Chile – Is This Thing On?

As nice as it was to be back in civilization, in a land with paved roads and road signs and everything, we didn’t exactly hang around in Chile. In fact, less than 24 hours after we’d entered the country we were back at the same border post being stamped out by the same guy who stamped us in the day before. He didn’t even bat an eyelid as he removed the tourist card on which I’d written that we’d be staying in the country for a month and passed my passport back to me.

It’s not that we didn’t like San Pedro de Atacama. On the contrary, it’s a pleasant little town–if a little touristy–of whitewashed houses and traffic-free streets. And after spending so long at chilly altitude it was lovely to be somewhere warm again (even if it had been cold, there would have been no danger of us shivering through the night, as the bed in our hostel had sheets made of polo fleece–it was as if we’d slept in a big comfy jumper).

But Chile is expensive. With no functioning ATM in town (seriously, what is it with border towns?) and only a limited supply of US dollars to exchange at punitive exchange rates, we were forced to keep moving. And as the bus across the Andes to Salta in Argentina only runs on certain days of the week, the first thing we did after checking into a hotel was to go and buy our tickets out for the next day.

We were joined in Salta by Chris and Kyria, who we’d first met on the chilly salar de uyuni, and who happened to be heading the same way as us. After we’d helped them celebrate American Independence day in Salta they went back to Bolivia and we started to work our way south through Argentina: a day in Tucumán (the cradle of Argentine independence) here, a few in uni town Córdoba there, and several more in Mendoza enjoying the delights of the country’s wine region.

From Mendoza, we poped back into Chile for a little while. The road over there takes you right up to the top of the snowcappped Andes, and back down through the ski resorts on the other side (at one point the road even goes under the ski run–and I hope no one ever strays too far from the middle, as that looks like a rather large drop on either side…)

But once again we didn’t hang around in Chile. We spent a few days in Valparaíso, a pretty town on the side of a hill by the ocean where we saw the first rain of our trip so far, and then a few in Santiago, before heading back across the mountains once again to Mendoza.

There was no electricidad again.

This time we were in the tiny dusty nothing town of Uyuni, ready to set off on our 4WD tour of the amazing Bolivian salt flats. We’d left La Paz the day before on the bus, travelling to a forgettable town called Oruro up on the top deck at the front. Our seats were panoramico, apparently, according to the woman who sold me the tickets. And we certainly had a full and unobstructed view of just how crazy the drivers are in these parts, including our own driver of course–if I’ve got a full panoramico view of the road ahead and I can’t see around that blind corner up ahead, then I’m pretty sure he shouldn’t be overtaking. That was enough Bolivian buses for us, so in Oruro we jumped on one of the few remaining passenger trains in these parts, the Expresso del Sur, which wound its way down the country through some impressive scenery to deposit us later that night in a chilly Uyuni.

This time a lack of electricidad didn’t mean that we had no water, just that the water was exclusively cold. Our shower, like most Bolivian showers we encountered, heated the water through an electric element in the shower head. But Uyuni was cold. So having no hot water was effectively the same as having no water at all.

As an indication of just how cold it was in Uyuni, we’d been woken from our sleep by the pleasant morning call of the lesser spotter backpacker, as one of our fellow hotel guests was being violently sick into one of the communal sinks in the courtyard just outside our room (these would be the sinks described by the Lonely Planet in its review of the hotel as being “great for laundry”). I wouldn’t have been volunteering to do any of my laundry in them that day, though, as when we left the hotel to find some breakfast we could see that his sick had frozen solid in the bottom of the sink into a sort of piece of abstract art. (And when we came back later to pick up our bags, the poor ladies from the hotel were pouring boiling water over it from a kettle and poking it with a stick to try to dislodge it. Rather them than me…)

The salt flats are every bit as stunning as we expected them to be, and there’s not much I can add that the photos don’t already show.

With such stunning scenery, it’s almost impossible to take a bad photo there. And it also seems to bring out the urge in everyone to mess around with trick photography–we went flying, as we’d seen someone else’s version of that shot back in Cusco, but other groups were taking it to another level. There were people there with props, playing with perspective to shoot themselves climbing into giant Pringles packets, pushing over giant footballs, standing on each others hands, and doing stuff like this.

After we’d spent the day hanging around on the salt, and visiting the spectacular cactus-filled island, Isla Incahuasi, we left the salar to spend the night in a hotel made of salt, in a small town called San Juan.

[I should point out that the salt hotel we stayed in wasn’t the salt hotel. There used to be at least two of these on the salar itself, but they’ve been closed down for environmental reasons. As the Lonely Planet colourfully puts it, they didn’t properly manage the waste, “essentially channelling it back into the same salty crust that you’ve come to admire…” We stopped at one of these hotels while we were on salar and saw that it has been renamed “a museum” (albeit a museum that sells drinks and has beds you can sleep in…)]

The second day of the tour took us to some more spectacular landscapes, but we were lucky to have got out to see it at all, as our morning had begun with the not so reassuring sound of a cold jeep refusing to start. It was eventually talked into cooperating (after a small nudge from the tour group), and apart from us subsequently pulling up in the middle of nowhere to let it cool down (“un pocito problema” according to the driver, who then jumped out and started throwing bottled water at the tyres) we made it through the rest of the trip, visiting funny shaped rocks, flamingos, and lagoons along the way.

The final night of our salt tour was not only the coldest of our trip so far, but also a timely reminder of why we haven’t been staying in dorms. As we slept in our sleeping bags, under the covers, and wearing all our clothes, listening to the cacophony of snores, grunts and moans coming at us in stereo from the other people on our tour in the dorm beds around us, we vowed to stick to the private rooms again from now on.

We also vowed that perhaps we should head for somewhere at a slightly lower altitude that might be a bit warmer, but as luck would have it, the start of the third day of the tour passed within spitting distance of the Chilean border, and so rather than head all the way back to Uyuni (which only offered more Bolivian buses, more freezing altitude, and no doubt more electricity-free hotels), we opted to jump off the trip and cross over to San Pedro de Atacama, a tiny tourist town just over the other side of the border down in Chile.

In fact, we’d technically left Bolivia two days earlier, when we’d got our exit stamps in our passports in Uyuni before the tour, although we wouldn’t enter Chile until we’d not only left the tour at the Bolivian border but also travelled a further 40 or so kilometres down to San Pedro. This confuses the hell out of me, by the way: where were we between stamping out of Bolivia and entering Chile, for starters. But then as someone who spent his formative years living on an island, I always find land borders a bit weird…