The old, vibrant port city of Valparaíso often leaves foreigners emanating praise for the lively city of graffiti-covered, hilly streets while Chileans express concern or even disdain for the place. For us, visiting Valparaíso involved plenty of time in the  artistic streets, as well as time relaxing in our apartment rental with coffee and good books. Valparaíso serves the history and identity of Chile by its status as an important historical city—a major gateway to the outside world. For...

We only know about the tiny town of Pisagua for a scrawny paragraph in our guidebook. We think it might be an interesting and worthwhile stop towards the end of our road trip through Northern Chile. We have a few days before we need to return the truck in Arica, and the guide book made it sound interesting enough. We decide to set aside one night for Pisagua before traveling south to Iquique for fuel. The place witnessed many dark...

The souped-up Volkswagen pickup truck humming underneath us, we drove outside of the city into a small, unassuming valley ready to begin our first real road trip since leaving the United States. Our first stop on the journey introduced us to oldest known mummies in the world—thousands of years older than the oldest Egyptian mummies. The creation of Chinchorro mummies involved a complicated and extensive removal of all organs and tissues, with the skin placed back over the bones,...

A few bus rides separated us from our first overland border crossing of the trip. The almost absurd vertical sprawl of Chile appealed to us. At least route planning might be simpler now that the pesky east and west directions were more limited. After a confusing stopover at the bus station in the last Peruvian city of Tacna, we finally scrambled together the Spanish instructions we received from about four different people, we found the correct bus and boarded with...