to my next stop, San Pedro de Atacama, until Monday. I bought the ticket, found a better hostel and started to explore Arica.
In Arica I found black sand beaches, a towering monument high above the city displaying the fight against Peru in the late 1800´s (not sure on the date-?), a cinema showing american movies with spanish subtititles (I watched X-men the beginning), and a McDonald´s. Now I have been good about staying away from these throughout the entire trip and don´t normally have it even in the US. But around lunchtime I was starving, hadn´t had anything since Ariquipa over 24 hours before, and didn´t feel like mustering up poor spanish. So I gave in and got a ¨lo mas grande¨ big mac meal, with papas fritas (french fries), a coke, and ice cream sunday (again a typically uncle joe diet)... all for about $8 US.
The next evening in Arica, Monday night, I boarded my bus to San Pedro de Atacam, true Chilean desert and highly recommended hang-out spot from other traveler´s I´d met. The ride there was horrible, in fact the worst one I´d encountered up to that point. At 4am while dying in a hot and humid atmosphere, pinned up against the wall by my the person next to me, we were all directed off the bus for some police search. It not only was early but took over an hour for them to search all the bags, under the bus, in the bus, and everywhere else!
We showed up at San Pedro at 9am. I had befriended a 29 year old from London who quit his job as a lawyer to come travel for 3 months. Oddly he had worked contract positions with HP on some of their mergers with foreign print companies such as Scitex, NUR, Colorspan, and even the latest US company EDS. All of these I knew very well and we chatted about similar HP employees and locations we´d both met and been to.
Once getting the usual hostel, food, and much needed baños, we booked a sand boarding ride later that day and in the evening a stargazing tour. The sand boarding took a little bit to get use to, resembling snow boarding quite a bit and included.
This entry is getting too long and has taken me over a week to construct. Thus, the rest of the story is I booked a bus ticket to Valparaiso (a beach to the south) from San Pedro, thought it left at 1:30pm but really left at 1.... so I showed up to find my bus idling ready to go, and instead of asking any questions, just watched it drive off into the distance. When I finally asked an attended where my bus was, he just pointed at the one that left. Oh well, so I booked a ticket for an hour later to Santiago, continuing on to Valpraiso.
Next entry is for the last of Chile and first of Argentina!
