Today, we travel from Santiago to get a flight to Calama. This airport is in the Atacama Desert, a huge area in the north of Chile. People (mostly Brazilians) come here to hike, bike, swim in hot springs, camp, and see the volcanos.
The flight on Latam Airlines makes Volaris Airlines look almost first class! Jim had a window seat in row 9 while I had a seat on the aisle in row 38, the last row. Since the flight was just under two hours, no worries, right? Well, there were two bathrooms for about 200 passengers and it seemed like half the plane needed to go and bump me coming and going. I understand that the view of the desert was pretty spectacular but the last two rows of the plane had no windows. Okay, enough of the pity party!
We were picked up by a university professor who taught European History in San Pedro de Atacama, our destination for today. As we drove the 1.5 hours to San Pedro, we saw hundreds of wind turbines and thousands of solar panels in the desert. What a good idea. We passed the the Licancabur Volcano, which was amazing. It is dormant but we will be seeing it from the Bolivian side tomorrow.
We continued through the Andes Mountains to the dusty streets of San Pedro de Atacama, where almost all of the town is built of red adobe. The whole town is monochromatic. We needed to get our passports and other visa paperwork to enter Bolivia tomorrow but had difficulty finding a shop to do this. Ultimately, we got it done and found a restaurant with WiFi to eat and catch up on mail. The food was surprisingly good and twice the amount we could consume. Another Pisco Sour and an Austral Calafate beer for Jim and we were set for the rest of the day. We took the other half of our meal back to the hotel. Good thing, because we were getting picked up at 6:00 AM to head to the border and would be missing breakfast.
By 9:00, we were asleep after the long day… Tomorrow, we cross the border to Bolivia.