The Atacama Desert

After a two-day drive across the Andes and the high Altiplano, we arrived on 13^th March in the small town of San Pedro de Atacama, a little oasis next to the Atacama Desert in Chile.  The Atacama Desert is reputedly the driest desert on earth and contains areas where no rainfall has been recorded, ever.

Crossing the Altiplano to San Pedro de Atacama

San Pedro de Atacama is hot and dusty, all the buildings are adobe with mud roofs so it obviously doesn’t rain very much, or it would all wash away.  Every other building on the main street is a tour operator offering tours to the surrounding area, there are numerous restaurants and plenty of shops selling artisan stuff which may or may not have been made in China.  The whole effect however is delightful, and we found a lovely cabana on the edge of town where we stayed for five days.

The landscape around San Pedro comprises vast, desolate plains surrounded by volcanoes and some beautiful lakes and most of our excursions involved driving anything up to 120 km each way.  The one which was closest, only a few kilometres drive, was in fact the most spectacular.  The Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) really lived up to its name.  

Valley of the Moon with snow-capped peaks beyond

Eroded strata - Valley of the Moon

Apparently, the most popular time to visit the Valle de la Luna is at sunset when the colours are at their best, but this would have meant sharing the view with a multitude of other tourists, so we opted to visit in the afternoon when we managed to have the place virtually to ourselves.

The place where we chose to walk was called the Valley of the Dunes and there was a path leading up past a mighty big dune that would have done credit to the Persian Gulf.  

Sand dune - Valley of the Moon

The track wound on up to the spine of a ridge of rock and after about ¾ mile we came out onto the top of the ridge where the only other occupants were a charming couple of Chileans.  We exchanged pleasantries, we took photographs of them and they took photographs of us and then they left us in peace.  

Climbing the dusty track - Valley of the Moon

Erosion Gully

The top of the ridge

General Erosion

Erosion gully

We sat for a while in this wild and desolate lunar landscape with jagged rocks, deep ravines, a multitude of shapes and formations, with the far distant view of the snow-capped Andes.  We took our leave just as we saw the hordes of tourists starting to arrive, forming crocodiles behind their tour guides.  Perfect timing!

Welcome rest

It was a very dusty track

The 'Three Marias' - Valley of the Moon

Wind blasted rock - Valley of the Moon

One of our excursions took as to the remote village of Rio Grande which had the most gorgeous little adobe church with a thatched roof and a collection of adobe houses.

Lunch stop - Rio Grande

Adobe church - Rio Grande

Village Street - Rio Grande

Llama and friend - Rio Grande

On the way back from Rio Grande, we took a detour to an area known as Rainbow Valley which had a series of very strange rock formations.  Whilst the colours were not anything like as stunning as those we saw at Hornocal in Northern Argentina, the standing columns and eroded pillars of rock were still quite spectacular.

The track to rainbow Valley

Rainbow Valley

Eroded rocks - Rainbow Valley

Cliffs dwarfing Lucy - Rainbow Valley

Saline Stream - Rainbow Valley

Rough going - Rainbow Valley

Young llamas at play - Rainbow Valley

Petroglyph on the road back from Rainbow Valley

On another day we drove 120 kilometres to two lagoons high up in the Altiplano which we both decided were rather disappointing.  The lagoons themselves were attractive, a beautiful deep blue apart from where they were reflecting the snow-capped volcano where they were a deep green.  There was no vegetation and no wild-life apart from a few ducks near the water’s edge which we couldn’t get near because the paths were restricted.  There were however several tourist buses which also meant the usual infestation of tourists.

Really interesting road across the Atacama Desert

Laguna Miniques - Altiplano

Vicunas on the Altiplano

The day was saved when we stopped off at another lagoon on the way back which had a few flamingos and Alan managed to get a couple of decent photographs.  He has been missing his birds!

Chilean Flamingo - Salar de Atacama

Flamingo - Salar de Atacama

After a stay of just a week we decided to set off for the Bolivian border, there being nothing else of particular interest to us in Northern Chile.  We had one overnight stop in an unremarkable town and then started our ascent of the Andes for the second time in just over a week.

There were no hair pin bends, no dramatic scenery, just a long and steady climb on good tarmac that went on for some 200 km. There were a few smoking volcanoes, more salt flats and very little else.  The very little else seemed to go on for miles and miles.  Our altimeter read 3,800 metres when we finally reached the border.  

