Chillin' in Chile

Ahh, this is the life. Lying on the beach, cerveza in hand and the Pacific at one's feet.

After hours of sand and rock, the bus descends rapidly down to Iquique, on the northern Chilean coast. A most welcome sight -- a city and surf.

Five-star hotels litter the center of Playa Cavancha, Iquique also boasts a gigantic duty-free port center, and most everything is insanely cheap.

Have no idea what they are, except that they´re carrion fowl -- and they dig chilling on the coast.

Stayed at the Hotel del Profesor, a dingy little joint costing $15 a day set up by the University of Chile for its professors who travel. Didn´t see any.

Did find the pub across the street, serving lomo saltado sandwiches. Some kind of sliced pork on a giant bun -- $2.50. Cerveza? Pint drafts of Cristal, a giant South American brewery, went for 75 cents.

Tsunami warning posters hang inside many places in Iquique, and street signs point the way to safety -- most point up hill.

Met three Chilean kids, somewhere around 20, as we were all leaving the same beer store with more or less the same purchases. Same on benches in a plaza, replete with fiesta of some sort and required too-loud music, a couple blocks from the hotel.

Iquique apparently gets a lot of Bolivian tourists, a few Peruanos and a bunch of Chileans, but few Americans or Europeans. The kids were fascinated that an old gringo could talk a little Spanish, drink a lot of beer -- and would talk to three kids.

This is the plaza I drank with the kids at, the next day.

The youths fiercely disputed my claim that Paraguayan women were, on the whole, better looking than Chilean women. They didn´t dispute the claim in relation to the other countries I mentioned.

Sunday was amazing. EVERYTHING was shut down until almost 3 p.m. A few tiny convenience stores started opening, and a couple of Internet cafes. A bunch of restaurants opened about 5. Otherwise, everything else remained closed. Chileans put the chill in chillin´ out.