We hopped aboard a bus headed for the border town of Tacna in south Peru. We planned ahead and bought tickets before leaving for Machu Picchu, but upon entering the bus we were surprisingly the only ones that had reserved the first floor.
Many of the distance buses in Peru have two floors or pisos. Each piso has a different price and can have different amenities such as meal service, DVD entertainment, wifi, 180° reclining seats, etc. I talked Rob into upgrading our seats because the trip time was 15 hours.
Our bus line Julsa didn't include any amenities other than 160° reclining seats, no meal, and no lights. The lack of light was ok until dusk when we started getting hungry for the sandwiches we brought. We accepted our loss when the bus took a sharp turn and we heard our fruit roll away into the dark.
Some 7 hours later just outside of Puno on lake Titikaka others boarded the first floor with us for the remainder of the trip.
5am we pulled into Tanca before sunrise and well before many of the facilities of the terminal were open. We hung out for an hour to charged up our cell phones next to the bathrooms which were manned by an attendant playing a radio much too loud for the hour.
Ears ringing, we caught a cab to the international bus terminal which is about two miles away for 6 soles. The choice was ours whether we took a carpool (collectivo) or a bus over the border. The carpool line had a sign clearly marking the price for 15 soles per person, however, the douche-bag drivers were charging tourists 20. We took a bus at the end of the platform for 12pp to Arica the first town over the border of Chile.
We tried Air B&B for the first time because hostels are around double the cost of hostels in Peru. We found the prices for both of us on Air B&B can be the same cost as one of us staying a night in a hostel. It turned out fine with our gracious host the Familia Avila, until I plugged in the power converter I purchased to use the European style plugs they have. Sparks went flying, I went running, and the lights went out, all the lights...the whole three story building... I failed to notice that the power supply was also 220 volts instead of the 110 volts that we use at home. Our host Carolina laughed it off and went about restoring the power.
The town of Iquique (EE-KEY-KAY) is a surf town three and a half hours inside the border of Chile. It is situated on top of one of the driest deserts in the world the Atacambe. The town is sandwiched between the coast and mighty dunes rising 1500 feet less than a half mile inward. There are Tsunami warning signs everywhere because, as I found out a bit later, the threat of a serious event is very real in this systemically active area.
Right about midnight we were awoken by an earthquake measuring 4.6. Everything was rattling and moving. The family clearly had practice with these events because they all met in the courtyard within seconds. When asked at breakfast the following morning, I was quickly corrected when I said earthquake. Carolina said, "it was nothing but tremors, you know it's bad when the lights go out."
Chile is going to be a challenge. It seems they've invented their own Spanish. Slang is the norm. They shorten all words such as "graca" instead of "gracious". We've become very good at understanding Spanish, but here were lucky if we get one word of the sentence.
