The adventure of being in the middle of nowhere

Humberstone

&

Gigante de Atacama

Ui, what a day. After breakfast we started off to the ghost city Humberstone. The 2 French girls we met found out about a bus going that direction, which can drop us off. So, we arrived well. That was very interesting... a very functional place for these mine workers and really a ghost town.

After that, we wanted to go to the Geoglifos del Cerro Unita. The only problem was that there is no public transportation heading there (well, of course you can book these overrated tours...). So we saw this bus station with a lot of Chileans waiting for sth. - which was Arica. So this was at least part of the way and so we decided to wait and go at least some km... after the first bus, coming after waiting 1 hour, was full and after another 1 hour of waiting we decided to try it by hitch-hiking after a truck had stopped at the bus station to offer a ride. So we took it and went on... not very far because a tire broke... well, it was quite exciting to see a Bolivian trucker change a tire of his truck ( he didn`t want our help... he said it is work for a man ;-) ). So after 20 minutes we continued. He took us until the next town Huara, which was still 14 km away from our destination. So we started walking. And somehow there was just no car coming. But then the second car passing us after another hour took us until the km 14 mark and we could see already the hill. The rest of the way was walking for about 40 minutes. But it was really worth it. We finally reached the Giant of Atacama and it was very impressive to see what humans left about 1000 years ago.

Since our time schedule was way behind and it was already 6 pm being in the middle of nowhere - the next town 30 km ahead and the last one 14 km behind... and us being like 3 km off the mainroad. Wherever you turned - nothing. But a really nice sunset. So we wandered back to the main street with the sun being already very low. Finally a car of roadworkers picked us up ... probably wondering what 2 girls are doing in the literally middle of nowhere. They took us again until Huara... it was 7 pm by now and dark. We planned already the worst case with staying in a residencial in this town for the night. There was no bus coming. And we eventually hitched a ride, but there was also a woman with 5 kids waiting... and we did a"gute Tat ausreichend fuer die naechsten Wochen" and let the family take the car. Well, so we waited another hour... and the police man invited us to wait in his little cabin because it got really cold and windy. And then, fortunately, a travel bus from arica had to stop and they were so kind to take us back to Iquique even though it was only 1 seat left. Well, so we arrived in our hostal by 9 pm after a quite adventurous road trip. And now we are having a barbecue at the hostal what is really fun and tasty!