From Purmamarca heading north-west we gained a lot of height fast as the bus wound up through a long series of tight steep switchbacks. This brought us to an altitude of over 8,000 feet, the height at which altitude symptoms can begin to appear. Our 6.5 hour bus journey passed through spectacular countryside – steep mountains and sweeping desert plains bathed in varying pastels, and later big volcanoes. We came to the Argentina / Chile border and when all the officialdom had been completed we proceeded into the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Our destination was the funky dusty water-starved town of a few thousand hardy people, San Pedro de Atacama. If you want to know the full meaning of parched, come to San Pedro. Hot and dry in the daytime and seriously cold and dry in the night time. The one constant is dry. Swing a wet shirt around your head twice and it’s dry again. Hiking socks – three times.
All of the wall to wall shops and cafes are of adobe construction and the streets dirt. Even San Pedro’s old church has adobe walls, and its ceiling is of cactus plank. San Pedro throngs with travellers, mainly backpackers, from across the globe. They keep the many tour agents busy, enquiring about and booking tours into the desert. We went on a couple ourselves; first to the Valley of the Moon, and second, to the El Tatio Geyser Field about 100 km to the north. El Tatio is the world’s highest geyser field, at over 13,000 feet above sea level, and also the world’s third largest in area. To visit these we had to be up at 4am and to have abstained from alcohol and red meat to counteract the effects of altitude. It was seriously cold when we arrived; minus 5 C, and we looked forward to the sun peeping above the horizon. On our way back to San Pedro we passed through a valley with small herds of grazing vicuna, and visited a village where llama are farmed, and where we sampled llama shish kebabs. Very nice, and perfectly cooked. Llama and alpaca are the domesticated cousins of the wild, protected, vicuna and guanaco.
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Like 90% of the other travellers in San Pedro, there was another reason for our being here, quite apart from seeing some of the sights of the Atacama Desert. An hour or so to the north east, on the other side of the Licancabur volcano (20,000 feet above sea level) that towers over San Pedro, is a remote border crossing into Bolivia. And across that border is yet more magnificent arid scenery, and further on, the vast stunning Salar de Uyuni in far south west Bolivia, the world’s largest salt flat. This was to be our next destination. After making many enquiries we chose a 4-wheel drive operator to take us on a three day jaunt into Bolivia, leaving us there when it was all over. Five or six passengers are the norm; we had two travelling companions; a couple from Canada, Sharyn and Peter. And so on Friday 25 March, at 7.30am, we had checked out of our San Pedro hostel and were waiting outside to be picked up, each of us having abstained from red meat and alcohol and carrying what had been instructed. A gallon of water, a roll of toilet paper, and 400 Bolivianos.
