What A and C are Doing

So what are my friends A and C going to do in Chile aside from meet up with me for a few days in San Pedro de Atacama?

For those of you bad with your geography, the length of Chile is comparable to the width of the United States from coast to coast. Yet Chile’s width is still less than 200 miles at its widest.

These lovely ladies will be flying on the overnight flight from Chicago to Santiago via Miami for a ten-day vacation in Chile. Once the girls land in the capital, Santiago, they will board their first domestic flight bound for Calama, the closest airport to San Pedro de Atacama. From there the hotel has arranged an airport transfer to the hotel. The ride will take about an hour. And then they will meet up with me for a few days of their trip.

A and C booked themselves on various flights around the country using the LAN Airlines air pass. It is similar to the Aerolineas Airlines air pass that the boyfriend and I used to hop around Argentina that you may remember me writing about last year.*

After our three nights and four days together, the girls will take the hotel’s airport transfer back to Calama and visit Viña del Mar (beach town and wine tastings), Santiago (a taste of city life) and Torres del Paine for glaciers and hiking, assuming the fires are out, before heading back to Chicago via Santiago.

*Airlines offer air passes allowing travelers to purchase a certain number of flights in a specific country or around the continent for a discounted rate, rather than paying full price for each leg (a la the $500USD one-way I found from Santiago to Calama). You are paying a set amount for the number of legs flown rather than the price of the individual flights. I’m not sure about the specifics of LAN but Aerolineas started their air pass with a minimum of three legs (the boyfriend and I flew three legs: BsAs to El Calafate, El Calafate to Ushuaia and Ushuaia to BsAs) for far less than booking each leg individually. The catch: there may only be a certain number of seats that can be sold as the air pass, and this can be extremely frustrating to figure out.