Travelling alone is really not bad at all. It`s so nice to be able to do whatever you want whenever you want to. You`d think you`d get lonely, but I stay in hostels so often that there are always people around. You can have your ten minute chats, and you have opportunities to get together with people and go out for dinner, but then you don`t have to put up with the painstaking group decision-making process. And you don`t have to feel bad or anti-social when you spend three hours at an internet cafè catching up with your online journals and e-mailing. Plus, other travellers aren`t generally all that great. Usually I`d almost rather be by myself. The times that are the hardest are when I have to deal with really challenging situations alone. And I`ve had a LOT of those, recently. It`s been rough.
First of all, I left San Pedro de Atacama for Calama in the afternoon after spending the entire morning at the geysers. I arrived two hours later. There were two groups of gringos on the bus that I probably could have started up conversations with, but I get preemptively annoyed by travellers who seem all-too stereotypical. Really, I shouldn`t be so damn closed minded and I shouldn`t be expecting the worst from people, but I am and I do. Plus, they were all in groups. It`s a lot more uncomfortable to crack into a group than it is to connect with another solo traveller. So, I decided not to try and make any friends. I started feeling ill on the bus. I didn`t know if was food issues or too long without seeing a toilet, but I felt awful when we arrived. If someone would have tried to mug me or something, I would have apathetically puked on them. That`s how bad it was.
The bus dropped us at a satellite office of the company I was travelling with. I went in to ask for directions to the next station. Through the haze of my illness, I got an address and something about turning at a church and walking several blocks. The man at the counter said, “It`s at least a half hour walk. You should probably take a taxi.” I saw no reason to do that when I had seven hours to kill before my next bus, plus I was almost out of money, so I told him so and nursed myself to the next station. Side note: being out of money is not a good thing to be. I was almost out of Chilean pesos, but I wanted to wait until I got to Iquique (where I was going to go paragliding and buy my final Chilean bus ticket) to make a withdrawl so I would have a better idea of how much to take out. Frickin` Wells Fargo charges an arm and a leg everytime I use foreign ATM, so I wanted to make it count. Too much money withdrawn, and I lose even more on changing pesos into soles for Peru. Too little, and Wells Fargo would tag me with yet another withdrawl fee.
Anyway, back to my seven hours to kill in Calama. Sometime within those seven hours I wanted to 1) take care of my stomach problem, 2) do some internet business, 3) make a phone call or two (it`s so cheap in Chile!). I kept passing all sorts of call centers and internet places on my way to the station. However, because of my desire to vomit, I decided I should just get to the bus station so I`d have a home base. Well, turns out the other station wasn`t a conglomerate of companies like usual (think airport), it was an independent terminal. This means minimal services for one company instead of fifty… kind of like hanging out at the Gillette Airport for seven hours, only it was located in the industrial section of town. After I got my stomach problems taken care of, I tried to decide if I should pay to leave my pack in the baggage check and walk to cheaper services (food, internet, phone) or if I should save myself the hassle and just pay the exorbitant amount the bus-station internet place was asking. I only had about two hours of daylight left. Considering the location of the terminal, I decided it was best if I just hung out. After spending as much time as I could stand staring at a computer and letting my thoughts seep onto the screen (two hours is usually my limit), I went to use the phone. I discovered, to my dismay, that my phone card wouldn`t work at the public phones and the call center wouldn`t let me use the card I had because they don`t get a slice of the action. Bummer. This is when it sucks to be alone. When you`ve got no home, you have no way of getting in touch with anything familiar, you feel like crap, and the only meal you can get is Oreos or fried mystery items. Times like these, it would be so nice to have someone. Nonetheless, I persevered.
I thought maybe I could get an earlier ticket (after all, Iquique is a popular destination) and found out the only other departure had been driving out the gate as I was walking in that afternoon. So, stuck I was. And it continued on like that for the next two days, basically. I arrived in Iquique at 5;30 in the morning, and chose to walk to my hostel, ten blocks from the station, instead of spend the small amount of money I had left. That was a mistake. I passed more prostitutes and strip-bars than I`ve ever seen in my life. The first two places I went didn’t seem to exist (thanks Lonely Planet). In fact one of the addresses turned out to be an abandoned building with a door hanging open and crooked on it`s hinges. A taxi driver had been following me for about four blocks by the time I got to the third place. He parked and got out while I was still waiting for them to answer the door. Scary. Times like this it would ALSO be nice to have someone. When he realized that I had already talked to someone inside on the intercom, the driver got back in his car and left. Phew.
