A view of the port city Iquique
Some of our group showing their Chilean Pride with a local
After our bus ride from Copiapo, we arrived in the port city of Iquique, which is a little bigger than Copiapo. We spent around three days there. For one of the days, we traveled to a town where a huge religious festival called “La Tirana” takes place for a week. At the festival, there are hundreds of people dressed up in fancy costumes dancing around and playing music. There is also a huge market full of vendors selling souvenirs and other miscellaneous items. I was amazed that none of the performers fainted from the heat. We were literally in the middle of the desert without a cloud in sight. After the festival, we drove to a place in the desert where the indigenous people had made geoglyphs with the rocks on the sides of mountains. We had a pretty worthless debate on whether or not the drawings were art. The next day we went to some ghost mining towns, where Chileans had lived for a while before they got completely deserted and are now tourist locations. Iquique was probably my favorite stop on our trip because we had so much fun in the hotel at the end of the day with our group.
Our group in one of the deserted mining towns
A dancer in the religious festival
After Iquique, we took another bus to our group’s least favorite town of the trip, Calama. The only reason why we went to this town was so that we could take a tour of the world’s largest open-pit copper mine, which I was extremely excited to see. Well, it turns out that the day we got there the workers decided to go on strike, so the government wasn’t letting anybody into the mine. To make matters worse, Chile was eliminated from La Copa America that day. As a result, we had to stay inside the hotel for most of the day because we weren’t allowed to go outside due to the fact that the town is composed of only homeless people and prostitutes… We were very happy to leave Calama to say the least.
The last town that we went to before returning to Santiago was a small, touristy, oasis in the desert called San Pedro. There is a small river that runs through the town, and, as a result, a larger presence of green plants. There was one main street running through town, along which were lots of souvenir shops and expensive restaurants. Our group leaders took us on a tour of the town, which only took around 30 minutes since the town is so small. On our first night in San Pedro, we ate at a restaurant that served traditional Chilean dishes. I order a dish called “pastel de choclo,” which is kind of like really sweet cornbread packed with meat. It was soooo delicious. I also enjoyed the fresh juices that all of the restaurants in Chile serve. During the days in San Pedro, we traveled to Moon Valley and climbed on the salt mountains, watched the sunset from the tops of sand dunes, traveled to salt flats with lagoons in them, went bike riding through the desert, and my personal favorite: sand boarding. Sand boarding is very similar to snowboarding. You are basically riding a snowboard down a sand dune. I was surprised about how fast you are able to go on sand. The only downside to sand boarding is getting sand anywhere and everywhere on your body and having to climb up the sand dune every time you want to go down. It is extremely tiring. Another awesome activity we did while in San Pedro was waking up at 4 o’ clock in the morning to depart for the Tatio Geysers. It was literally freezing in the morning, and nobody in our group was prepared for the weather that we about to encounter. We rode a bus all the way up into the Andes Mountains where there was snow all over the ground. I could definitely feel how high up in the mountains we were as soon as we parked. Our group leader told us that the temperature was -4 degrees Fahrenheit. He wasn’t lying… That was the coldest weather that I have ever been in, and I didn’t even have my really warm clothes on. One of the kids in my groups swam in the hot springs. I thought he was insane for getting wet in that weather.
A view from near the Tatio Geysers
A picture of me shredding up the sand dunes in San Pedro
A view from atop a salt mountain in Moon Valley
Unfortunately, our time in San Pedro came to an end and we had to return to Santiago for our flights back to the U.S. On our last night in Santiago, our group leader took us to a restaurant where we did some reminiscing on our trip and talked about how much fun we had. We then returned to our hotel to hang out. At about 12:30 a.m. our group leader summoned us into the lobby and told us that we were going to go to a discotheque. So, he led us through the city until we got to the discotheque, where the ladies got in free, but the boys had to pay. We ended up staying there and dancing until about 3:30 in the morning. It was a great way to end our trip, but also made us extremely tired when we got up the next morning.
We had spent a whole month in Chile, but, by the end of the trip, it seemed like only a couple of weeks at max. We had had so much fun and made such good friends that nobody wanted to leave. I would like to thank the Wilson family for providing me with the amazing opportunity to go on my trip. I had a great time and will never forget the memories I made. Without the Wilson Grants, I would probably never have heard of this program, so, once again, thank you so much.
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