de Norte de Chile

Getting out of El Calafate proved to be a nightmare. There were 10 flights a day out of town, all of which go to Buenos aires, and all flights were booked for six days!! That's how badly everyone wants to leave El Calafate, after they see Perito Moreno and Fitz Roy, of course.

To leave, we had to backtrack to Puerto Natales, and then continue to Punta Arenas the next morning to catch a flight to Santiago. Muy caro!

Unfortunately our stay in Santiago was short, 2 nights and one day. During that day we went to Pablo Neruda's house, took the funicular and the cable cars to see a huge statue of the Virgin Mary (with radio towers strategically placed behind it) and the city at large (wow, sprawling), and looked unsuccessfully for a book store that would buy my Patagonia travel book. I'm trying to shed weight.

The next day we went to Valparaiso, Valpo for short, a great port town having universities and numerous hills throughout the city, much like San Francisco. Except here, they have these box-like escalator things that take you up them. Take that San Fran! You're stuck in the stone ages! Houses on the hills were all kinds of shapes, colors, and sizes - you could spend all day taking pictures of them (if you didn't spend it people watching in one of the squares, like I did). We could have easily stayed several more days here. This would be a great place to be if you spoke Spanish fluently and had time to burn.

Unfortunately, we didn't. We decided we'd need to light a path to Bolivia if we were to have any time in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador (and Mark's going on to Colombia). So we took a 24 hour, yes, 24 HOUR bus to San Pedro de Atacama. We opted for the cama ejecutivo class, complete with three meals, seats that fully recline into beds, and tons of english movies with spanish subtitles and spanish dubbing. Great for practicing comprehension. I watched a great football movie with Mark Wahlberg, a terrible Disney movie called Underdog, and several episodes of McGuyver, the Simpsons, and Seinfeld. I had never seen McGuyver before! I also bought a Harry Potter book, in Español, at a market in Valpo, and worked on reading it. After a total of about hours reading I´d read about 2 and a half pages. Tough!

The ride was great - I really like traveling by bus, but I'd rather not see the accident statistics... Anyway, it was a good ride and makes 5 hour flights across the continental US seem like a drop in the bucket.