How'd you do that?

San Pedro

We’re up early the next day, much to the dismay of many. There are a lot of groans as we get on the truck,
Grace and Danielle

but it’s a long drive day, so we have to get going. Today is the longest, most boring truck day in South America. We pretty much just pass through rocky desert the whole way. It looks like the way I imagine Afghanistan to look; lots of sand and rocks and not much else.

That afternoon we stop in a town named Calama that has a big mall and supermarket. San Pedro has virtually nothing for shopping, so I want to get it all done here for the next 3 days as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, about halfway through the shopping, Andy walks up to me and mentions that there’s a possible situation in the mall involving Grace. She seems to have lost her credit card into a pay phone. I rub my head, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Sure enough when I arrive on the scene, Grace is crying and yelling at the mall manager. It seems that in England you can put credit cards into pay phones and they’ll just charge you through your credit card. Regrettably here you have to use a phone card. So while Jill, the American girl, tries to calm down Grace I have a chat with the mall manager. He claims that he doesn’t have the key to open the phone and that we’ll have to wait until the next morning to claim the card. Of course, that’s impossible or at least really inconvenient, as we’re still an hour and a half from San Pedro and we would have to come back the next day. So I ask him if he has the phone number for the people who manage phones and he says, ‘no he doesn’t and it’s quite impossible for them to come out now anyway.’ Hmmm…first of all I find it hard to believe that he doesn’t have their phone number, but OK, does he have a phone book so I can at least try.

He looks at me obviously irritated that I won’t be put off so easily. Eventually, I get him to take me to his office and we find the number. It turns out that it’s not impossible for the guy to come out to the phone and he says that he’ll be out in a jiffy (he doesn’t really say in a jiffy, but whatever the Spanish equivalent is). In the end, the guy gets there before the shoppers are even done, opens the phone (infuriately with a screwdriver) and we’re back on the truck without any time lost.

We finally get to San Pedro that evening and set up camp. San Pedro is in the middle of the Atacames desert, one of the driest places on Earth. The town itself is very small, but charming with adobe buildings and a number of nice cafés and bars with large outdoor courtyards. After dinner a bunch of us sample of a couple of the bars and then come back fairly early. Embarrassingly, Claire invites me to her tent, but when I come back from the bathroom she’s already gone to it and I don’t know which one it is. There’s 16 identical tents spread throughout the campground and I’m not about to start knocking on each one trying to find her, so I end up just going to my own tent. The next morning she’ll laugh and laugh.

Note: Unfortunately, this is where I stopped blogging about this tour. I always meant to continue, but I never got around to it.