This post’s journey: Punta Arenas to Santiago to Calama to San Pedro de Atacama; around 2,400 miles or 3,800 kilometers. All in the time span of only 3 days: from February 16th until February 18th of 2023.
February 16th, 2023
Celebration of my last day in Patagonia called for drinking some mate, which I did while overlooking the Straits of Magellan and following through on some emails, squaring myself up to be without Wi-Fi for a while. Over breakfast I gave some tips on Torres del Paine to a dad and his two daughters. I descended the stairs to start packing up, and behind me on the counter a note read, “Cosas gratis / free stuff”, alongside a fuel container, a mesh drawstring bag, and camping cup. With a shave and a brushing of the teeth and tongue, I was off to the airport in a taxi. $19 later with sleepy thumbs, somewhat regretted it.
The view out the airplane window from Punta Arenas to Santiago, the capital of Chile which is roughly in the middle of the country, never stopped revealing fathomless Andean peaks. They eventually lost their snow caps and green bodies, morphing into different hues of tan-brown-orange-red, scattered with faded green bushes, and with less clouds hovering above their heads.
It felt surreal returning to Santiago for a few hours before catching an 8 PM bus to Calama, a small city in the far north of Chile. My first few days in South America were spent here, and by now I had been traveling in Chile for about six weeks. I could actually understand what people were saying, and they could understand me. My surroundings felt familiar, less overwhelming. I felt empowered, grounded, and hungry. Though people still stared at me as the obvious tourist, I felt safer with my basic Spanish skills and travel experience. The warm dry air felt nice for a change, and so too did the hustle and bustle of people selling goods along the sidewalks.
I bought some sort of Venezuelan pancake with shredded cheese on top – buttery, delicious, and fulfilling. Next I stumbled across a herbal goods vendor, from whom I bought some red maca root powder (highly nutritious and delicious, arguably my favorite “superfood”) for 2 bucks, something that would’ve costed me 15 times as much in the states. With a belly still churning, I sought some rice or noodle dish, which was a challenge. Up three levels in a mall there was a food court, and the rice place had just closed.
So I settled for some jugo de maracuyá (passionfruit juice), and back on the street found a different Venezuelan vendor selling some Chicha drink, which I had no clue what it was, so I tried it. Great decision, cool and refreshing, I think it consisted of tapioca, sweet milk, and cinnamon. Yet still hungry, I made my way to the bus station where I waited too long to order a vegetarian completo (hot dog minus the hot dog) with french fries. Full enough, with my stomach rather confused by all these foods I wasn’t used to, consumption came to a grumbling halt.
I loaded my backpack into the underneath compartment of the bus, and proceeded up to the 2nd level, where I had a single seat on the aisle and next to the window. Worth the extra few bucks for a 21 hour ride. It left at 8 PM and wouldn’t arrive in Calama until 5 PM the next day. It might seem like a long time, but as I sit on the bus writing this first draft with only five hours left, I almost wish it was longer.
At first I spent some time becoming friends with Jose, the dude sitting next to me, who was on his way home from a rafting trip in Futaleufú. Otherwise I’ve been so absorbed with catching up on writing that I’ve barely been able to read my book. And I still have yet to watch a show or movie, play word games in Spanish or English, or listen to a podcast while gazing into the driest desert in the world, the Atacama, which…
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February 17th,
I’m in the middle of right now. Thankfully, I can attribute my lack of time to fill on this bus ride to actually being able to sleep for six hours last night. By now, the road has veered further away from the coast, and there are literally no plants in sight. Just rocks. Lots and lots of gray, brown, and tan rocks. Water is hard to come by, fittingly, since I’m in the desert. Yet on most bus rides I’ve been on, there have been stops every few hours for passengers to buy food, smoke, use the bathroom, and acquire water. So far after 16 hours, there’s been but one brief stop. At least that I was awake for. Oh well. Welcome to the desert. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of mountains out the window. This place is starkly desolate, in a beautiful, formidable way. Time to stop writing, and simply appreciate.
