Haircuts, Peñas and Chilean women

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  Sucre, Bolivia
Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The next stop after Valpo was the Atacama desert and having navigated our way to the bus station walking past the hordes (literally hordes) of Chilean schoolgirls giggling at us whispering "gringo" (we like to think its a good thing) we started the nightmarish 28 hour bus journey to the desert. Upon arrival we were bundled into a van and taken to a hostel by a guy who insisted he was neither Chilean nor Bolivian but Indian, an indication of how indigenous it gets in this area.

San Pedro De Atacama is a town that depends entirely on tourism and it was funny to walk round this backpacker/tourist Mecca. Funny because the irony of backpacking is that unless a backpacker is in a hostel he looks upon any other backpacker with disgust, an obstacle ruining their search for the non-existent "off-beaten track" and something constituting "real travelling". That is not to say there are no locals there is an indigenous population which we came to realise when our hostel owner took us out each night. One night we found ourselves sat in a bar when an endless stream of gorgeous Chilean adolescents started walking past our window after locating them in a nearby bar with the conversation flowing and the English charm/gringo appeal working it seemed too good to be true, and it was because nearly all of them were just short of 18 and were kicked out for being underage. Because all bars have to close at 1am in Atacama there is a thriving local private party culture which are hostel owner blagged us into and myself and Felix (one of the guys from Cambridge) felt like Chippendales as we posed for numerous photos with 30-40 something mischeivous Chilean women behaving in a manner typical of English women of that age on a weekend away from the nest.

The remainder of our stay there consisted of desert haircut and more night activity, Felix unhappy with the length of his hair put himself at the mercy of the rest of us in a surreal situation that saw him seated literally in the middle of a valley with the only sound being the whizzing of the clippers and snipping of a Swiss army knife´s scissors. That evening the hostel had an international feel and we all chipped in to put together a great Anglo-German-Bulgarian-Chilean bargain steak dinner before heading out to a peņa (a folk venue where live Andean music is played). It was refreshing to go to a dance venue that consisted firstly of live music and secondly something that was electronic, with the dancing being as contrasting to western nightclubs as the music was. It seemed to all be about just letting yourself go and noone would bat an eyelid whether you were swaying nervously from side to side or throwing your every extremity about like a raving loon. Its a general Andean attitude that we have so far only scratched the surface of.

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