Baches

11 Aug Happy Birthday Timothy The word for the day is baches. We spent the morning in Arica getting a few things accomplished. We talked with a guy from Santiago about helping us sell our RV. He was impressed with the RV and said he might have a friend. We don't know if he was being polite or serious. Next accomplishment was getting taking a collectivo to el centro to get a SIM card and service for the phone. [A collectivo is a group taxi as oppose to private taxi. The driver can pick up to 4 people and drive them to a general vicinity, such as El Centro.] Additionally, we were able to change our Peruvian money for Chilean money. Our final task was trying to find "Se Vende" signs for the RV, no luck. We also inquired about a lavador for the RV and were told that only car washes were available in Arica. One thing we learned about Arica, and apparently Chile in general, is that most stores don't open until at least 10 am. This included the Claro store. We left Arica about noon and headed towards Santiago. We slowly passed through the construction zone that had closed the road yesterday. The road was single lane with a lot of fallen rocks on the righthand side of the road. (Could this have been the result of Sunday's blasting?) Once past the construction zone we climbed to another pampa, which I'm now mentally defining as high desert plain. The road was good for most of the day, except for we're guessing about a 10-20 km stretch of road construction. There was a sign that said "BACHES" which means potholes or ruts and the sign wasn't lying. This knocked our speed of advance down to 25 mph. Roger played "dodge bach", for the entire way. Once past the work zone the road for the most part was very good. The terrain on the high plain is very diverse without major vegetation. You could easily tell where there was a water source, because vegetation would appear. We drove through a large area of salt flats, very similar to Death Valley. At mile marker 1861, approximately 19.5 degrees south we saw off in the eastern distance our first snow capped Andes mountain. I have no idea how far away the peak was, but it was a huge mountain to be seen from the distance we were at. The traffic that we saw on the PanAm consists largely of tankers and Crystal beer trucks. I counted 6 Crystal trucks, once I started actually counting. The cars that we did come across were the typically overloaded vehicles, that had countless mattresses stacked on the roof rack. I think there's an unwritten rule that if one is going to travel far, one must overload the vehicle. There are no gas stations between Arica and where we stopped for the night, which is close to Maria Helena. We're parked along side of the road in an estacion, which is a designated parking area. We saw a beautiful sunset and it was finally clear for us to see the southern stars. However we don't know where the Southern Cross is. I'm sure we saw it. It's really dark outside and we can see Maria Helena off in the distance.