Hundreds of miles passed without seeing a single plant, other than those which were planted and human-watered in the towns we passed through. I understood why movies set on mars are often filmed here. As such a plant lover, it’s the type of place I admire but would never want to live in. Some portions of the Atacama have never, ever, ever received rain, as long as humans have been keeping track, at least.
So perhaps I’m good luck, since a few hours away from Calama, the terminus of my bus ride, it rained! Lightning struck a couple times, and brown puddles formed along the highways. For a place that receives only an annual average of 0.6 inches of rainfall per year, I felt like I was really amidst some special forces of nature. Like the Gods and I were traversing this alien landscape together.
I arrived in Calama around 5:30, and proceeded to my Air BnB. It was cute, cheap, and hosted by a nice old woman named Maria. For dinner she recommended I visit the mall, where there are better vegetarian options. So I walked past Johnny Rockets and made my way up to the food court, where there was KFC, Pizza Hut, Wendys, and a couple other non-U.S. fast food options. Ugh. Depressing. But famished as I was, I settled for a mediocre pizza and mini calzones from the Chilean pizza chain. My curiosity led me into “Happyland” for a brief moment, which was like a mini Chuck-e-Cheeses. Alright, enough. It was time to evade the Western invasion.
The sky was clear, revealing dry, Utah-esque hills and mountains in the distance. The air had started to cool down, and the sun would soon set, which meant that in order to stay safe I needed to briskly make my way back to Maria’s place. For the first time I watched some Chilean TV, which was intriguing to see that there were movies such as wild west films overdubbed in Spanish, and stories of “violencia de delincuentes” on the news. A quick video chat with my Workaway host, Alexis, who I stayed with for a few weeks in Coyhaique, and I was off to sleep.
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February 18th,
With Maria out of town early in the morning to visit some family, I boiled some water in her tea kettle for my instant coffee with butter and red maca root powder. Delicious and enlivening (and probably strange to the normal human), it gave me the energy I needed to survive potentially being stuck all day under the desert sun trying to hitch a ride to San Pedro de Atacama (SPA), which was about an hour and a half drive away from Calama. First I walked a mile and a half close to the edge of town, where a local bus picked me up and took me just another mile or so to a busy, scary, major highway intersection. This was my first time hitchhiking on what felt like an interstate. I checked in with my intuition if I should turn around and take a bus, and felt that, no, this will be ok. Keep going.
So I hopped over the guard rails dividing one section of the highway from the other, and walked up towards a gravel pull-off into nowhere, and put my thumb back out. People driving past gave me weird looks, but it didn’t deter me. After maybe 20 minutes Miguel pulled his truck over, and we sped off towards SPA. He told me that hitchhiking is more dangerous up here compared to Patagonia. For the second time in the last 12 hours, the word, “delincuentes” popped into my world. Ok, I’ll be careful.
After having cumulatively spent over a year of my life in foreign countries by this point, I knew what not to do in potentially dangerous places: Walking while looking down at my phone. Setting my bag down. Drinking alcohol excessively. Holding any amount of money out in the open for even a short period of time. Staying out past sunset. Disregarding my intuition and mixing energies with those who are up to no good.
I think the most important thing one can do to stay safe when traveling, and to stay on track in life in general, is trusting one’s intuition. This is the all-powerful abysmal source of human wisdom and goodness. This is one’s connection to worlds beyond the one we see, touch, taste, and feel. This is the final judge of all moral decision making, at least in my book. If I could give one unanimous piece of advice to any human in the general populace of the world, it would be, you guessed it: don’t bother wearing deodorant. And trust your intuition.
