Just desert!!

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The 1008km bus ride from Jujuy across to Iquique, Chile was just under 24 hours, including the border stops and a 4 hour stop in Calama to change buses. It was pretty much desert all the way. Crossing the Andes we rose to 5200m. It was just dry, arid landscape for as far as we could see, and the occasional snow-capped peak in the distance.

San Pedro de Atacama had interesting landforms, surrounded by towering volcanoes. It was more sandy than the Argentinan side and numerous sand dunes were dotted across the landscape. San Pedro town itself did little to inspire us to get off the bus. I guess it's the safari tours into Boliva to the Salt Flats that attracts the tourists to this place, that only 2 days earlier had an ATM machine installed!

On arrival to Iquique we discovered an earthquake had hit the region the day before and took out the bridge on the road to Arica, making Peru inaccessible. The quake measured 7.9 on the Richter scale, shaking at 7.00pm. Apparantly the land at San Pedro moved like waves, the locals at Iquique thought a tsunami was going to strike and fled for the hills. Quite a bit of damage was done, and we had no water at our hostal for a day.

Iquique is squeezed between the coast and an imposing hill rising 600m about 2km inland at it's greatest width. The hill appears very unstable, with the lower parts just sanddunes. The road into the city winds it's way down this hill, and chasms along the land which opened up from the earthquake were evident. There is a 240ha block of duty free shopping here......sorry, can't tell ya what it was like. We had better things to do......

.......Like Paragliding!!!!!!!! Yup, since buses weren't leaving the city, I took to the sky for a tandemjump, along with 3 Americans we met in town who were looking for some help..they knew less spanish than us! The view was just breathtaking as we floated around the hill, along side the road, of which we moved faster than the cars, and finally across the city to land on the beach. About 40mins in the air!!!!!!

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