July 7th: Travelling daze

One airline site that is not my pal
Woke up in a daze, and travelled to Calama in a van, surrounded by sheer desert darkness. We arrive at its tiny airport around 6AM, cash in hand, anxious to know whether we can fly today. We tried booking the Calama - Santiago flight through the PAL website for weeks, even asked Blandine's mom to book for us, but it just didn't work. The desk clerk confirms our struggle: we have 7 reservations in the system. The check-in girl explains that booking over the internet only works for Chilean credit cards, and that we should have gone to a PAL office in Chile instead. Duh, we've only been in Chile 3 days, and San Pedro de Atacama has no PAL office. Luckily she is nice enough to recognise our hard work an gives us the internet rate anyway. The airport is freezing cold, so we drink a hot beverage while waiting for the PAL plane to land. In cold, gusty wind we run over the tarmac and board the plane. As we make ourselves comfortable in the exit-row seats of an almost-empty plane, we receive company. The check-in girl and her colleague sit next to me, two guys from cabin crew sit next to Blandine. They'll all fly with us to Antofagasta, where they'll do the check-in while we wait on the airplane. I find all of this very funny, especially because the check-in girl drops a whole bag of candy on the floor while trying to pass it to the cabin crew guys. Who has to clean up the mess? The cabin crew guys.

Valparaiso, ciudad encantador
The rest of the day is spent travelling and resting. We arrive in Santiago, take a shuttle bus to the bus terminal, then get tickets to Valparaiso. Buses leave every 10 minutes, almost all day long. Two hours later we see the Pacific for the first time. It's winter and about 14C  here, but this city has flavour, you can feel it from the minute you arrive. We check in to hostal Pilcomayo on Cerro Concepcion, one of several hills overlooking the ocean. The hostal enjoys a great location, but is very basic. We chose it because we were tired of walking up steep hills with our mega-heavy backpacks, because it's within budget, and because we are the only ones staying there. Basically it's the first floor of  a big house, guarded by students at the local university. I could be their father, but they're all super-friendly. We drop our backpack in the roon, then rush to a nearby French restaurant for lunch, where we watch Spain beat Germany 0-1.


We explore some of the city in the afternoon, then have a fantastic seafood dinner in a place around the corner from the hostal. Hearing somebody say "Osteones en Parmezan y loco a la plancha" now not only makes the mouth of the locals water, but mine too. Chile's reputation of fine seafood dining is confirmed by this here Belgian. With tummies full of seafood and good Chilean wine we return to the hostal. We're both tired, but I manage to update the blog  bit before I go to sleep. And dream of more seafood .