Arica, Putre & the Lauca National Park

I had started this post, and will leave most of it as already written,  before we suddenly had to change our plans as Craig wrote in the last 2 posts.

We continue to find Chile very friendly. Arica, on the Peruvian border is a city of of ~230 000 people on the ocean, and in the desert and its downtown area resembles some in Europe more than what we saw in Peru - pedestrian streets and all.
I enjoyed the youngish guys we saw perform in cross walks when the cars were stopped - they didn’t hold up traffic and quickly walked around with their hats once the light turned.
There are plenty of traffic lights and cross walks, and cars yield to pedestrians even when there are no lights. This has not been the case where we visited in Peru. But the language barrier continues to be a problem. Only one woman spoke English at the airline office, and we continue to use google translate when my extremely limited Spanish fails at hotels and guest houses.

Link to Arica, Putre & Lauca pictures

Designed by G. Eiffel, as in the Tower

Craig read the average income here is 2.5 x that of Peru’s. Chile’s is 25% of ours at home. We find the recent demonstrations here totally understandable, because I have paid $2-3 for a very tasty, but small cup of coffee, and a fast food meal for the 2 of us came to $14 (great burritos, incl.soda at a mall). This mall was close to our hotel in Arica, and looked just like a mall at home - all modern and clean with some international chain stores.
But why demonstrators have to vandalize, and loot is beyond me - doing this certainly doesn’t increase my sympathies for their cause.

We took yet another bus inland to Putre, to a nice guest house at an elevation of 3300m (11 000’). This is the gateway to Lauca National Park / biosphere - all high desert again. We walked to the outskirts of this tiny town twice, and one day  paid what I think is an exorbitant fee to be driven into the Park. It was probably still cheaper than renting a car, and I hope some of the money went to conservation. Unfortunately they only had Spanish language drivers/guides, but am glad we went anyway.

We saw viscatchas - cute rodents native to South America. They look like big rabbits with longer bushy tails and a dark stripe along the back, and are bigger than chinchillas. They were not afraid, and sort of hopped when they did run off. They seemed to like rocks.

The turn around point for our tour was a lake at 4560 m - Laguna Chungara. The Park sign states they have >100 different species of birds in the park, and we saw several types in/by the lake. It is spring time here, and we saw a few nests, and also, at a distance, at least one tiny chick attended to by both parents.
There also were wild vicuñas, and alpacas (some with tags) moving about freely, including crossing the road lots of truckers and buses use to get to Bolivia.

The clouds came in, and we jokingly thought they looked like they could contain snow. But a mountain-climbing German couple we later met at the guest house had to abandon their attempt at one of the volcanoes because it did snow.

Will finish this post tomorrow at the airport - we have booked an apartment downtown Buenos Aires for a week, and hope after this to be able to make our way to the Chilean side of Patagonia as planned. We have reservations at Torres del Paine National Park there in early November.