Share Iquique, Chile
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Iquique is a very strange but beautiful city. It is pinned to the coast by some huge mountains that provide a beautiful backdrop. The coast sweeps round full of pelicans and sea lions basking in the sun. A great beach with some huge waves hogged by many people practicing their surfing.
There really isn’t that much to do in Iquique unless you have some great weather to enjoy the beach which we kind of did, but nothing that was going to keep us on the beach all day long so we ended up going between Mall Las Americas, the hostel to play cards/table tennis and the beach to at least see some sun.
Booking a Bus is Hard Work!
Who knew trying to book a bus out of somewhere would be so hard! Trying to book a bus to another country (Argentina this time) requires your passport number, and a correct one at that. Not being able to remember mine we had to walk the 10 blocks back to our place to write it down. 40 minutes later we get back to the terminal and find out that either she couldn’t be bothered to turn round or genuinely the 2 card machines in clear sight behind her were not working. I had enough cash on me leaving only 2 coins in my pocket that would amount to about 12 pence.
The only other thing we did from the above was to go to the Casino on one of the nights. We lost about 2 days worth of money but had fun in the process.
It Snows in the Desert!
So our bus was at 9PM to leave for Salta and we had to catch 1 bus to Calama that got there at 4AM, then a wait until 8AM for the bus to Salta. Only none of this happened.
We got to the bus terminal about 8:45PM, after checking out of our room almost 9 hours earlier, to find out the border in the mountains was still closed as it had snowed heavily. It had snowed that bad and widespread that it had snowed in San Pedro for the first time in over 50 years!
So after much deliberation we decided to get our money back with the help of a Chilean lady that spoke some English. Soooo, 10 blocks back with all our bags to the hotel we had left 10 hours ago to find our room had been given away and we had to pay the same price for a much smaller room with 2 single beds instead of a double, 1st world problems ay!
We spent the next 5 days with next to nothing else to do but repeat what we had already done apart from breaking the tedium with a trip to the cinema. Chill, work, beach and drank some booze. It sounds awful, doesn’t it?!