Calama Drama!!

As mentioned in our previous post, when we first started planning our trip to South America, top of the list was a stop in the Atacama Desert to do some star gazing. Not only did we plan our itinerary to avoid the full moon, but we also had to take bus schedules to and from such remote destinations into account. After reading up about the bus routes, we wanted to take the bus from San Pedro to Salta in Argentina, as it travels over the high passes of the Andes and includes amazing scenery. The trip would be about 350km and take 11 hours but only left on Fridays. As soon as the bookings opened three months in advance, I booked us two seats. Adrie was particularly excited about this bus trip as she read somewhere they serve you champagne if you book seats on the upper deck…

HOWEVER…. We got to the bus station at 8am (after we received a reminder from the bus company the previous day) for our 8.30am bus. Adrie disappeared into the ticket office to find out which stand the bus would leave from and left me with the bags. After about 10 minutes I realised there must be a problem. I found Adrie in the little booth staring at the computer screen. The lady was busy typing away in Spanish into Google Translate and Adrie read the translation out loud.

There would be no bus today! Apparently the recent bad weather had caused road closures during parts of our route and they were not sure when the next bus would leave. Then Adrie typed a question again… No there aren’t any other buses leaving for Salta. When would your bus leave? Maybe Sunday. Or maybe Monday. No one could really tell what was going on or what we were to do about it.

What now?

While we had quite a few things planned around Salta, including a road trip to Cafayate, our real concern was missing our flight to Quito and trip to the Galapagos – which has been prepaid in full. We HAD to be in Quito by Monday. Today is Friday. We also had a flight from Salta to Quito booked already. So how can you get from San Pedro to Salta without taking the bus. With much difficulty it turns out.

We were both in a mild spin because we didn’t really understand the problem or any possible solutions. However, we decided to get ourselves to the nearest ‘big’ town (i.e. one with an airport) which will give us some options. This was Calama, which was 100km away in the exact opposite direction we actually needed to go. So we hopped on the 9am bus.

 

Once in Calama and once we had access to wifi, we came up with a few options:

Option 1: Fly to Santiago, then fly to Mendoza in Argentina, then fly to Salta the following day. Cost = High!

Option 2: Fly to Santiago, then fly directly to Quito to be sure we were there in time, but lose our non-refundable hotel, car and flight bookings in and from Salta. Cost = Very Very High!

Option 3: Hire a car in Calama, then try to drive over the Juma pass ourselves and leave the car in Argentina. Cost = Undetermined, but we also needed to give Hertz one month’s (yes – 1 whole month’s!) notice if we wanted to take the car across the border. Option rendered unusable.

Option 4: Fly south to Santiago, (if you haven’t figured out by now, the departure board in Calama only had flights to Santiago… so much for more options, right?), then fly to Iquique at 00:15 and connect on a 5am flight to Salta. Cost = Also High!

Option 5: We could sit and wait for the bus in San Pedro that would leave maybe Sunday, maybe Monday. This could mean missing our trip to Galapagos, so let’s be honest, it wasn’t really an option.

We opted for option 4. The irony being, our main objective was to get to Quito in Ecuador. Flying to Santiago was once again in the exact opposite direction to where we actually needed to go – 1300km south. Iquique was 1500km back north of Santiago. It was also actually only about 200km north from us in Calama but apparently it would take about 5hrs in an overnight bus. Then we still had to get to Salta – another 700km away. In fact, the flight from Iquique to Salta would pass straight over San Pedro… oh the irony!

Our original bus trip cost £80 and would have only been a 350km drive. After this morning’s escapades we found ourselves in the Santiago Airport Holiday Inn ordering beers so that we could use the wifi to book ourselves onto flights that would cost £1600 to travel 3600km to get to the same place. It would be comical if it wasn’t so painful.

To make things slightly more interesting, when we tried to book the 00:15 flight, it was no more. Instead, we could only find a 04:40 flight to Iquique. Our home for the night was to be a cheap airport hotel. So much for six month’s worth of forward planning! These storms have not only costs us three nights of desert stars (the whole point of coming to San Pedro) but it has now also whacked a sizeable hole in our wallet too.

Getting up at 2.30am is hard, especially on three hours’ sleep! As we got into (a clearly very busy) Santiago airport to catch our 4.30am flight, we saw how some people had managed to sleep on those uncomfortable airport chairs and knew we made the right decision to get a hotel. We were hopeful to catch some sleep on the flight before spending our last few days in Argentina eating steak and drinking wine.