Leaving La Serena

La Serena is the last major city before you reach the fringes of the Atacama Desert, so you might want to spend a further night there. With all the buses moving north and south stopping there, the large numbers of travelling young people help to make it quite a lively place in the evenings. It’s an attractive place, too, with some interesting street markets.

Sooner or later, though, you’ll have to hit the road again, but before you leave town it’s essential to fill up with petrol / gas. The next stage of the journey is the first of many where petrol stations are few and far between – perhaps hundreds of kilometres apart. The bigger towns marked on the maps usually, but not always, have one, but as a glance at the map will show, in many places there simply aren’t any towns.

Leaving La Serena, the road starts to twist and turn, and it’s here that you may well encounter a common problem along the Pacific coast: fog. The reason is that although you will soon be approaching the tropics, with warm or hot dry air inland, running up the coast is the cold Humboldt Current. This huge mass of moving water starts at the icy southern tip of Chile, flowing all the way up the Peruvian coast. As it does so, it cools the air above, preventing the formation of rain clouds (one reason the Atacama is so dry), but also creating mists and fog.

It’s best to take it easy on this stretch of road, even if you’re stuck behind a truck. Patches of fog can suddenly reduce visibility on bends to just a few metres, and if you’re overtaking and you’re unlucky that could be just the time another truck coming the opposite way suddenly appears. Remember that before long there will be plenty of opportunities to put your foot down on endless straight roads in blazing sunshine.