A Holiday in Chile

We have been in Chile for four days now, and it feels like a holiday, or rather a holiday within our holidays! It is nice and relaxing to be in a place where everything works properly.

I am writing this post relaxing in a hammock in a very nice hostel at San Pedro de Atacama in the middle of the desert. It is quite hot during the day, but nicely cool at night. We sleep in the camper in the parking lot of the hostel but we can use all the amenities: a very nice kitchen,  fully equipped, bathrooms with toilet paper and soap, great common areas and internet! Tonight we are going to watch the stars, it is apparently the best place in the world to do so. We also visited a huge open air copper mine in Calama two days ago. Very dusty but impressive. The visit was organised by the State mining corporation exploiting the site, with a guide speaking both English and Spanish. Very interesting. There are many such mining sites in northern Chile, copper being one of the major exports of this country. We could see the huge pit from a view point and the giant trucks going up and down with their loads of raw copper. Their wheels are almost the size of our camper!

Yesterday we visited the Valley of the Moon, near San Pedro. It is rightly named, it looks like being on the moon, even though I have never been, at least not yet. 

Tomorrow we will start going south along the coast. As Chile is a very thin and long country, this going south will take a while. But first we will have to wash our dusty camper. I reckon we will have to do it ourselves in a Wash Your Car place. Nobody will do it for us here, welcome back to the developed world!