After my friend left for Switzerland from Santiago, I stayed for a couple more days to visit Chile’s capital.

Santiago is a big city, with more than 5 millions people leaving there. The center is really crowded, lots of people on the street, lots of people selling a bit of everything as well, shouting “a luca” (it means for 1000 chilean pesos, around 1.2 chf) 🙂

With my friend we followed a free walking tour of the city, very interesting, we leart a bit more about the chilean culture, history and politics as well, very instructive! Chile’s history is quite hard, given the fact that it was a dictatorship for almost 20 years and that the political situation is still a bit troublesome, the guide told us it’s still a sensible topic for Chileans. Though it was really interesting to get a bit more knowledge on this country’s history!

In the city there are a few hills that you can climb to get a view of the city, and it’s surrounded by mountains. I went to Cerro San Cristobal, that is about 300m above the city to get a panoramic view, the city is so polluted that you can actually see a cloud floating above it, preventing you to see the moutains surrounding it…

After spending around 4 days in the city, walking around, I took a flight to Iquique in the North of Chile, on the pacific coast. Since my flight was at 05:10 in the morning, I spent part of the night in my hostel’s hall “sleeping” on a couch, then “sleeping” at the airport on a bench, and finally sleeping in the plane 🙂

I arrived in the morning in Iquique, and while waiting for my hostel to open I sat on the beach, watching early surfers enjoying the famous waves of Iquique 🙂

It’s a really cool city, surrounded by mountains and hills, it’s quite funny as the city is on the coast and outside the city it’s just dirt and sand mountains. The landscapes are surprising!

I spent the first day walking around the city, there is a pedestrian street that looks like a western with saloons 🙂 I also spent some time on the beach, there were a lot of people surfing and doing bodyboard, it was quite impressive!

For the following day I booked a tour to go in the Chilean Altiplano, so the bus came to pick me up at 04:15 am… That was tough given the fact that I barely slept the night before 🙂 But it was totally worth it!

The beginning of the tour was a bit difficult because we drove from the see level up to 4200m! And you can feel the height! I normally don’t have issues with altitude, but this much height difference in so little time was challenging, with a bit of a headache and it was more difficult to breathe. Thankfully I got used to it, but for some people in the groupe it was more troubling…

The first thing we visited were Geysers and therms of Puchuldiza. With the sun rising it was really beautiful and mystical! Smoke and geysers coming out of the ground, with the rocks colored in white/yellow due to sulfur, and the red-like mountain and green-yellow bushes in the background with the blue sky, it was amazing! There was a “natural” pool, man-made but directly filled with the hot spring.

We took the bus to visit small villages in the altiplano, and on the way we saw a few wild donkeys (I didn’t know it existed), some strange rabbits and a lot of alpacas 🙂

We reached the small villages at around 3800m high, where only a family of 5 persons lives there! We saw as well some other villages, kind of lost in the middle of the mountains, almost abandoned, must be lonely to live there…

We also saw the Laguna Arabilla, with flamingos and alpacas, with the Isluga volcano in the background, even though it was covered in clouds. It’s quite funny, in Iquique the weather was really good, sunny with no clouds, but in the altiplano it’s actually the rain season, they call it the “Bolivian winter” 🙂 So at some point we even got some rain/snow, while later the same day it was completely sunny!

We continued the tour throug some canyons that looked like a lunar landscape to go see a geoglyph, El Gigante de Atacama, a 119m big drawing on the side of a hill in the middle of a desert, that was quite funny 🙂

And we eventually finished our trip to return to Iquique, enjoying a nice sunset on the ocean 🙂

I spent one more day in Iquique, chilling on the beach, walking around the city, before taking a bus to go to San Pedro de Atacama where I’ll spend a few days before crossing to Bolivia through the Uyuni salt flat!