Finally settled in Iquique

The bus journey was pretty crappy, got a couple of hours sleep max, the morning was quite interesting driving along the coast and seeing all the potential set-ups breaking in the small swell.

I was starting to think that Iquique might not be big enough for a proper session when we got there, but I was pleasantly suprised.

We arrived 30 minutes early at 09:10 and the taxi cost 2,000 Chile Pesos, about £2.50, which was better than the hostels website led us to believe.

The hostel weren’t able to check us into our room before 12:30, funnily enough an American couple who we’d met in La Serena were checking out of our room as we were arriving.

So to kill a few hours I went for a surf at Punta Una (about 100 yards from the hostel), it looked OK from the beach, and once out there it was really good fun, I’d compare the wave to Reef in Portugal - but less sketchy, it’s mostly a closeout over rocks, but the reef is pretty uniform with a big channel so you can avoid a thrashing most of the time despite pulling into close outs.

The locals were putting on a good show, with nice barrels into inverts or ARS’s being pulled off without any fuss, I kooked around for a while, got a couple of cover ups and called it a day.

I did go in again later but it was pretty crowded with the after school crew so I didn’t stay in long and ended up surfing the beach next door to avoid the six people on the reef.

Going to try an early one tomorrow, and hopefully get some water footage at some point.