09/19 My only mission in San Juan was to try and get some Chilean pesos. I failed. I went to every little store in town and no one had any. Almost everyone will exchange pesos for bolivianos but not the other way around. If what I’ve read about the border is true I won’t find a place to exchange currency there either. That means I’ll be stuck with about the equivalent of $70 US in cash I can’t do anything with. My only other hope is that I run into some gringos heading toward me from Chile on the road tomorrow. Maybe they’ll stop and exchange cash with me if I flag them down. I have enough food to survive the 5 days to an ATM but it’ll suck not having cash just in case (no beer!).
Another day of pushing. Some of it may have been unnecessary. About 8 km after making a sharp right away from the lake and toward the border it seems that there’s an option to jump on a bumpy dirt road that runs further to the south. I must have missed the turn because I ended up on a sandy nightmare of a track that required much pushing. I wasn’t alone since a few 4x4s also went by so maybe the road isn’t so obvious to get on.
San Juan has about 5 places to stay. I ended up at a fairly new salt hotel which means I can check sleeping in a building made of salt off my list. The room was Bs.40. The shower was piping hot and felt great. The place was dead until a bunch of jeeps showed up with a million 20 year old foreign tourists (German’s mostly but I heard some English at one point).
Dinner is proving to be very hard to find in these parts. There are restaurants but it seems that they only cook when jeep tours call ahead. I found a nice lady in a tienda who said she’d make dinner for me tonight. The meal ended up just being a piece of chicken in some soup with half a potato and some rice(?). It’s hard sometimes when you look at what you have or what you could afford to eat and you know that people are eating almost nothing and that’s normal for them. A couple nights ago I peeked inside the house where the people renting me a room lived and there were just eating a little bowl of soup for dinner.
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