Felt pretty good to get back here, Victor and Martin picked me up from the bus station and we drove to the new house. Marilla was there but otherwise I was the only visitor besides Victor who has been spending his summers here for 4 years. There was some rain and a full rainbow in the field behind the house, which serves as a landing field, just what I needed. We caught up about what I had been doing and the building of the house. To give a quick history Martin and Mariella run a small paragliding school do tandem flights and have a house that serves as a hostel for paragliders, mostly Argentinian. I spent 3 weeks in their old house in Feburary of 2005. Turns out my timing was pretty good last year they were in transition, had sold the old house but not built the new one, so last year everyone was living in tents on the land while the house was built! Also last year was a bit unusual with the weather and not very many cross country flyable days. Well so here I am untill middle of January, hoping to get in some good flying but also looking foreward to long summer days and the relaxed atmosphere here.
For those pilots reading this here is my advice about Iquique. It's a big city, you can stay in town or on the south side of town is the Altazor flight park. For $11 a night you get free internet, kitchen, a place to land and fold your glider. They sell stuff and have a repair center, also you can rent vehicles for the day and probably even a driver which is needed for cross country flights. When I arrived there were 32 pilots staying there. However many pilots were in groups so getting to know people wasn't easy. Cheap and easy to take local bus up to launch. Usually pilots fly the site called Alto Hospicio above Iquique in the morning, then land on the beach or back at Altazor and hang out for the middle of the day, in the evening you can return to Alto Hospicio or share a truck and drive 15km to Palo Buque where when conditions are good you take off at sea level and soar up 800 meters over desert to practice manuevers and repeat, that or practice sand skiing, which is a good way to scoop a lot of sand in your glider. And for XC? Wish I would have known this earlier. From Iquique you can really only fly 10k to the north and 5 to the south. So for a day you can do laps but this gets boring quick. For longer flights you need to start out in the morning and drive to the south however far you want to fly back- possible for 30-50-100-200 km flights but!! for anything over 30 you need permission to cross the airport with requires dropping off a copy of flying license and passport and calling before entering airspace, which requires having someone on the ground to call in by cellphone as you pass. So this works fine if you have 5 people to share the cost and hire a driver for retrieve and make the call. For me this was all to much planning and networking.. and money. I kind of like to take off and see where my mood and the conditions take me, not possible in Iquique. That and the dynamic/thermic conditions and scenery were not all that interesting to me. Great place to practice but for me 6 days was enough I would return with friends to practice acro or do some XC together. Oh as near as I can tell November is the best month for XC I think conditions slow down during the summer.