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Published: December 1st 2008
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Lifes a beach and then you sit on one!! Have you ever seen a desert, no the kind that has chocolate sprinkles on top. The one where there isn´t much H2O around, well our journey through to Bahia Inglesa followed the edge of the Atacama (driest place on earth), past Copiapo. A town where mining is big, perhaps more popular than in the Neath valley, where a huge proportion of Chile´s natural resources are brought to the surface. As you can imagine Copiapo is dry, dusty, feisty and quite frankly rather ugly. Strangely it seemed to have an abnormally high population of 'lady boys'some of who joined us for the rest of our bus journey, with their vanity cases and loud pumping house music through their ipods.
However our destination was far more picturesque, it is famous for the colour of its waters and for a form of poisonous red algae that lives in its seas. We had decided to try and venture away slightly from the Pan Americana Highway and find a quiet little spot to chill out. The problem that we faced however was getting there, this was highlighted when we got off the bus in Caldera and
asked the taxi driver to take us to our cabañas. The confusion on the guys face only produced a form of panic on ours and we felt a moment of dread. We were saved by our taxi driver as he decided to contact number that we had and call the owners who would guide him directly. We were very used to our luggage being pushed from pillar to post but we arrived at Playa Paraiso with only a few centimeters between my surfboard and the floor. Arriving at night can somtimes dampen your spirits but it was soon evident that we had fallen on a little gold mine of a place. The cabaña was completley self contained and pearched on the sand, we had a private BBQ, bathroom and complete kitchen we fell soundly asleep with only the noise of national Chilean TV to accompany us.
As we only had basic supplies that Emma had run for the previous day we decided to start the walk into Bahia town which was about 7km along either a beach bay or straight highway. As we decided to stroll along the beach we looked around, faced by miles of sea on our
left and then never ending desert lanscape on our right. It was mesmerising and surreal in one glance, as if your view was that of a postcard or shot from a landscape in a BBC documentary. We strolled along, chatting away and soon we had arrived in the town. A quick ice cream pit stop was followed by a search for a local supermarket. We walked around town until we were forced to ask a local lady in our Spanglish and she informed us that she was heading there herself and would we like to accompany her. In the end she turned out to speak English fluently and we had a nice chat along the way.
It was very evident that the supermarket was just for a few small items and we decided to head back into Caldera where the bus had dropped us off the evening earlier. It had a much larger supermarket and it was soon after that we were packing away enough supplies to keep us happy for the next couple of days. While were in town we wanted to book our accomodation for our next place and then the bus tickets out of there, it
would mean that all of our jobs were done and dusted, so with only a few language diffifulties we secured most things and headed back to base. We BBQ´d that night with the influx of beach dogs coming around regularly with the smell of our various meat products cooking away. As you can imagine a few scraps were given.
Over the next couple of days we chilled on the beach, ran along the shore line, sat and quizzed each other about life plans and read books with absolutely no interruptions at all, well except for the beach dogs coming back for their newly found water supply (a bowl from the Cabaña). It was majestic, a place where you lose and find yourself in a space of five minutes. We ate more BBQ in the evening with the meal being toasted nicely with a bottle of carmenere.
It was a sad moment having to call a taxi to pick us up but our host, Gloria and Eduardo, were very hospitable and got us back into Caldera with a few hours to wait. We milled around town, checking out an internet store and eating before our night bus journey further
into the Atacama. We had a delightful encounter with a couple of local school girls who took a shine to us as we sat in the local park, their questions made it easy to practice our Spanish but even they got a little bored we us repeated saying that we don´t understand so we turned the table and thought that we would teach them English. Unfortunately with my grasp of the language they are now speaking in very short choppy sentences.
We waited at the bus stop accompanied by another hoard of stray hounds until our bus turned up, it was going to be a long journey and both of us hoped to get some shut eye. The only thing that we could guarantee is that it would be heading further into the desert. San Pedro here we come!
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