We got to Arica a day too early, Feb 13. Feb 14, Valentine’s Day, marks the beginning of the town’s Carnival season that runs through Fat Tuesday, March 8. The town is erecting stages and bleachers for the big party.

This is our second time around for Arica. (Click here for my post from 10 years ago.) It’s a pleasant beach resort town with a busy port shipping minerals from mines in Chile and Bolivia. To people in the region, it is known as the town of eternal spring. The Humboldt current keeps the weather mild. Even though we’re in the tropics the temperatures are in the mid-70s. There are nice beaches and walkable pedestrian streets lined with shops and buskers. And Banks.

One of our goals in Arica was to get some local currency. In the past Holland America has stocked local currency and exchanged it at Guest Services. They are not doing it this trip. In Trujillo, we found an ATM machine in a Scotia Bank. We figured this would be a good place to get some local currency. It wasn’t. The next day the Cruise Director told us to only use ATMs with a golden globe symbol. We didn’t know that, so Scotia Bank’s ATM ate our card and would not give it back. The people in the bank did not have a key to get our card out of the machine for us. So, I spent hours on the phone canceling our ATM card and having a pin added to our credit card so I could get money from future ATM machines. I was also dealing from the inevitable fraud alerts that came from the bank saying they had declined the transaction in Peru, did I really try to do it? I did, and I had warned them before I left that I would be trying this in Peru, as well as other countries. But the card was declined and then eaten. I don’t know whose fault it was that my debit got eaten, Scotia Bank or Bank of America, but I was not happy. I am also not happy with HAL for ending a service that they had, in the past offered, without warning us. Getting Peruvian, Chilean, Argentine or Brazilin currency in advance is not easy in Sitka. Although we do have Euros and Pounds for later in the trip. Big Fail on HAL’s part.

So I faced the ATM machine in Arica’s Banco Nacional with some fear. But it worked, I got Chilean currency, but I had an additional 5% added onto the bill because jt was a credit and not debit card, as well as the foreign transfer fee. The banks always win. But I have some local money for our next 7 ports in Chile before I face the fearsome ATMs in Argentina and Brazil.

Back on the streets I noticed of the sidewalks have designs that look to me like the icons from the old Atari game “Space Invaders.”

Alexandre Gustav Eiffel is one of the main architects of the city, although he never set foot here. His workshop in Paris designed three of the buildings. One, St. Mark’s Cathedral, is a completely prefabricated iron church, built in Paris and shipped to Peru in the early 1870’s, time for the Peruvians to assemble it just before they lost a war, and Arica, to Chile. Eiffel provided a key to lock the pieces of the Church together. It can be used to dissemble the church if someone ever wanted to move it. The Peruvians took the key with them so Chile could not move the church further south.

Two other buildings were designed by Eifel, the customs house and a government building. Those buildings have iron frames but brick facades, so they look more like regular buildings. The Peruvians finished them just in time for Chile to take over.

The city is guarded by the Moro, a fort on top of a large rock, the Gibraltar of Chile (it used to be the Gibraltar of Peru, that never seems to work out. (Look at my post from Paracas for the reference.) We sailed out past the Moro, just as the fleet was headed out to sea for an evening of fishing.

As we sailed away a brass band played us off with medleys of Abba songs, seasoned with some Latin rhythms. The shore crew waved us off, or were they waving to the drone hovering over the sail out festivities?