After a short (by our standards), ten-hour overnight bus ride, Megan and I emerged on the streets of Arica around 7:30 a.m. After a navigation crisis that was mostly my fault (I was confusing a train station on the map with our bus station, a problem two calls to our hostel for directions failed to solve), we ended up at this amazing hostel called Sunny Days. It was run by this nutty guy from New Zealand and his Chilean wife. The major perk was the all-you-can-eat breakfast, with fruit, cereal (which I had not yet eaten in Chile), bread, cheese, all different kinds of marmalade, and milk. Oh, and there was a cute kitty that cuddled with me in my bed one night. Megan and I got settled in our double room (yay, goodbye dorms!), and Megan took a long nap while I did laundry. Can I please just say that on this vacation, I missed my house keeper! I have started to take for granted all the cooking, cleaning, and laundry she does for me. Doing laundry in Chile is a pain in the ass, because they have wash machines but do not use dryers. So you have to wring out every piece of clothing and then hang it dry. Arica was dusty, too, so by the time my clothes were dry, they were kind of already dirty again! After nap and chore time, Megs and I went to the beach. I have lived my whole life with large bodies of water nearby, and so the last four months in landlocked Chillan have been mildly painful. So I was really happy to finally get to run around in the sand and waves.
This beach was a ten minute walk from our hostel. That big rock is called El Morro. We planned to climb it the next day, which never happened due to a dust storm. Plus we were lazy. 
Arica, the northernmost city in Chile, is much more tropical, so we were treated to numerous sightings of floral explosions, like this bougainvillea bush. 
That night, Megan and I laid low, cooked dinner, and relaxed. We then both took another nap, planning to awaken at midnight to go out (since it was Saturday night and our vacay, and we didn't party that much in San Pedro, we were ready to live it up!) We were both stunned when the alarm went off, and after internally debating how much we wanted to go out, we both resolved to pull it together. We got cute, pounded some forties, and then decided to check out Kamikaze, highly recommended by our guidebook. So, we took a taxi to the club and walked right through the doors...no cover charge, how strange, I thought. Inside the club, there were less than 100 people, which is odd for Chile on a Saturday night at 1 a.m. Failing to notice the baloons and streamers festooned around the club, we walked up to the bar and I tried to order a gin and tonic. The bartender leaned in and informed us only rum and cokes were available. How odd, we thought, but ordered two anyway. As he came back with our drinks, the bartender again leaned in and said, "Señoritas, this is a private party. But these two are on me." How humiliating! We were the only two gringas at a private Chilean birthday party! Umm, we prettymuch sucked the drinks down and got the hell out of there. Luckily, one of the bartenders recommended we check out Club Drake, which turned out to be on the beach we had visited earlier, a short walk from our hostel. Perfect. So we hit the club and danced all night to a fun mix of music. I was super happy to be reunited with all the reggaeton hits, which I had been missing for the duration of our vacay.
On Sunday, Megan and I decided to check out this apparently phenomenal museum about 15 minutes outside of Arica. We wandered over to get a collectivo by the bus station, and were promptly bombarded by taxi drivers who proposed to charge us 10 mil ($20 US) for the round trip. We told them we wanted a collectivo (roundtrip 1.5 mil, or $3 US), and they told us collectivos don't run on Sundays. This sounded like a load of bull to me, so we retreated to regroup and devise a strategy. On our retreat, we started to get hassled by some gypsies, which cannot be trusted here, so we got the hell out of there! After surveying the situation from afar and calling our hostel guy again to double check information, we charged through the mob of scammers, yelling "No, gracias!" while walking confidently and purposefully, until moments later we were safely installed in a collectivo. I was kind of pleased with us for escaping the typical scams.
The drive to the museum was pretty, past olive orchards, crazy palm trees, and lots of tropical flowers in bloom. The museum, by the way, was excellent, probably the best I have seen in Chile. Like San Pedro, geograpical conditions are so dry that things remain remarkably well preserved. We saw several different types of mummies, including a baby whose tiny hands, feet, and nails were intact, and a family of mummies that were roughly 8,000 years old! I was in heaven, prettymuch. There were all sorts of textiles, tools, weapons, jewelry, pottery. It was very informative, and my imagination explodes around stuff like ancient civilizations. Megan and I spent the morning enraptured. Then we hit the market near our hostel for a seafood lunch. I had ceviche (raw fished soaked in lemon juice, whose acidity cooks the fish and Megs had the sea bass. Que rica!
