Discovering Iquique downtown area

In my itinerary, today is dedicated to resting and recovering from the Jetlag. That is precisely what we did. 

We started our morning too early, both awake before 6am, we stayed in bed before making our way to the nearby supermarket to load on groceries for the 4 days of our stay.
The hostel has a nice kitchen with everything we need and we have to be a little more careful about our budget. We decided to eat out for lunch, but breakfast and dinner will be cooked. 

Breakfast is done a little later than usual, I scored yummy and very ripe avocados – avocado toast it is !

Alexis feels down and goes to rest in the room while I take care of further administrative paperwork and start looking for a hotel in San Pedro De Atacama. While I spend my morning in the common room, I meet another fellow traveler Carolina. She is a very interesting person with great business ideas – she is now poking around and wondering how to realize some of them while travelling in South America. It’s why I like booking in hostel, we meet a lot of different people. Iquique doesn’t feel like a super touristy town, I don’t think it’s on the main touristic tracks. Most of the other travelers have been in the hostel for a long time and are enjoying (or learning) surfing in Playa Cavancha or Sandboarding the sand dunes. I see them going for a few hours a day. 

It’s a relaxed and friendly crowd in the hostel. 

We end up chit chatting with Carolina for almost all the morning until Alexis finds us and we chat some more. It’s almost lunch and todays’ plan is to walk through the heritage part of town. We walk along Playa Cavancha promenade until Baquedano street. It’s a beautiful street entirely made up of colonial wooden houses, which are now mostly bars, hostels, restaurants and pretty shops. The street is pedestrian. It’s extremely pleasant to stroll along the avenue. During the day it’s subdued but at night it must be animated.

As we arrive to the main square, we see the iconic clock tower and a well-maintained area with beautiful buildings. There are also more people sitting at cafes and restaurants here. Everything is open. 

We walk further towards the port, there is a museum into a ship and also the fish market that I saw online were both interesting to see. 
The fish market was a disappointment, online it said that you could have a nice lunch on the first floor. But as we arrived, it was too late, everything was closed and the so-called 1st floor restaurants inexistant. Anyhow, we continued to the ship – which is beautiful but is closed between 1 and 3 pm… 

We decided to backtrack and have lunch at a Peruvian restaurant on the main town square. It was pretty tasty and nice. 

Again, jetlag got us yawning, and we walked back to the hostel for a snooze. On the way back we saw that the police had blocked part of the street in front of the hotel for a crime reconstitution. Alexis looked online and after a quick reddit search, we learned that 3 months before someone had been stabbed / beaten to death on the beach not far from where we stay. A little chilling. 

After some time resting – we have another hour before sunset, and we decided to walk around the police restricted area to go along the beach promenade on the opposite side of the town center. It’s a nice little walk but there isn’t anything really interesting on the other side of the beach. 

Back to the hostel again, this time we find the rest of the guests in the common room and kitchen. We chit chat further, cook together and enjoy an evening before going to our room to sleep.