Four hours of desert and a brush with officialdom; from Arica to Iquique
January 8th 2015 If one flies into the city of Iquique, in Northern Chile, one lands on an airstrip more or less on the beach, surrounded by desert and at the foot of a giant mountain of sand. The gigantic sand dunes and the desert, spread from the Andes in the east, to the ocean in the west. Virtually the whole of Northern Chile is desert, from the Peruvian border down to the Atacama, where it hasn´t rained for
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Prior to the coming of the Spanish in the 16th century, northern Chile was under Inca rule while Araucanian Indians inhabited central and southern Chile; the latter were not completely subjugated until the early 1880s. Although Chile declared its ind... ... read more 
