A cold autumn day as winter approaches and the Athabasca Glacier in full retreat gets some well deserved replenishment.

This time we’re taking you back to May 2010 and to a desert in northern Chile.

We leave Pisco Elqui taking a morning bus ride through the valley back towards the coast. After a couple of hours we arrive the lively fishing town La Serena on the northern coast of Chile.
I think up a hilarious and catchy, or as just puts it super annoying, song called “HEY LA Serena” sung to the tune of Macarena it really only has three words and a prelude of pretending to speak Spanish and anyone can join in. Basically it goes:
Takeabus tothecoast of northern chile
Haveabigheadache cozyoudrinktomuch pisco
HEEEEEEY! LA SERENA!!!
Thankfully one homeless guy thought it was pretty good, he and his toothless grin joined in before falling over.

Anyway, our stay in La Serena is short as we are making our way up the coast to San Pedro de Atacama. So we spend a brief dazed moment at 7am walking around La Serena. Even at this early hour there are people getting about their daily business and painting graffiti on the steep streets that lead down the hill to the harbor. But we have no more time to explore, we board our bus to Calama for our 14 hour ride.

The scenery flies past.

Some of the scenery

By the time we arrive at Calama it’s night time. Calama bus station is small, crowded and dirty. We push through the mob to get our bags and find the next bus to take us to San Pedro. All goes well and we’re on our way for the final leg of our trip.

G’day Travelers,

As per usual we’re Michael J Foxing it back to the future in our proverbial Delorean all the way back to June 2010.

Its a Saturday, not that we’d know thanks to Travel Time which has it about “not long ago”, a bright and sunny Saturday. We have just come from the surfing town of Pichilemu on the coast of southern Chile.  We’re on a bus, possibly made in the mid-70′s or at least the seats smell like they haven’t been cleaned in that long. We’re flying past the the fields and small hillside towns on the way too Santiago, Chile’s smoggy capital city.

We’ve been to Santiago before and along with what we’ve read and heard from other travelers its a city best served as a pass through point. It’s actually quite a nice big metropolis right on a doorstep of the Andes with a lot of European charm, much like most of the cities we visited in South America. But it is big with a LOT of people everywhere at every time and due to it’s location a very bad pollution problem.

We spent the day and most of the evening exploring the city, we found ourselves spending a lot of time around the neighborhood of Barrio Bellavista. Barrio Bellavista is a lovely, lively part of Santiago. Its colourful streets are lined with pubs, restaurants, art galleries, dance studios, night clubs and cafe’s.

Did i mention colurful?

The modern section of Barrio Bellavista

We could of spent more time and money eating our way around the cafe’s and pubs of Santiago but we had a bus to catch. This bus was heading into the great unknown, otherwise called Pisco Elqui at around 10pm.

Pichil-emu get it!?!? ha!

It is May 20th 2010 and Jess and I have just taken a 3 hour ride aboard an old bus from Santiago through the Chilean countryside to the fishing village of Pichilemu….

There is something unsettling about the very earth you stand upon shaking! A sort of uneasy fear knowing there’s little you can do other than stand in awe of the great force of nature. The first few times we felt the tremors I convinced Jess someone was just doing some earth moving with a dump truck, I was 50% right.

Pichilemu after the quakes:

Yup the Concepcion, 50km south, earthquakes still cause small daily tremors in Pichilemu. The people are busy rebuilding homes and places destroyed by the second 7.2 earthquake or the tsunami that followed. Even with all the destruction, Pichilemu is an amazingly special place. It has an aura of relaxation, a place where time doesn’t matter unless it’s breakfast time, time to go surfing, time for bed, time for a beer etc etc.