The road to the Andes

Salt flats on the road to the Andes

We sailed through the Chilean Border Control in about five minutes but when we got to the Bolivian Border Control we were told that they’d all gone for lunch and wouldn’t reopen for an hour.  Practical as always, Sue remarked, “Well, we’ve got to have lunch somewhere” so we had it there.

Lunch stop at the Bolivian border

Effect of high altitude on a packet of crisps

Once over the border the road changed, unsurprisingly, from tarmac to dirt although most of it was good dirt.  We were treated to a landscape of more salt flats, fields of tortured rocks but, as we were now in Bolivia, there was no descent, just a continuation of the very high Altiplano which makes up much of this country.

Wind sculpted rocks by the side of the road

Llama on the Altiplano

Another llama

Group of llamas

Late in the afternoon we finally reached habitation at the little village of San Cristobal where the only hotel was closed for renovation.  We did, however, find a perfectly decent hostel with private room and bathroom for £15 a night!  San Cristobal appeared very traditional, most of the women were sporting long pigtails, frilly skirts and bowler hats, but none of them was prepared to let Alan take their photograph.  

There was no WiFi anywhere so far as we could tell so the publishing of this post has been delayed until today, 21^st March, where we have reached the town of Uyuni and civilisation!

From Unremarkable to Incredible – the trip across Argentina

After a day of cleaning and packing up the vehicle, we finally got on the road on Tuesday 25^th February, exactly three weeks after our arrival at Paraiso Suizo. We felt we had been in Uruguay long enough so concentrated on making our way West to the Argentine border.

Our last few days in Uruguay were fairly unremarkable although we enjoyed a stop off at the old Fray Bentos meat packing factory, now an industrial heritage museum on the banks of the Rio Negro. The site itself is enormous with every building a mighty edifice of Victorian endeavour. 

The fridge of the factory was about 150 yards long, five storeys high and about fifty yards wide.  It was basically just all fridge and the coolant was provided from three mighty engines in the massive engine room.  The flywheels on these huge engines were about thirty feet across, solid cast iron, and attached to two pistons each, each piston about the size of a dustbin and the sort of noise that would have been generated inside this engine room must have been almost intolerable.  

Loading Cranes at Fray Bentos (made in Leeds)

Sue next to giant fly wheel in the engine room

Engine room showing fly wheels

Engine room showing fly wheels and pistons

The plant’s record year was apparently 1890 when 209,000 animals were killed.  The plant’s products were used by Captain Scott, Florence Nightingale, British Everest expeditions and crucial to the British war effort in both World War I and II.  At its peak more than 2,000 cows were processed a day, as well as 6,000 lambs, pigs and turkeys.  Every part of the cow was used apart from the moo!

We also spent one memorable night when we made the mistake of staying at a little farmstead just outside the town of Mercedes. The surrounding countryside was lovely, but the place turned out to be a bit of a pigsty.  We found ourselves surrounded by a wide variety of chickens, guinea fowl, dogs, rabbits and a rhea.  The shower room didn’t look as though it had been cleaned since God was a boy and the water found its own way out, mostly under the door.  The final straw was when the very unfriendly cockerel attacked Sue and the over-friendly Rhea tried to join her in the shower. We didn’t hang around next day!

Sue's shower companion

The crossing over the border from Uruguay into Argentina on Saturday 2^nd March was entirely painless and then began the very long and almost entirely straight road across Argentina.  The fields on either side of the road stretched as far as the eye could see, the only variation being the type of crop grown, mostly soya, maize or millet.

Miles and miles of soya

Camping at Parana

A very prickly tree - Parana campsite

The monotony was relieved a little when we stopped off in Cordoba, Argentina’s second largest city, for a couple of days.  Our main objective was to find somewhere that would sell us a new car battery, having discovered that our domestic battery was no longer holding a charge and therefore the fridge was not working.

We found Cordoba to be much the same as many other cities, full of high-rise buildings, most of them a dirty white colour, and very noisy at night.  In this part of the world, nothing seems to happen in the afternoons, the shops close and everyone goes off for a siesta.  At about nine in the evening everybody and everything comes to life, just as we are thinking about getting ready to go to sleep.

We achieved our objective and after a couple of false starts we found a Bateria place that not only sold batteries but were prepared to fit them.  The cost of the battery, incidentally, was exactly half what we paid for exactly the same model in Uruguay.

