Chilling in Chile

After a 30-hour bus, shared taxi and another bus ride, I arrived in the surf town of Iquique in Northern Chile at 1:30 am and suffled my way to my hostel 10 blocks away. One way to avoid the $100 - $150 US ¨reciprocity fee (that our countries charge for Chileans to enter our countries)¨ into Chile for Australian, Canadian and American citizens is to simply enter the country by land. Flying into Santiago, you will have to pay this fee. However, it also means you will have to cross Northern Chile with long stretches of shrubby desert, rocky coastlines and empty sand dunes if you want to see the greener south.

Iquique is a laid-back coastal town with consistent, rolling waves that surfers crave caused in this case by the underlying reefs. It has a long promenade with people doing cross fit exercises on Saturday mornings and a pedestrain walkway leading to the town centre, the Plaza Prat. There are gaint sand dunes and cliffs overlooking the town and with the constant winds and sand, baking sun and warm temperature, everything looks faded.

There are also ¨ghost¨ mining towns nearby, relics of Chile´s once nitrate (aka white gold) boom from the 1870´s to the early 1940´s until the Germans discovered the process of making nitrate artificially. One such ¨ghost¨ town is Humberstone which is 30 minutes away from Iquique. Originally constructed near a nitrate mine in 1872 but abandoned in 1963. It is a bit errie walking down the empty streets, houses, school and processing plant of this once-thriving town. Surrounded by the desolate Atacama desert, the town is slowly rusting away and returning back to the desert. Humberstone has been designated as an Unesco World Heritage Site but is endangered as many buildings are simply decaying away.


As I can´t swim (and therefore can´t surf) and the waters are too cold to enjoy (there are only surfers with wetsuits), I left Iquique this morning for the small, dusty mining town of Calama to transit to San Pedro De Atacama. Here I wait in Calama for another bus on a quiet Sunday afternoon.