5th Nov. 2016
We’re not normally great fans of modern, swish hotels. Whilst we like being comfortable as much as anyone, we find that they’re often overpriced (particularly for things like breakfast) and usually they are soulless, impersonal affairs where you can easily end up not talking to anyone. However the Terrado Suites in particular – and Antofagasta, in general – has turned out to be a bit of a gem and we’re sorry to be moving on again so quickly.
This sense is exacerbated when we get to the bus terminal and start waiting for our bus. There are no departure boards like at a train station, but if we have understood the woman in the ticket office correctly, the bus will be No. 2848 and it will be somewhere between Gates 9 – 15. It is almost certainly my fault, as the previous day I had said to Janet how good it was that the buses were almost on time. And so we waited and waited. Double and triple checking that the few Pullman buses that did arrive weren’t No. 2848 and weren’t going to Caldera. Fortunately a local took pity on us and said that he was waiting for the same bus and we then felt a whole lot better. But we were still waiting.
Eventually, around an hour late, the bus turned up. To be fair, it had travelled from Arica (where we were over a week ago) and is going on to Santiago. I wonder if anybody had signed up for all 23 hours of the bus trip?? The next surprise is that the bus configuration wasn’t 1st Class / 2nd Class but 1st / 1st. This would be OK in and of itself except that the top deck, front row seats that we had booked, didn’t exist and so we weren’t going to get the panoramic view (of the endless empty desert) that we had been looking forward to. Anyway, we find a seat, make ourselves comfortable and settle in for the 6 hour journey – as usual, there is lots to crack on with.
Our next surprise is at the small town of Chañaral – up the coast a little from Caldera, and an option for our next stop that we had discounted – when the bus starts to empty. We should have guessed that it wasn’t just an unusually popular stopping off point but we sit there oblivious until the conductor comes down and starts gesticulating that we need to get off the bus. Between the driver and the conductor we understand that we should get off and wait and not worry about our backpacks, but it is still somewhat disconcerting when the bus just drives off. Once again, our fellow passenger takes pity on us and explains that the bus has gone to fill up with diesel.
Sure enough, half an hour later, the bus reappears and we all troop on again. It’s just a short run down to Caldera but we’re now running about an hour & a half late, pretty fed up with being on the bus and generally impatient to get to the hotel and have a beer and a shower. So, it doesn’t help when the phone map shows the hotel at the wrong end of town and I confidently march us off in the wrong direction – only to discover my mistake 15mins later and have to turn us round and walk back to within 100yds of the bus terminal.
If we’d gone straight from our ‘compact and bijou’ hostel in San Pedro to our ‘suite’ here in Caldera, we’d be very happy. But our night in Antofagasta has spoiled us – here we have no sea view out of the window, no airy spacious room and certainly no free glasses of bubbly. Indeed, the whole town of Caldera seems to be stuck in a time-warp. After the hustle and bustle of San Pedro, it is a shock to arrive in a little seaside town with little or no foreign tourists. This is reinforced when we go out to for supper and have trouble finding a restaurant of any sort. In the end we settle for the ‘1850 Restobeer’ – sort of self explanatory really, though the music was 1980’s heavy metal (Metallica, I think) rather than 1850 anything!
Then we had the usual challenge of going from the menu to the actual set of dishes that are available before we settle for a seafood and vegetable stir fry (which was very tasty and a welcome contrast to all of the red meat and chips that we’ve had over the last few days). As we wash the food down with a couple of pints of the local craft beer, we reflect that this is a good metaphor for our day – arriving late in a town that is behind the times, but somehow it just all works out in the end.