Trip Interrupted

You may have noticed that we went a while without posting anything about our travels. After enjoying the mountains and desert in the Salta region, we hopped on a direct flight to Iguazu on the border with Brazil to see the amazing jungle waterfalls there. Afterward, we flew back to Buenos Aires so we could say goodbye to Argentina and start a new chapter in our travels. Then, 10 days disappeared. How do you lose 10 days, you ask? Travel to Chile and back in time to 2020 COVID.

Our unfortunate episode began when Andrea caught a cold supposedly from our travels to and through the waterfall. We intended to spend one night in Buenos Aires to say goodbye to Argentina and then fly to Santiago the next day. About 5am the morning of our flight, I knew she wasn’t going to be able to go to the airport. We ended up spending an additional three days of recovery in our hotel in Buenos Aires and rebooked our flight to Santiago, Chile. She was feeling much better, and we were hopeful that we’d get our travels back on track.

Our optimism was misplaced, and our hesitancy to travel to Chile in the first place due to their continued COVID protocols wasn’t. Ande got randomly checked at the airport for COVID, but we didn’t think anything of it because she was feeling better and our traveling companion in Iguazu, Brooke, also caught the cold and had two negative PCR tests to return to the United States. We checked into the hostel in Santiago, went exploring, and spent our first night outside Argentina having dinner in Barrio Italia.

The next morning, we had breakfast and started to head out the door of the hostel when the desk clerk caught us and said that the Chilean Ministry of Health was on the phone and wanted to talk to Ande. I won’t give a summary of what happened next, but suffice to say, Ande was quarantined in our room for the next seven days! As many of you know, she is rather claustrophobic, so didn’t take to it well. Lots of pacing ensued. I, of course, was free to come and go–makes a lot of sense from a public health standpoint, huh? Some quarantine.

Over the next six days, she was stuck in a roughly 150 square foot room with a bed and one chair. She was visited personally every week day by a member of the Ministry checking to make sure she was actually in the room and had no symptoms. I spent afternoons walking the city and bringing her food. To make the incarceration even more painful, we ordered pizza one night and she got food poisoning. Needless to say, we were not impressed with Santiago or Chile in general and certain we had made a huge mistake by trying to visit the country when it was still so tightly restricted by COVID protocols…or should I say COVID theater?

She survived, was actually freed a day early (the hotel owner (we love her!) signed off the second the Ministry person left, and we were free), and we got the hell out of the hostel and the city. To try and salvage the trip, we rented a car and drove to the coast. We had a wonderful weekend in Valparaiso, and also spent some time at one of the beach towns north of the city. We’re now wrapping up five days in the northern desert region at the town of San Pedro de Atacama. There are a lot of crazy landscapes and we’ve had an amazing week exploring the land and sky. We’ll catch up our posts in the next couple of weeks and share what we’ve seen.

And now…we are tired. So we’ve booked some down time from the constant travel. To recuperate from the misadventure in Chile and take a break from the constant trip planning and sleeping in a different bed every three to five days, we’re headed to Costa Rica to spend the month of June. We leave tomorrow morning and will spend the next two weeks in andAirBnB on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. We’ll post our next updates from there! Ah, I can feel the tropical breeze now! We need it after spending five days in the actual driest place on the planet–Really, not kidding.