Arica, Chile

In Arica we got our first glance of the Atacama desert. It hasn’t rained here for about 400 years! We went to the caves along the shoreline. There are thousands of birds that nest in them, and people come to collect the guano for fertilizer. It was kind of like walking into a huge bird toilet. We saw a German tourist scraping the white stuff off the walls with his fingernail and smelling it trying to figure out what it was. Another reason to research the places you visit before you go. We saw the geoglyphs - which were piles of little rocks which made pictures of people and animals etc. that have been there for thousands of years. They were neat, we were impressed, ok, lets go. Hmmm. After we went to a lovely market where they sold fruit and veg. The market was covered with a kind of a netting material and with all the bright colours of the fruit and vegetables and the filtered light sparkling and streaming through, it was quite lovely.

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