Pos: here
Loc: Yacht Club Iquique
Acc: Robert und Monica’s home
Dist: 0 km

Tomorrow:
Estimated landing: headland behind Caleta Buena
Estimated starting time: Right after sunrise
Estimated landing time: Well before sunset

After this morning’s online session, Robert was happy to take us on a short inland drive up the mountains. It was good to see Iquique from the top, watching a few hang gliders starting and flying around, and then driving past the top city Alto Hospicio further and further inland.

This about 700 m “Altiplano” mountain level was a real desert – rocks and sand only, and HOT! We were happy that Robert’s car had a well working climate control, it was probably over 35 degrees hot up here, no sea breeze any more…

Though there were a few dry trees and bushes here with long roots sucking the ground water. It almost looked like a forest at some places! But also a bone dry salt lake with some mineral diggings was visible.

After about an 50 km inland drive, we arrived at Monte Pintura, aptly named because of many, many huge old “paintings” on the rocks. They scraped the small black lose top rocks away, so that from the distance the probably
about up to 20-30 m wide “paintings” were visible. Nobody knows why and by whom those about 1500 years old artwork has been created…

Also very interesting was an old grave yard out of the salpeter digging times.

Back to Iquique, we had a yummy sandwich lunch and checked on our kayaks, which were in meantime repaired by a qualified friend of Robert. Thanks very much! My field repair was not leaking, but as we did it quite fast with not much drying time for the kevlar fabric underneath and for the layers on top, it may not have lasted forever…