Chile was somewhat of an unknown to us. Not knowing many people who have ventured to this part of the world, coupled with the fact that it is often overshadowed by its neighbouring nations (except for the obvious region of Patagonia) meant that we were both intrigued and also slightly sceptical about what to except. Nonetheless our journey brought us to the most northern settlement of Arica. Before we start this post we want to acknowledged that leaving Peru so soon and without visiting the famous Machu Picchu or Lake Titicaca may seem like madness to most people but believe us, there is a very valid reason which will soon become apparent.

Arriving to Chile after a long haul, not very enjoyable night bus was simple and complicated at the same time. Our night bus dropped us on the Peruvian side of the border in Tacna. Not much, if anything draws tourists here so we decided to quickly pass through to our final destination. Being dropped at the bus terminal here you have to skip across the road and enter the other bus terminal – this is the international station as opposed to the national one in which you disembark your bus from the rest of Peru. Outside the first terminal many taxi drivers will try to draw you into their taxi to make the journey across the border but beware, these are not official nor to be trusted as many tourists had previously warned us. Upon entering the International terminal it is necessary to purchase a usage ticket to allow you to pass through to the departure area. Here you will find numerous collectivo taxis to take you to Arica. The drivers take care of everything. You hand your passport over and they collect the necessary forms for entry and departure. They then drive you to border control, guide you through the desks as you stamp in and out of the two countries and then continue, finally dropping you at the bus station in Chile.

The whole process takes about 2 hours including the queuing time at the borders. There are other options available in the form of local buses or with more reputable companies that can take you further into Chile but the collectivos are faster and the most popular option for most tourists and locals.

After arriving in Arica we took out our trusty guide which informed us that the town doesn’t offer much to the tourist market. However, we only planned to stay for one night to break up a long journey to Santiago so that didn’t phase us. We walked to some nearby hostels only to be turned away by all of them. For this reason, as well as the fact that this area was extremely desolate we decided to head into the centre of town. After a misunderstanding with booking.com – not for the first time on our trip they had booked us a room at a full hotel – we managed to stumbled across a small hostel named ‘Le Petit Clos’. The hostel had amazing views over the town and port of Arica and was run by the most friendly french man we have ever met, along with his wife, a local to Arica.

To make the most of our small amount of time here we set off to explore and were greeted by endless shops selling cheap knock off goods only split by cheaper food outlets that would struggle to tempt the most adverse traveller. We found the most western area we could, complete with small shopping centre and a few small restaurants and gorged ourselves on a well deserved meal. We had been informed by our host that carnival was starting here tomorrow so there was lots of stalls and tents already set up selling tourist orientated items which passed some time for us to stroll through before taking in some more of Arica’s more photogenic areas.

Unfortunately, Arica didn’t offer much more than this and as we were fairly run down from 24 hours of travelling we hit the hay for the night, not before finding out what awaited us the next day. Chile is an oddly shaped country for those of you who aren’t aware. It is very thin but extremely long and straddles nearly half of the western side of the South American coast. As previously mentioned Arica is the most northern settlement here and our next stop Santiago is roughly in the middle. Northern Chile again doesn’t offer much to tourists and is mostly barren desert apart from a few beach towns, cities and San Pedro de Atacama – which is much like the Bolivian salt flats we are told. It is for this reason we had chosen to shoot straight down to the capital but we were unaware until this point that this meant a mere 30 hours on a bus.

Awakening disheartened and faced with a journey of that scale is a depressing feeling and one that drove us, in pure desperation into the local flight agency stores spread along Arica’s main strip. Usually we go for the cheapest option of transport but this time we caved and booked onto a flight for later that day. Admittedly it was only around 50% more expensive than the bus but it took some justification to ourselves to allow us to shelll out this amount.

A few hours later our french host dropped us at the nearby airport, took a selfie with us for memory and bid us farewell. We checked in and passed through and onto the plane within the hour. Less than two hours later we touched down in Santiago and the grins our faces bore said it all. We were ecstatic to of skipped those 30 hours on a bus and be able to settle in Santiago with the knowledge that even this time the next day we still wouldn’t of arrived

All in all Arica was a good pit stop but we would not rush to suggest spending any significant amount of time here. However, our top bit of advise for this leg of a journey to Santiago is to simply suck it up and pay for the flight, we guarantee you won’t regret it one bit – we didn’t!

Find out how our time in Santiago went after we were so happy to arrive in the next post and all about one of our favourite South American cities

Peace out

Jonny & Hayley 🙂