I am writing this blog as I sit on my last hour of a 22-hour bus ride from Santiago, Chile to Calama, Chile where we will be doing ministry for the month. It has been so interesting to experience the landscape of Chile and see its vast differences. It has ranged from beautiful ocean cities to vast grassy mountains to barren deserts, where we are now. As I glance out the windows, I see different shades of brown dirt and rocks with mountains in the distance. That’s what it’s been like for a few hours now. We learned that we are in the middle of the Atacama Desert – one of the driest in the world. So dry in fact that they do Mars’ rover testing here because of the similarities between here and Mars. So yeah, picture Mars, but instead of red, it’s brown.
Over this past weekend we had additional training and prep-time in Atlanta where God both wrecked me and excited me all the more. Officially, we started our journey to Chile at 2am on Oct 10th and will be arriving today at 2pm Oct 12th – 60 hours total. The flights were a no brainer, however once we were in Santiago, figuring out this bus situation was another story. I had taken for granted wifi is all I can say. Not being able to google things makes logistics hard, but also allows us to rely on the locals which is cool. We finally got an address of where we were headed, talked to some nice taxi drivers and got a lift from the airport to the bus station, which seems to also be a mall.
The bus has been an interesting experience thus far, filled with Spanish action movies and sleep, but all in all pretty awesome. Funny story – we were told we were getting dinner and breakfast on the bus and were siked because #missionarybudget. But 9pm rolls around and there’s no food to be seen and the seven of us give up hope. So Alli takes out her almonds and we each eat a few and drink tiny sips of our water, hoping to conserve. Wellllll 10:30pm rolls around and they are passing out dinner. So, lesson learned – Chileans eat dinner LATE. It was a roll and some rice and chicken – not bad, but still no water so we have tried not to drink a lot. In hind sight we should have bought a few bottles each coming on the bus because Calama is around 7,000 ft about sea level or something like that, but we are praying that the Lord provides and gives us rest and hydration.
UPDATE: We made it to Calama!!! We are working with a church this month and staying in what looks like their Sunday School classroom. And our host is SO nice, but doesn’t speak a lick of English sooooo Google Translate is gonna be our best friend this month. Below are some pics of the drive up here and the neighborhood:
