Life in the Desert

 

After the excitement of Santiago we headed north toward Bolivia. We decided to stop over in La Serena, a small coastal town before San Pedro de Atacama (on the Bolivian border), just to break up the monotony of the bus rides and to check out the beach.  La Serena is a small, peaceful town with all the shops pretty much closed by 9:30pm. Their main claim to fame is the beach, so we rented bikes (at an outrageous price of $20, which we negotiated down from $32) and enjoyed a nice, but chilly, ride along the ocean. It was spring time, but we could tell things pick up in the summer time. We met an Australian couple who were also headed to San Pedro, and a couple of fun Swiss girls headed south; our hostel was a great place to meet people and that was good considering there wasn’t a whole lot more to do!

After a couple of days we jumped on a bus headed to the very north eastern corner of Chile, the little town of San Pedro. We only booked two nights at a hostel that was described as “right outside the town” but for some reason still outside our budget. The bus ride ended up being a bit fucked up, our connecting bus in Antofagasta left 15 minutes before the ticket said and we ended up walking to the center of town to catch a completely different bus so we didn’t have to wait four hours. Then we had to catch another bus in Calama, and it was a pretty messed up trip all around.  In Chile usually everything runs behind schedule, so this situation took us completely by surprise. Because of the confusion, our ride to the hostel wasn’t there (we were 1 ½ hours late) so we took a taxi. 

$6 Coffee!

San Pedro is a small, dusty, hippie town whose main purpose is to provide tours. They had tons of hiking, mountain biking, sand dune boarding and, most importantly for us, tours of the Salar de Uyuni (the salt flats of Uyuni).  The largest salt flats in the world are actually in Bolivia, but San Pedro is very close to the border so many tours depart and arrive there. San Pedro is stupidly expensive.  We were only there for two nights, so this wouldn’t have been a problem except none of the five ATMs were functioning when we arrived, or the next day either for that matter. There are no grocery stores, and pretty much no way to do things on the cheap.  I grew up in hippie country and I simply don’t understand how anyone could spend any amount of time in this place. It definitely had the dirtiness, drugs and artistic vibe to foster a laid back hippie style, but the prices were INSANE. It’s amazing how many wealthy people enjoying being dirty and at the mercy of the elements. Personally we do not enjoy having dust lung.  We lucked out and had just enough money to get though until the last morning when the ATMs started running again, we booked our tour to the salt flats and got the fuck out of there.

 

 I’m not really into the desert, being white as fuck and pretty much allergic to the sun, so I wasn’t a big fan of San Pedro.  Dan couldn’t believe a town completely reliant on tourism would not have good internet access or ATMs that worked, so overall we didn’t really like it there. The only good part was we were headed to one of the “can’t miss” sights in South America!