Advertisement
Published: November 2nd 2010
Edit Blog Post
Valpo to San Pedro
Hola from San Pedro de Atacama!
Arrived here after about 23 hours of bus travel from Valpo, and i'm pretty gosh darn impressed. San Pedro pretty much exists only for gringos as a means of launcing tours into the surrounding desert to sandboard, horseride, visit canyons, geysers, etc. Construct of tourism aside, it still seems like very cool place to hang out. It's essentially a dusty little desert centre that you can traverse on foot in roughly five minutes. All of the places that i'd emailed about accomodation failed to reply bar one really expensive one (this may have been due to my rubbish spanish in the email i sent out), so i'd been a bit worried about finding a place to stay. Fortunately, i exited the bus a couple of hours ago to about five Chilean dude forcing hostel pamphlets into my hands and i fairly quickly settled for a dorm bed in Hostal Florida, not far from the main street (although... nothing in this town is more than 200m from the main street... except sand).
My final days in Valparaiso were spent mostly strolling
around the streets. I visited one of Pablo Neruda's houses (it wasn't that exciting, but he certainly loved to collect strange things), took a cameraful of graffiti photographs, splashed out about 15US on a three course meal in a fancy restaurant (not really sure what i ate, but it was quite delicious; some kind of salmon wrap, a giant steak that i think was tuna? and a huge hunk of some kind of berry meringue cake) which made food prices in Sydney seem immediately ridiculous considering Chile is one of the most expensive places in SA. One the last night there (before my 1030pm bus), i went to a giant concert that was in the main plaza. There were pretty great bands on, too. One sort of progressive jazz thing and then a band which the crowd seemed to love that played kind of ambient rock with giant horns and piano.
Managed to get onto the bus without too many problems, and it turns out the buses here are really comfy. I rode semicama (the less expensive of the two seating options), and the
seats recline waaaay further back than on planes, and they gave me a blanket and pillow and i slept pretty much until morning. The following ten hours of travel were pretty draining, though, and i arrived in Antofagasta in low spirits and stumbled to the hotel i'd booked and passed out until the next morning. The owner was great and woke me up in the morning and cooked me breakfast and told me how to get back to the bus terminal via collectivo (like a cab, but on fixed routes and about a tenth of the price). In retrospect, i'd have likeed to have looked around Antofagasta a bit more. It's much nicer than Lonely Planet would have you think, and i kind of sandwiched between a large beach on one side, and mountains on the other. Some parts were pretty scummy, bit it didn't seem at all dangerous toward the coastal slice of the sandwich.
The bus trip to San Pedro was much more pleasant by virtue of me being much more well rested. I sat down
Valpo Graffiti
Wrestle for your life! with a sandwich from the bus depot and cranked the ambient music (thanks Lachlan) and watched the desert go by. The area between Antofagasta and San Pedro is dotted with little shrine constructions (which i assume were for road accident victims) and abandoned clusters of building which were falling apart next to the road. Lonely Planet tells me these are the ghost towns left behind after a nitrate mining boom. They were pretty cool to look at. Lots of trucks pottering around the desert carrying rocks as well. Not sure what those were for.
Anyway, it's about time i retired. I'll go book some tours tomorrow, and return with more interesting photos that were not taken from a bus and more interesting stories that do not involve travelling in a bus.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.177s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 6; qc: 47; dbt: 0.1308s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Daventry
non-member comment
I'm Reading