5 day drive from Peru to Chile

First night in Chile we slept in the town of Iquique on the beach then headed off at a reasonable hour on Saturday onwards towards Santiago. It's over 2000km from Tacna, Peru to Santiago, Chile, so understandably we needed to do this journey over quite a few days. The first two or three days of driving were through the Atacama desert. It's the dryest desert in world, I think this explains why the terrain is so not interesting, just giant piles of dirt in the shape of a hill really.

We spent 2 nights at Antofagasta so that we would have Easter Sunday as a family day of rest. This was a fun relaxing day of a late breakfast and family dinner with communion in remembrance of our saviour's death on the cross.

As you can see the Peru to Chile (all 5 days of it!)

drive was not along the most interesting of scenery...

Driving to Santiago, don't be deceived, it's not

nearly as pretty as this photo makes it appear!

Monday we set off off again for what turned into a super long day of driving, we arrived at the town of La Serena after 11pm, boy were we ready for dinner plus bed by that time!

The time had finally come to offload one of our pop-up trailers. Having made it all the way from Portland in the USA to Chile it had finally fallen apart enough to not be worth carrying around with us. So we put it up one last time while we in Antofagasta to see if we could find anyone who would like it. Alas no such luck (!) and so it got hitched back up for one last travel day with us... This pop-up had been home to 6 of us ladies for many months through Central America, so understandably it meant quite a lot to us. I think you could accurately say that we had a love hate relationship with it - hate because it was so broken and such a hassle to put up and down, but also love as it was our home for many months plus it was a place we'd laughed and cried in and shared many memories. Of the 6 ladies there are 4 of us still on the trip, so we took a couple of photos of us with the pop-up for one last memory...

The four us

Retelling stories from the pop-up one last time

We really wanted to bless someone with the pop-up trailer rather than just leave it as a dump or sell it (once you've put it up it could be a good home, it's just not strong enough to be driven through all the rough terrain as we have been travelling through). So mid-morning we pulled over in the middle of the desert where we saw some trucks. We found a husband and wife there who were delighted with it - turns out she'd been praying for a pop-up trailer for a year, asking God to give them one as they couldn't afford one. And here we go and just give them one for free! I love it when my prayers are answered, but I can honestly say I am more blessed when I am part of the answer to someone else's prayer. The husband explained to me how one of his son's is serving the Lord in Peru and how he didn't always believe in the Lord but while he was in Peru he became saved. They were so happy they gave us food for the road. So we left our pop-up home on the side of the road in Chile for 20 sandwiches and a bag of candy and drinks!!

Putting the trailer down one last time

What we swapped our mobile home for -

20 sandwiches, a bag of candy and some drinks!!

Driving away, minus one pop-up trailer

This is what 2 full days of driving to Santiago consisted of, dessert and more dessert

Tuesday was a shorter 6 or 7 hour day straight through to the YWAM base in Santiago.  It's a lovely base outside of the city on a big plot of land. Only thing is the ice cold showers, and Chile is kinda chilly to begin with...

Kurt syphoning petrol out of one of the cars 

for another one which had run out of petrol