The next day also had several challenging moments that would have been more easily dealt with if I had been with someone else. I had decided to save my money and not go paragliding since I awoke to the most bleak landscape I’d ever seen. Really. It was total desert. I guess I had failed to notice the Chilean promo at the beginning of the Lonely Planet chapter: “Atacama desert, world’s driest, covering the northern portion of Chile and Peru.” Fantastic! I wasn’t really mentally prepared to be travelling through a movie quality expanse of sand. At breakfast, I met my first American since I left the company of Jared and Eleanor. It was disheartening. She was from Wisconsin, and completely unfriendly. Argh! In light of no longer having anything to do in Iquique, I took a bus four hours north to Arica on the border between Chile and Peru. To cross cheaply, you have to bus to the border, take a colectivo (a kind of taxi service) across the line, then buy another bus ticket from the other side. It`s way more expensive to get a bus across the border (so I am told). So, I arrived on the Chile side having no idea where and how I get this “colectivo.” I was directed to what looked like a run-down flea market outside the bus station. Apparently, this is the “international terminal.” Not quite what I was expecting, but I`m getting used to bus stations that look like food courts. A giant maze of people and all their crap (I`m talking 10-15 pieces of luggage per person!) blanketed every piece of pavement available. As I tried to ignore all the “Taxi! Taxi! Colectivo! Tacna! Señorita!” and coinciding cat calls, I searched fruitlessly for something that would explain to me just exactly how all this was done.
Finally, I sought out the help of a woman in a call center. She took me under her wing and basically did everything for me. Times like that, it would have been nice to have another person to be confused with. Alone and confused is not fun. It was a good lesson for me, though. I’m so independent and set on doing things on my own. It was really valuable for me to be put in a situation where I was entirely at the mercy of the people. I definitely came to terms with the fact that you have to trust people, and you can’t always have the safety net of the gringo river to float yourself down.
The colectivo is a taxi that takes reservations, basically. You sign up, and when the car is full, you leave for the border. The driver helps you with all the formalities, and then drops you off in the town on the other side. Crossing had it’s moments. For some reason, some people were skipping the baggage scanning, which caused them to be swarmed upon by border police, C.O.P.’s style. Probably they just had fruit or something that was really valuable to them. The people were screaming at the cops hanging on to their baggage for dear life as ten officers surrounded them and ripped their luggage out of their hands and carried it off. Crazy!
We arrived in Tacna (on the Peruvian side) just as the sun was setting. From there, I had to figure out how to get to the next town, because there were several bus terminals. This is becoming more and more common, but it’s weird. It would be like Delta, United, and Continental all having their own airports. It was a mass of confusion and decisions. Do I want to walk to a hotel alone in the dark in this city? Should I go on to the next place right now and have to find my way around there at midnight? Should I hang out in the bus station for five hours and take the last bus possible which will get me to the next place at 5 in the morning again? Questions like these would be a lot easier to answer, and at lot less important, with another person. Being alone, you have the added burden of having to be concerned for your safety all the time. With another person, you`re a lot less vulnerable and therefore have a lot less to think about and a lot less to weigh in terms of decisions.
When I finally arrived by bus, at midnight, to the place I am now (Arequipa), the taxi driver was really nice, helpful, and didn`t try to rip me off. However, the first hostel I went to was full, and he assured me the others on my list were quite popular and would be full as well. (Turns out he kind of scammed me on this.) So, I let him take me to a place a few blocks away. It wasn`t a hostel, which equals more lonely, but I took it. It wasn`t bad, but I wasn`t tired, and it sucks to be essentially trapped in a tiny little room. Can’t leave for lack of safety, but too bored to stay. If I was travelling with someone else, or even if I was at a hostel, I could have gone to the common room and met up with people who wanted to go have something to eat or drink. Instead, I was relegated to hibernating in my barren, piecemeal room until I could fall asleep.
To make matters worse, I awoke to some guy with a Boston accent swearing in English at god-knows-who. I couldn`t tell if it was coming from outside or from within the hotel. He kept calling someone an asshole and sounded abnormally angry. Then I heard him walk up to the front desk, ask what “that goddamn kid is doing on the floor” and say, “Yeah, just give me the fuckin`key.” Jeez! I decided to vacate pronto. (Also another time that it would have been nice to have someone… in the event that I had to interact with this crazy bastard.) I tried the shower. As I suspected, cold water only. I promptly packed my bags as quietly as possible and high-tailed it to the front desk. I walked to the place that had been full the night before. They now had space, so I got a room. It was adorable, clean, had hot showers, and a patio terrace with views of the town and volcanos. After the past three days, it`s a dream come true! There was some weird, 40-something British guy checking in when I got there. He`s going on the same tour I am tomorrow (a two-day visit to the second deepest canyon in the world, home of the Andean condor- one of the biggest living birds). I`m not really looking forward to spending time with him. He makes me uncomfortable, watches me too much, is really awkward in conversation, and was really impatient with the staff (it`s HIS fault if he can`t understand things. Learn Spanish, for christsake, and stop expecting the world to cater to YOU!). Anyway, it would also be nice, in this instance, to have someone to join up with in order to keep him from wanting to befriend me. Perhaps there will be another single traveller on the tour!
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