In the afternoon, Stacey arrived in Arica and met up with us! We had planned to go to El Morro for views of the city, or take a bike ride to a southern beach for some cave wandering, but the weather was so windy that the air was really dusty and gross, so we ended up at the same beach as the day before, which ended up being just fine.
There was some sort of wild bird phenomena happening in the ocean, and hundreds of birds were swarming, feeding on something apparently delicious. The bigger birds pictured here are pelicans, which look freaking huge as they swoop over the waves. They fly alarmingly close to the water. I kept getting scared that the waves were going to swallow them up. 
Two hot mamas on the beach. 
After our beach time and some catting around in the centro, we laid low at the hostel. The next morning, we hopped a four and a half hour bus south to Iquique!
In Iquique, we bounced to this amazing hostel that was housed in an old, Victorian looking house that reminded me of the houses on Haight in San Francisco. We lunched at a restaurant near the market on cazuela and chicken and rice, then headed to the beach. We scrambled around on some rocks, checking out tide pools and staging photo shoots. The tide pools made me miss the Pacific Northwest, and Megan and I both concurred that the PNW has the best tidepools ever.
Tiff loves Iquique!
Omg, a sea star!
I have a sea urchin!
The red spots are sea anemones and the dark purple spots are more sea urchins.
Megan has a baby crab!
We spent all afternoon at the beach. Stacey entertained herself and us by throwing a tennis ball for two stray dogs and then trying to get the ball back. I harassed some little boy that had found a five-legged starfish. I showed him where its mouth was, and I showed him how all the individual little suction cups worked. He seemed unimpressed, so I let him go, only to discover that the little shit was taking the thing home with him! His mom seemed unconcerned that her son was murdering sea life. Worst.
Views of Iquique from the roof of our hostel.
We spent our only night in Iquique making shashuka (not sure if I spelled that correctly) with an Israeli traveler named Motti that we met at our hostel. Shashuka is basically a lot of vegetables and spices and egg in tomato sauce. Then you eat it over bread with avocado and bleu cheese. It was pretty good, and after over a week of cooking for ourselves, it was nice to have someone else be the mastermind of dinner.
Preparing shashuka. I chopped. Stacey sat next to me looking cute. 
Eating shashuka. Motti is on the right, and the other guy is Saul, another hostel mate. 
The next day, we had grand plans of swimming. As usual, the weather refused to cooperate. However, we stubbornly hit the beach in sweaters and jeans, praying over several hours for the sun to come out. I shivered in my swimsuit as I watched paragliders sail from the cliffs above town and land a hundred meters down the beach from our "sunbathing" spot. I was kind of dismayed that it was too cold to swim, although I did a lot of wading as I watched the surfers and body boarders in their wetsuits. In the afternoon, we wandered around downtown, Stace and I got pedicures, and then the three of us enjoyed a delicious sushi dinner before Megan and I parted ways with Stacey (sad!), who was headed for a quick stop in Antofagasta and then back to Chillan.
Leaving Iquique, I though, man, what a pleasant place to stay. Our hostel was rad, the beach was, like all beaches, amazing and entertaining, and I would have liked to have more time to explore the city itself, as well as possibly paraglide and visit the nearby ghost town of Humberstone, which was abandoned after the collapse of nitrate prices. By the end of our day and a half there, we were referring to it as Ikik, like we were old friends. However, our bus out of town left a sour taste in my mouth. We boarded our bus at 9:35 p.m., as ready as possible for the 18 hours it would take us to reach La Serena. The bus DVD player was playing a 20 second clip of that Twisted Sister song "We're not gonna take it!" That song always kind of cracked me up, but we listened to that clip on repeat for nearly an hour. Megan and I were getting really pissy. Then, after I had been sleeping for about an hour, we were stopped at some sort of check point, where we had to get off the bus with all our bags, reclaim our baggage that had been stored, and then stand in line while someone went through our bags. I was quietly raging the whole time, mostly because I hate being woken up. Also, it was never entirely clear the reason for the check. Someone told us it was because Iquique has a duty free shopping zone, so the authorities were looking for taxable goods. This sounded kind of strange, especially since they didn't very carefully go through the luggage. The whole thing was odd.
When I woke up the next day on the bus, I was ready to be in La Serena. It was interesting watching the scenery change. The last time I was in La Serena, it was early fall, and the earth was parched and brown. However, in the middle of winter, the desert of La Serena is awash in shades of green from the grass and bushes that bloom in the rains of winter. It was a beautiful and welcome sight after our time in the dry, dusty north.
Long hair on me is like a bad relationship: I never realize how horrible it is until after it's gone.
