Four nights in San Pedro de Atacama, which is a village of adobe walls and dust with one church, one square, and a great many agencies selling the same three excursions.
Four nights of it at the Hostería San Pedro de Atacama, and I would not go back. The setting is right — adobe ranges round courtyards, pepper trees, a long pool that is exactly what you want after a day on a salt flat — and none of that survives the fact that the place is noisy at every hour of the day and night. Four nights, four bad ones, in a village where the good excursions all leave before dawn. That being said, I love the village!
The last dinner is at a restaurant called Blanco, on Caracoles, which from the outside is a white lit box set into a dark adobe wall with a chalkboard on an easel by the door. The board is worth reading:
Para picar — tempura de vegetales y mariscos, tabla de rolls, tabla de tres patés y tostadas. Ensaladas — mediterránea, de quesos, de pollo al olivo. Fondos — lomo en salsa vainilla con papas especiadas y salsas confitadas; salmón caramelizado sobre curry verde y peras aromáticas; costillar de cordero al horno; pollo ahumado sobre miniralla de tomates con risotto de quinoa y tempura de cebolla. Postres — higos confitados con chantilly y queso de cabra; helado artesanal en galleta de quinoa.
Quinoa in the biscuit and in the risotto, in a village at 2,400 metres in 2006. That reads differently now than it did then.
The airport
Calama’s airport, El Loa, is a single apron with brown hills behind it and a jet parked on the concrete with a stair truck alongside. There is a sign on the grass advertising Chile’s national parks — Destinos, Naturaleza, Cultura — with a photograph of a lake on it. It is 30-odd degrees and there is not a scrap of shade anywhere on the airfield.
From here it is Santiago, and then across the continent to Buenos Aires.