Entering Chile
May 12th, 2009
View the trip so farI left Cuzco on Saturday at 2pm and arrived in Tacna around 9 in the morning. Took a collectivio, with four other guys that were on the same bus, across the border to Arica, Chile. There was a Chilean, a Dutchmen, and another American. A funny thing happened to us two American’s as we were leaving Peru. The guard wanted to do a “thorough check” for some reason. I got a little nervous when he brought me into a separate room that had an examination table with stirrups. What the hell I thought? But he just ended up padding me down and went through my day pack. Meanwhile my big pack, which had all the drugs (just kidding mom) was still in the collectivio. I didn’t mention that. He was intrigued by my money belt. He asked me what it was, like he had never seen one before. So I showed him and everything was good. Entering Chile was no sweat. Apparently the Peruvians don’t want their drugs leaving the country.
The collectivio dropped us off at the terminal and just like taxi drivers world wide he tried to rip us off. We had agreed on a price before we left Peru, and by the time we got to Chile it had gone up. We refused and payed what we had originally agreed upon. The four of us then had breakfast. At this point we had been traveling for close to 19 hours on a night bus with no real food. During breakfast I discovered that I was not the only one that didn’t know where he was going, includig the Chilean. We all just crossed the border and figured that we would figure it out once we got there.
I had heard that Iquique was nicer than Arica, so I decided to take the next bus out. While the others went on their own way.
I was a little surprised when I got off the bus and there were no taxi drivers hounding me. Usually when a gringo gets off a bus in South America he gets hit by either a barrage of taxi drivers, or “agents” from hostals, or both. Not here. I also noticed that the city was kind of dirty. I chalked that up to just the neighborhood that the terminal was located in. I was soon to find out that I was wrong. It took me about ten minutes to figure out that all the taxis in this town are collectivios, meaning that they take more than one passenger at a time. I kept waiting for an empty one. Once I figured that out, it took me another ten minutes to find one that was going to the area where my hostal was.
The hostal was actually kind of nice for being a Hostel International. Usually the HI hostals are kind of crappy. It turned out that there really isn’t much to do in Iquique so at night most of the residents were just hanging out at the hostel and drinking. Not a bad choice for me. I decided that night that I would move on the next day, and take a night bus to San Pero de Atacamas.
The next day I got up, had breakfast and headed out to the bus agencies to find a bus. I then spent the day walking around the city and the beach. Oh I forgot to mention that Iquique is an up and coming beach town, with the keywords being, “up and coming”. While walking around I ran into Tom, who I had done a couple of hikes with in Huaraz, Peru. So we just hung out the rest of the day, had some beers, dinner and then I went off to catch my bus.
