Iquique, Chile (Post #113)
Mike writes…
Well, we haven´t been very good about keeping up with the blogs lately — we´ve been incredibly busy and it doesn´t look like things will slow down for the rest of the trip. So, our readers should only expect a blog every 7-10 days now.
Anyway, late in the evening of April 26 we left San Pedro on an overnight bus to Iquique, Chile. We had previously sworn to never do the overnight bus thing again but we had heard such great things about the cama (bed) and semi-cama (reclining seat to about 45 degrees) that we figured we´d try it out. Furthermore, we are running out of time in South America so we are trying to save it wherever possible. Unfortunately, the ride sucked and we only managed 2-3 hours of sleep. I don´t have time to go into the details right now because we have to leave Iquique on a bus bound for Arica in just one hour.
Iquique is a very interesting city in that it looks a lot like New Orleans. When walking down the street, you get the feeling you are in Louisiana in the USA and not in Chile. Here is a picture:
Our main reason for coming to Iquique was for the paragliding. Iquique is one of about 3 cities in the world where something like 95% of the days have conditions favorable to paragliding. On the 27th of April we arrived at our hotel at about 6 a.m., and took a nap until about 9 a.m. Shortly thereafter we set out to find out about booking tours of a nearby nitrate-mining ghost town and a paragliding flight. We spoke with a nearby tour operator who told us he could do a special private tour to the two ghost towns for 30,000 pesos (about $60). This was a special tour because most of the tours are pre-set and include some other sites. We just didn´t feel we had the time for the other sites. The agent also told us he could book the paragliding flights for us which would cost 30,000 per person.
While we were thinking about what we wanted to do about the tour and paragliding, we went to the bus ticketing part of the town and looked into when we might bus to Arica. After checking out some bus companies we decided to go over to the duty-free mall just outside of the city center. The city is famous for this giant indoor mall which houses hundreds of shops and venders apparently selling hundreds of thousands of different items at excellent prices. A couple we met in our hotel that morning told us we would be able to find everything we needed there. We needed watches, sunglasses (since i left mine on the bus that morning) a backpack for Michele and another SDcard for my camera. We made the 30 minute walk to Zona Franca (the mall) managed to find everything we needed and then came back into town to talk to our tour agent again. We agreed with him that we would come back in the moring to decide when the conditions for paragliding would be best. If they were good in the morning, we would go then. If not, we would either go that afternoon or the next morning before getting on the bus. Then, we would try to fit in our tour in whatever space of time was left.
On the morning of Thursday the 27th of April (yesterday), we woke up, had our breakfast and headed over to talk to our agent. He told us conditions were good and we should be ready to leave with the pilots in an hour. While we were waiting, we took a short walk through town and along the coastline where i got this cool picture of some type of cormorant drying its wings…
About an hour later, after a 25 minute car ride up to the paragliding site, we were with our pilots waiting for the perfect conditions.
We learned that paragliding involves jumping of a cliff (or other high elevation), gliding into a thermal, riding the thermal up, gliding to another thermal, riding it up, and so on. So, we had to wait a bit for the ground to heat up so the thermals would be stronger. The pilots judge the strength of the thermals from the wind strenght, the number of birds riding the thermals and the way a pair of flags near the starting site fly.
After waiting at the launch site for about 1.5 hours, it was time. Michele and her pilot (the tourist flights are generally tandem) took off first and i filmed the departure. This is a picture i captured from the film…
I actually filmed the set up, my entire ride and the landing site but i am not sure it will be too enjoyable to watch. In fact watching it could even cause some people motion sickness…
This is another vidcap of a part of the city below…
Anyway, about 3 minutes after Michele and her pilot took off, me and mine did the same. I have a fear of heights but only in certain circumstances and i´m not exactly sure what those circumstances are but in this case, i wasn´t the least bit afraid. The plan had been to climb some thermals and work our way across the giant sand dune below (rumored to be the largest in the world — really enormous actually), across a part of the city and then land on the beach. My pilot had no trouble finding a good thermal and we were climbing pretty good but about 3 minutes into our flight, i noticed Michele´s paraglider getting really close to a dirt path on the giant sand dune below. I wondered if they were going to land there. Well, 30 seconds later, they were on the ground.
My flight was still going pretty well (except for the slight motion sickness i was feeling when we would lose or gain altitude very fast. After about 8 more minutes, my pilot asked me (in Spanish) if i wanted to continue to the landing site on the beach or just land where Michele was. I explained to him i thought it would be better if Michele and i were together (for one thing, i didn´t know if everything was ok down there and for another i didn´t know how or where we would meet back up if we landed on the beach). So, about 5 minutes later we landed about 15 meters away from Michele…
Picture taken by Michele of me landing
Michele was a little disappointed that her flight wasn´t longer but i was content with my 15 minutes. I was surprised that once i had been in the air for a few minutes i just wasn´t so thrilled with the flight. It was not as exciting as i imagined. It is still cool to be up above everything like that but its not so much of an adrenalin rush. Maybe it could have been better if we had actually glided over the city instead of the giant sand dune.
It took our pilots about 15 minutes to pack all the gear into their backpacks and then the four of us caught a taxi back to town. Once back, we quickly grabbed some take away empanadas and met with our guide to the ghost towns.
The first site was about 45 minutes drive away. This was Santa Laura. Starting in about 1880, this nitrate processing plant was set up to turn the mined nitrate “ore” into pure nitrate for shipping out around the world. At the time, Chile was the largest nitrate producer in the world producing about 45% of the world´s nitrate. One of the uses of the nitrates was as a component of gunpowder. So, during world war I, Chile´s nitrate production was critical to the warring nations. Below is a picture of a wagon used to haul the “ore” from the desert to the processing plant (part of which can be seen in the background).
Our guide, who spoke excellent English, explained all the processing steps and showed us each of the stations corresponding to these steps.
About 3km away from the plant was Humberstone, a town built especially for employees of the nitrate mining company. We drove over there and our guide showed us the school, the market, the church and some of the housing. Everyone left the town when the nitrate factory closed down in 1940. At that time, synthetically created nitrates eliminated the need to mine naturally occurring nitrates. Here is a picture down one of the main streets of Humberstone…
So, that´s what we´ve been up to for the past 2.5 days. We are only planning to stay overnight in Arica (4 hours by bus) and then cross the boarder into Peru tomorrow morning and continue to Arequipa, Peru where we plan to see the worlds second deepest canyon (much deeper than the Grand Canyon of the U.S.). We´ll report on that when we can…
Tags: Category #27: Chile
Michele Harmon
I thought the bird was part of the gate until I re-read the caption! What a great picture!