So Miguel dropped me off maybe a third of the way to SPA, and again I found myself on the side of this relatively intimidating highway doing the finger (a translation of “hacer dedo”, which is Chilean slang for hitchhiking). Some looming red and white windmills added a nice touch to my time-lapse video (I imagine, at least, since I never got to see the actual footage). A lapse of maybe 25 more minutes, Leo and Isabel were pulling over their truck to merrily take me the rest of the way to my destination. A friendly couple, we stopped and took a picture together at a lookout, admiring the wind-carved, sunburnt rocks.
In SPA I made my way to where I’d sleep that night, Camping Quilarcay, and proceeded back into the main part of town to meet up with the tour company who would be taking me across the border to Bolivia the following day for a three-day tour of the famous Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flats, and nearby attractions. They helped me print off the documents I needed, and offered me a tour for that day too, which I reluctantly accepted. I grabbed a quick bite to eat and went to search for an ATM so I could acquire a crisp $170 USD for the 30-day Bolivian visa.
The ATM that I was directed to by the employee in the Sol Andino Expediciones oficina was out of order, so I asked again for advice, and the next one he told me to go to was also closed for the day. Crap. Now the tour was starting in just a few minutes, and the only other ATM in town had a super long line, and would likely close before I return from the tour. So I told him I couldn’t make the tour, and he flared up. He told me I could figure it out when I get back, and without having the availability to actually listen to me because he was too busy rushing to prepare some document for an upcoming tour, I felt untrusting of his advice.
Well, he was very pissed off at me because he pre-paid for my spot on the tour that day, but what was I to do? I had intended to make the tour, but life happened, and now my heart was telling me that I needed to prioritize preparing myself for the border crossing the next day. I felt torn. I don’t ever like upsetting people, even if I don’t think I was at fault. What felt even ickier, was when he found me half an hour later browsing the souvenir street, in order to yell at me in front of the crowds of tourists passing by. After 10 minutes of him running his mouth at me, I asked if he was interested in hearing what I had to say. Clearly flustered, he responded, “What? You were worried about your money?” In a tone that told me he needed to de-regulate before being able to actually listen to me. So I responded, “clearly you’re not capable of hearing my explanation, so I won’t bother. And I’d like to go on my way now.” “Ok, go!” He brushed me off. Thanks.
So I re-centered myself, and had a pleasant time people watching and buying some little bags of medicinal herbs that I could mix into an infusion. Plus, SPA had a cool, ancient pueblo-type feel to it, which tickled my fancies to simply walk through. All the walls lining the streets were made of some local reddish rocks and/or brick material. I ran into my friends Leo and Isabella from earlier that morning, and walked down to the one and only water source for the town, el Río San Padro de Atacama, which was bone-dry. But, I have a feeling the water simply had been diverted into town, since I remembered passing by a little channel of flowing water dug into the side of the road earlier that day.
Some last minute grocery shopping included a couple pepinos dulces (sweet cucumbers – very juicy, tasting more like a mixture of a banana and a cantaloupe, looking nothing like a cucumber), some limes, a couple guavas, a few packets of powdered fruit juice, bread, spicy potato chips, two beers, and an instant mac-and-cheese cup which I made for dinner that evening to save some dough. Needless to say, my hands were pretty full when I approached the checkout counter.
I moseyed back over to Camping Quilarcay, a surprisingly green patch of land with some natural palm frond huts, where I edited some writing and got to know a fellow multi-month traveler from Germany named Dominic while eating dinner. I was glad that life led me to missing the tour that day. Now I had ample time to organize my pack and try my new herbal tea (pungent, earthy, tasty, relaxing), before slipping into the sleeping bag inside my bivouac (like a casket-shaped tent) around 8 PM so I could rise at 5:45 the next morning to pack up for my tour, which would commence unpromptly at seven o’ clock dull.
My next post is real juicy, and coming soon: crossing the border into Bolivia, watching the sun rise over the world’s largest salt flats, and worrying that I might die of internal brain bleeding while up at 15,000 feet in the middle of nowhere. Stay tuned! Thanks for reading. Comments, questions, etc. are always welcome 🙂
Cheers,
Hans
Words of Hans 