The bottom of the world

Before heading to the south of Chile, I was meeting up with Ellen in Santiago to play tourist for a couple of days. She came in on a night bus, and instead of wanting to sleep all morning she came out with me and we checked out the seafood and produce markets in Santiago. While the seafood market didn't smell all that great, it had tons of things I didn't recognize. Massive fish and eels, weird stuff in shells, big squids, you name it. I stopped at a restaurant on the second floor of the produce market and got ceviche. It was more fish than I could have eaten in two meals. Phew. For those of you that don't know what ceviche is, its chunks of raw fish that are covered in lemon juice. The acidity essentially cooks the fish and its served tossed with slices of onion. 

Van para el paradiso!

I knew that my bus ride back down to central Chile would be long, but I didn't anticipate the two hours we would spend sitting because the highway was closed for a massive accident. Or for the fact that I was next to a heater that blasted all night. I seem to always get these seats. It happened on the busses in Vietnam a few times too. Ahhh. Always better to show up roasted, sweaty, tired and hungry in your destination city. Especially when one of the kids working on the bus (taking tickets and luggage etc) chooses to sit down next to you at 1am to ask why youre traveling alone and where your boyfriend is in the quietest, fastest mumbled spanish ever. Even better when you write down the address of your hostel wrong but know its only a couple blocks from the bus stop. And in the middle of a market. No worries, you can just wander down each street that's both a couple blocks from the bus station and in the middle of the market. That doesn't get weird looks from people with you're two backpacks. 

Flamingos volcanos and salt

After I left Arica, I took a night bus to Calama. It's the larger city where you transfer buses and take a quick one over the San Pedro de Atacama. This is the small town that provides access to the Atacama Desert. The Atacama Desert is 49,000 sq mi of salt flats, lakes, sand and lava. Its just to the west of the Andes and still has a couple active volcanos. The average rainfall in this area is about a half an inch per year aka not very much at all, making it the driest non-polar desert in the world. And one of the oldest!

El pueblo de Codpa

I got picked up from the bus station by Roberto and Fabiola that I had gotten in contact with through work away. As we stopped at an apartment they have in the city, a baby goat and two dogs tried to escape through the door closely followed by two kids yelling at them in Spanish to get back inside. Roberto and Fabiola have three kids, Matias (first grade), Augustina (fourth grade) and Valentina (sr. in high school). It looks like they split their time between a house in a small pueblo about two hours into the desert with weekend missions into Arica for food and errands. I really hit the jackpot getting to spend time with this family. The love they have for each other and their happiness is just so obvious only after spending half an hour with them.

Breakin' up the bus ride

My ultimate destination was Arica. It's so far in the north of Chile that it's only about a half an hour busride to the border with Peru. But if you do it all in one shot its a 28 hour bus ride. Soooooooooooooo I decided to break it up and spend a day in La Serena.

On the road again

I had originally planned to buy my tickets down to South America for a few weeks after Burning Man, similar to what I did last year. Then for various reasons, I didn't end up buying my ticket out of Washington until the week before Thanksgiving.

Back to Kathmandu

The flight from Lukla back to Kathmandu was a sobering one. The sixteen-seater planes don't fly very high so it was pretty easy to see a lot of the damaged buildings. In most of the empty space or grass that was backyards and parks, you could see bright orange or blue tarps set up that people were living under since so many buildings were't safe to live in. At this point, there were still aftershocks with enough regularity that people didn't want to move back into their homes for fear of more damage/collapse.