Deserts, Floods and Geysers

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As mentioned in our last blog we booked a flight to Santiago - the capital, which is about halfway up the country. Santiago was hot and sticky which for about a day was very pleasurable as the South had been anything but. We climbed the hill in centre of the city to get a good view of the smoggy, sprawling mess that is Santiago. We explored the central administrative part of Santiago which is very grand, with a great central square which is very well used. We had a great lunch at the fish market at a place called Deniss. He turned out to be quality entertainment. The old part "Barrio Brazil" was lovely, really nice archtecture and very relaxed, however as a whole the city was overwhelming so we moved very quickly on to the nearby beach-port of Valparaiso. This is where all the Chileans go on holiday and so we
were surprised when we arrived to find it was cloudy and had been for days... This city is situated on 42 hills, so you can imagine exploring the city was tough... we were aided greatly by furnicular railways. During our time there we visited Pablo Neruda´s house (famous Chilean poet) situated up above the harbour with fantastic views of the Pacific. The house was full of mad furniture which Dave is all ready to re-produce on return to the UK. We were quite happy to leave Valpariso as someone said ´far too much dog poo´ (sorry Dad) and we returned to Santiago to spend a lovely Valentines Day evening in the bus station - to be fair Dave treated us to a pitcher of beer, so no complaints!!
We caught the bus to Calama at 11:58pm thinking that we would be in San Pedro de Atacama in the desert of the same name by 11pm the next day. This is what we thought, however things didn´t turn out quite how we had envisaged. In Antofagasta about 4 hours from our final destination we were told we could go no further. The reason for this was that the Atacama desert had experienced some serious flooding and half the altiplano had been washed onto the road blocking it. We were not impressed and fought over the next two days to get on a bus. Antofagasta is not exactly the sort of place you want to spend more than a night (my opinion) so we were relieved to manage to get a bus on Friday - FINALLY.
San Pedro de Atacama is a completely different situation. We arrived finally ay 5pm and managed to sort out two tours for the following day and our onward trip to Bolivia...
We have just returned from the first of these trips to the Tatio geysers. We got up at 4am this morning and drove for 2 and a half hours into the desert. We arrived at the geysers in the dark and could see the smoke rising. It was fabulous!! As the sun rose everything was revealed, snow-capped mountains, endless geysers, vicunas (llamas). Dave and I swam in a pool heated by the geysers - freezing to get in - but worth it... We saw llamas, flamingos and some amazing landscapes - so pleased to have made it here.
We were planning to have all this for you to see but the computer crashed when we tried to upload the photos - boo - you´ll have to wait.

Hope everything goes well with you
Love
d+c xx

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