Thawing Out in Chile

SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA, Chile -- Close followers of the blog may wonder, what happened? Chile was not on the itinerary. We have in the past deviated slightly from the route, but never before had we spontaneously added an entire country. Well, nearly eight weeks into the trip, after experiencing the, er, spontaniety of Bolivia, we have thrown planning out the window. We have started doing things like hopping into a Toyota LandCruiser with six total strangers and driving through the frozen desert to the Chilean border, with nary a centavo to our name, not a guidebook in sight and without any idea as to the entry requirements of said country.

But it all worked out, mostly.

We last saw the blog on Friday in Potosì, where the miners` protests had escalated into using hard dynamite and burning the local tax office down to the ground. We were sure things would only get worse -- or, at the very least, that they would take a few days to cool off. So when we awoke at 7:30 a.m. Saturday, well-rested for the first time in weeks, we realized the dynamiting had stopped, and we knew we had to act fast. I ran to the front desk, where the hotel manager told me the miners and government had reached an agreement just two hours earlier. That is how negotiations work in Bolivia. Protesters threaten to escalate violence, the government calls their bluff, it turns out not to be a bluff at all, and after valuable infrastructure is destroyed, everyone sits down at the negotiating table again. With news that the roads had opened for the first time in six days, I hopped in a cab -- still in my pajamas -- and made for the bus station. There, I found hordes of people desperate to leave, including a woman with a herd of about a dozen donkeys. My haste paid off as I grabbed the last two tickets on the morning bus to Uyuni. Afraid the miners might change their minds if we dawdled, Will and I skipped a trip to the ATM and snack store, instead hauling our luggage to the terminal early.

Over the next six hours, we gawked at the sheer drop off the rocky, unpaved road and admired the starkly beautiful mountain scenery. We arrived in Uyuni, ready to sign up for a four-day, four-wheel-drive tour through the Salar de Uyuni and Reserva Edoard Avaroa. After a week cooped up in small-town Potosì, we looked forward to going off-road to see Bolivia`s natural wonders, even if it meant climbing still higher to altitudes of more than 5,000 meters, forgoing showers and sleeping in unheated huts. We had another concern -- Bolivia was bracing for a transport strike on the 25th, the day after we would return to Uyuni. We could find ourselves stranded in Bolivia another week or two (not a bad prospect, except our return flight leaves from Buenos Aires). So we decided to sign up for the tour ending at the Chilean border, with a bus transfer to San Pedro de Atacama, an oasis in a vast, high-altitude desert. We put down a deposit for the next day at a tour agency, then set about restocking bolivianos.

But when we reached the only ATM in town, we discovered it had run out of cash -- two days earlier, according to other tourists. No, we had not learned our lesson from the virtually identical incident at Machu Picchu. We couldn`t pay our hotel. We couldn`t buy food. We couldn`t pay the remainder of the cost of our tour, which left at 10:30 a.m. the next day, Sunday.

Don`t worry, everyone told us. They restock the ATM at 9 a.m. every morning. We awoke at 8 to stalk the ATM. By 10:30, the money truck still had not appeared. It might come today, or it might not, the security guard told us (wearing a Wackenhut uniform -- their reach extends even to the frozen desert of southwestern Bolivia). We were sure we would have to forfeit our tour deposit and hang out in Uyuni until the money arrived. But instead, the tour operator, desperate to send us on our way in a full SUV, talked the four other tourists into loaning us $40 to pay our hotel bill (we sprung for the only hotel that advertised heat) and said we could pay the rest at the end of the tour.

We spent 20 of our remaining 100 bolivianos on four liters of water, and hopped in the LandCruiser.


TO BE CONTINUED ...