seminar

i put the fotos from our seminar in santiago/viña del mar/valparaiso online:

http://chile.marahtyler.com/#28.0

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san martin

i´m in san martin de los andes in argentina for the weekend, renewing my visa.



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dieciochero

Chile's independance day celebration is September 18th, and it's a huge deal here.

we celebrated with a barbecue and games for the kids. also, there is a lot of cueca dancing going on, chile's national dance.

we were told that everyone had to dress up, so we made this huge effort to find outfits. and felt really stupid wearing them. and it turned out that only the little kids were wearing the dresses, none of the older girls dressed up....

photos at: http://chile.marahtyler.com/#30.0

the end

Breakfast for me is eggs and cheesy toast. I buy a Cosmo for the bus ride, and Steffi gets a newspaper. Yay, finally we are on a Chilean bus once again. Pure luxury! The trip to Santiago takes about 24 hours.

At the airport, we check in and chill in a café, drinking coffee and eating cheesecake. Eventually, it’s time for us to get moving, so we ask for the check. This takes about 20 minutes however, and now we’re really in a hurry to catch our flight. We stand in line for security. I am totally out of it after out bus ride, and not really paying attention. Steffi isn’t either, apparently. I don’t realize that we are in the wrong line until I finally make it to the window after about 15 minutes. The lady takes my passport, looks at my ticket, and tells me that I am in line for international flights, we need to be at domestic departures. Which is of course at the other end of the airport. We hurry across and go straight through security, luckily there is no line. When we arrive at the gate, the plane is still there, with the gangway attached. They begin retracting the gangway. The lady at the gate says we are too late, I can’t believe it. The plane is right there!

And that’s how we missed our flight. We aren’t the only ones: a family of 5 runs up and also want on. She says there is another flight in a couple of hours.

The plane begins rolling away.

She looks at our tickets and says “Steffi, Marah….I’m sorry. The next flight is not until tomorrow!” I really can’t believe it now, the family is pissed off too. I am tired and was so looking forward to being home this evening.

Now we will be spending the night in the airport, in our clothes and without luggage, as neither of us are prepared to shell out for another night in a hostel.

Of course, it turns out that we cannot change our ticket to another day because we booked the cheapest fare. And there are no more flights the same day. The only option left to us at the airport is to buy another flight back, which is not an option. We go back to the bus station and get on the next bus to Temuco. Another 9 hours on the bus…I call Viviana to let her know we will be late and arriving at 1 am.

When we go to pick up our bags (which made the flight) from the airport the next day, Steffi’s backpack is broken: the plastic back support, not just a strap or something.

I am really thinking about getting a canvas bag for mine.

iquique

Once we are back in Iquique, we decide to walk to the beach (although Ignacio warned us that the shore is also a dangerous area) and watch the sunset. There are pelicans, yay! I have been trying to get decent pelican pictures for a while. The sunset turns out to be lame so we walk around Iquique  instead. Which has some pretty cool architecture, like a purple church.

We spent 30 minutes hanging around a kiosk, trying to find a junky magazine for our bus ride the next day. However, it seems that all the magazines that cater to women are about knitting, cooking, babies, or decorating. Oh, and gardening and fashion. My favorite title is “Cocinas y Baños” (kitchens and bathrooms). Most women my age here are married with children, so there are no interesting reads for bored singles. There doesn’t seem to be anything like a Chilean version of “Cosmopolitan” or all those other women’s magazines. Just the South American edition of Cosmo. There are one or two celeb gossip mags, but that’s no fun because we don’t know Chilean celebrities. Of course, we could pick up one of the masculine magazines: cars, guns or women.

In the evening, we went out to a bar on our street.

They have a video screen playing horrible music videos, but with the sound off, there is a jukebox too. Everyone starts cheering and singing along loudly each time a new cheesy romantic song comes on the jukebox. All the patrons are men, and there are a million women working as waitresses. I suspect that there is some other aspect to this bar that we are not catching on to, although it seems innocent enough. I ask for a pisco sour, but all they serve is beer. One of the guys at the table next to us asks to buy us a drink, but we decline, since neither of us can finish off another one of these giant beers without getting drunker than intended. But a few minutes later he asks again, and we agree to share one more beer between us. Turns out he and his little person friend are Peruvians. They ask to take a picture with us on their camera phone…okaaaay.

And they warn us to be careful, that this is a “bad area” at night. (Chileans really love telling us this.)

Our hostel is across the street though, so we make it back without incident.

Iquique fotos: http://chile.marahtyler.com/#29.0

iquique/humberstone

Iquique is a coastal town sandwiched between the ocean and the hills of the desert. We arrived there at about 7 in the morning. The bus driver did not bother to announce where we were, even though half the bus was asleep. So we missed our chance to get off at the bus station. He threw us out at the next and final stop, somewhere in Iquique, with the warning to “be careful, this is a bad area.” Great, thanks for dropping us off here, buddy. Once we figured out where we were on the map, it wasn’t so bad, since we were actually quite close to the hostel we were looking for.

View from our hostel window.

There are a bunch of juice bars here. The one we get breakfast at is called “El Mango Alegre”, the happy mango, and I am going to steal that name for the milkshake bar/restaurant/café that I may someday open. 

We took a colectivo (fixed-rate/fixed-route taxi) to Humberstone, an abandoned nitrate town. On the way we get a better overview of Iquique, which is much bigger than I thought. We also see that Iquique has this crazily huge, random sand dune in the middle of the city! Which you can maybe see a bit on this picture:

 

There used to be a saltpeter mine at Humberstone but it was abandoned and now the town is a ghost town.

It is a UNESCO world heritage site, and a tourist attraction.

We wandered around Humberstone for several hours. When we want to go back to Iquique, the concerned old man in the office tells us that a taxi comes by at least once an hour. Yay. We stand out by the road, he says we can take the tour bus which is coming, but it seems to be full and doesn’t stop. We decide to hitch, although this may give the old man a heart attack. We are picked up right away, by Ignacio in a jeep. He works at a plant close by and drives us all the way to our hostel (warning us that it’s a bad area). Along the way he asked the usual questions…. "Don't you miss your families? Do you have boyfriends? Your parents let you come all the way out here? I would never let my kid go so far away.”

Humberstone fotos: http://chile.marahtyler.com/#27.0