Friday February 28th, 2025 Arica, Chile

Arica is a small port town right at the very northern edge of Chile, on the border with Peru. In the late 19thcentury Peru won a war with Bolivia and Peru for ownership of this part of the coast, literally cutting Bolivia off from the sea. Today Arica acts as a freeport of Bolivia and this seems to be the major economic activity, along with fishing and a bit of tourism.

Just a stroll around town today, and as we exited the port, we could see the huge Morro Arica Hill topped with a prominent Chilean flag blowing in the breeze. Apparently, there is an historical museum located at the top of the hill, but since it’s about 500ft up and the walk takes about an hour, and it’s a bit warm and humid today, we won’t be making the ascent.

Right by the port exit there was a square, Plaza Colon was obviously designed to facilitate market stalls – but today there were only a handful selling tourist trinkets. It does seem like Arica is orientated a bit more towards tourists than Coquimbo, we saw groups of locals walking past – packed for a day at the beach, there was even surfing nearby. Just beyond the square was the San Marcos Cathedral, designed by Gustav Eiffel – yes, the guy who did the tower; the white walls with red trim were beautifully framed by the bright blue sky with streaks of white clouds.

Wandering aimlessly we stumbled onto Avenue 21st de May, this was a really great pedestrian street with a nicely tiled surface and the occasional palm tree. Lots of shops were busy selling absolutely everything for the locals, it was not a tourist street. Store owners were standing at the entrance to their shops shouting their best deals of the day, some used microphones and speakers, music filled the air from other places and customers busied themselves doing their daily shopping. A van was delivering whole sides of beef cattle, two burly butchers sweating to pick the carcasses and swing them onto the pallet.

We walked and people-watched and soaked up the atmosphere – Sandra found ribbon elastic at a large emporium type store for a project she’s working on. This was quite a feat as no one spoke English and, obviously our Spanish is non-existent, it’s amazing how many ways you can hand-gesture “elastic”. Incidentally all of the stores accepted USD at a fixed rate of 1000 Chilean pesos to 1 USD.

Having walked almost the entire length of Avenue 21st de May, we turned and headed back towards the ocean. Café del Mar was a bustling restaurant with a small shopfront on the street and a deep, tabled, area stretching back to an open kitchen – the place was quite busy, filling up with the lunchtime crowd of local shoppers, though we did spot a few fellow travelers from the ship. An extensive menu offered an amazing array of, mostly Chilean, food; we shared a sandwich stuffed with cheese and a mixture of known and unknown vegetables and I had a local beer. The beer was very good, the sandwich – OK. Just to capture the strangeness you encounter when visiting a foreign location; mid meal, an older lady came down the central aisle of the restaurant pushing a shopping cart loaded with empty plastic food boxes – like Tupperware. No one batted an eyelid. Reaching the back of the restaurant she chatted with the staff, sat for a bit, and then wheeled her cart to the front and left. No idea what that was about.

Later in the afternoon as the ship was pulling out of the port I stood out on our balcony and looked back on the small town of Arica. On the headland I could clearly see the mound of Morro Arica Hill with the huge flag still blowing in the wind, but what really caught my eye was how utterly desolate the area was immediately inland from the town, the edge of the Atacama Desert.

In the early evening the captain announced a change to our itinerary. After Arica the ship is scheduled to stop overnight in Lima, Peru and then our final South American port would be Manta in Ecuador; however, due to political unrest and violent protests we are not going to be able to stop in Manta. Instead, the ship will now stop in Fuerte Amador; this is the port for Panama City and right at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal. We are a bit disappointed as we had an interesting shore excursion booked for Manta, but I bet we are nowhere near as disappointed as the small number of passengers who had booked the multi-day trip away from the ship to the Galapagos Islands – they were supposed to rejoin the ship in Manta and now, of course, can’t. Oh well, as Sandra said, “better safe than sorry”. We’ve never been to Fuerte Amador or Panama City.