Solucion Por Todo..

UPDATE: Iquique rocks. During the day it´s not dangerous, and it reminds me of Rosarito, Mexico. The surf is looking pretty good, and renting a wetsuit and board for 2 hours is only $14. Not bad. I´ll be going out tomorrow. A lot has happened in the last few days, so I´ll try to keep the story in Cliffnotes version and just post more pictures, because those are 1,000 words each.

Before I left Santiago I met some BMXers who let me take photos of them. They were pretty cool guys and were ditching school to ride around Santiago. The city also has some pretty good grafitti.

Friday morning at 8 AM I got on a bus north from Santiago to Copiapo. Halfway through the 11-hour ride, it broke down, in the middle of nowhere on the Panamerican highway. We waited four hours for another bus, and I finally got to Copiapo after midnight. It was extremely dangerous at night, and every local I talked to told me not to walk alone. There were also a lot of prostitutes hanging around. Every hostel and hotel was full, as it was almost 1 AM, and I had nowhere to stay, all because of the bus breaking down. Eventually, I walked back to the bus station, looking over my shoulder every 30 seconds and keeping my knife handy.. I´ve never been somewhere where I felt so vulnerable. Just before 3 AM I got on another 14-hour bus north from Copiapo, Chile, to Iquique.

bus #1 broken down:

Of course, just on time (around noon) the Iquique bus broke down, too. We were stuck, this time in the middle of Chile´s Atacama Desert, hot, dry, and wind blowing dust everywhere. It wasn´t the most fun I´ve ever had. Luckily we only had to wait just over an hour before another bus arrived. I had left Copiapo at 3 AM and didn´t arrive to Iquique until 7 PM. It ended up being about 36 hours of straight travel from Santiago, and although the buses are very comfortable (the seats recline almost all the way down), it still wasn´t fun.

bus #2 broken down:In the desert:There´s NOTHING out there. Except me looking goofy.Along the way there wasn´t much to see in the desert, not even a cactus. It was empty. However, where the Panamerican hugs the coast, I got to see every surf break North of Santiago. Some were firing, but I couldn´t get great pictures from the bus window. We drove past more than one break where perfect, glassy A-frames were barreling and spitting, rights and lefts, and going unridden. We passed through a smaller town called Tocopilla, and just before town, spraypainted on a giant boulder, was a stick man riding a surfboard in a wave. The words underneath him simply said, ¨Solucion por Todo¨- Solution for Everything. Unfortunately, I couldn´t get a picture since we drove past too fast. As simple as it was, it meant a lot, and I spent a considerable amount of time trying to dig deeper into that image. It will definitely be a landmark in my trip.

I wouldn´t mind living here.. It was deserted.
Needless to say, I was sad. Not about the bus delays. Not about the crying babies, cell phones that no one puts on vibrate, hunger pains in my stomach, or sweat drenching my two-day-old clothes without a shower because the bus had no air conditioning. I was sad that I was looking through the smudged window of a bus that stank of stale urine at 6-8 foot clean blue tubes, void of all human interaction along the Chilean coastline. I was sad that I was stuck passing them, with no one to share my excitement with, even with the small array of broken Castellano (Spanish) that I have in my translation book. No one to grip their seat and stand up to see the point breaks with me, let alone access to a board and wetsuit so I could run down there and throw caution away. I was sad I couldn´t even get a great picture with my small camera through the window of the bus, with its poor zoom.

Alas, now I am in Iquique, and the surf isn´t bad here, so a new excitement has gripped me.
Oh, and dinners aren´t half bad either. Empanada y Inca Kola.
Wish me luck,

Brian