We also enjoyed a visit to the weekend ‘feria artisanal’ which was lively, interesting and full of antique stalls, and numerous other stalls selling all kinds of arts, crafts and jewellery.  Unusually for us, we didn’t actually buy anything.

After nearly a week of driving north west across Argentina with nothing remotely interesting to look at, on Thursday 7^th March we finally started to climb into the hills.  The road took us up and up through a narrow river gorge which eventually opened out at about 6,000 ft onto a wide valley with a beautiful lake and surrounded by mountains.  We found a very nice cabana just outside the hill town of Tafi del Valle and the prospect of a couple of days walking in the hills was very attractive.

The lake at Tafi del Valle

The Maid of the Mountains

Next morning there was not a hill or mountain to be seen.  The weather changed overnight, the cloud came in and covered the mountains and even the lake, and then the rain started.  Since thunderstorms and rain were forecast for the foreseeable future, we abandoned our plan to stay awhile which was a pity as it was such a lovely area.

The road out of Tafi del Valle continued to climb, the cloud was swirling around us and we reached 9,000 ft at the highest point. Then, as we started to descend a little, we out-ran the cloud and were able to enjoy the view again.

The terrain was covered with huge cacti, some of them 30 ft high, many branched specimens, standing like stark signposts pointing this way and that across the landscape. Further along the road, the scenery changed, and we found ourselves in Argentina’s second largest wine producing area around the town of Cafayate.  Then, just as suddenly, it changed again and we were back among weird and dramatic rockscapes, great jagged teeth of rock with strata at all sorts of impossible angles.  There was no wildlife as far as we could see but a great feel of geography in action.

Giant cactus - road to Salta

Rock formations - road to Salta

After a six-hour drive, much of it on bendy mountain roads, we finally arrived in the north west city of Salta. Like other cities we have visited we found Salta to have an interesting colonial centre surrounded by very uninteresting suburbs with a lot of traffic and noise.

Cathedral - Salta

Hobo feeding the street dogs

We visited the Museum of the High Andes, one of Salta’s many museums, which gives an excellent insight into Inca culture. The exhibits were something between fascinating and macabre, fascinating because they speak of a culture long past but macabre because they featured mummified bodies of high-born children who had been sacrificed to the Inca God of the Mountain.  Three such children were found near the peak of a 19,000 ft volcano on the Chilean border, the world’s highest known archaeological site.  The cold, low pressure, lack of oxygen and bacteria helped to preserve the bodies almost perfectly.  Apparently, it was regarded as a great honour, but we find it difficult to understand how anyone can sacrifice their own children.  We’ve sometimes wanted to strangle ours, but never for long!

On Sunday 10^th March we left Salta and drove north to an area called Quebrada de Humahuaca, a World Heritage listed valley.  This valley is overlooked by mountainsides that have been eroded into spectacular formations that reveal waves of colours.  Some of the rock formations look like jagged teeth and others like the backbone of some unspeakable beast.

Dotted along the valley there are a number of small indigenous towns and villages.  Purmamarca was the first town that we visited, also known as the Valley of the Seven Colours.  This featured a huge artisan market and also a lot of tourists.  

Valley of the Seven Colours

Artisan market - Purmaharca

We stopped for lunch at a dark little café and whilst the food was awful, the music provided by an unlikely looking ensemble was quite wonderful. The girl with the recorder was animated, had a wonderful voice and the Indian thumped away on his drum with great gusto and the guy with the guitar sang with the girl, and the whole place became infected with their vitality such that several people in the room got up and started doing some form of traditional dancing.

Impromptu dancing at café - Purmaharca

The drummer

We decided to base ourselves in the picturesque little town of Tilcara and, as we drove into the centre, we came upon the tail end of the ‘Carnaval of the Quebrada’. This fiesta kicks off on the Saturday 50 days before Easter Sunday.  In each town, a devil figure is dug up from where he was buried the previous year and paraded into town amid much noise, triggering an eight-day bender of music, dancing and copious drinking.  We arrived for the final day and probably just as well because the music and festivities went on most of the way through the night. 

Drummers at the Devil's Carnaval - Tilcara

Dancer at the Devil's Carnaval

Dancers at the Devil's Carnaval

The dancers who were of all ages were dressed in a fantastic array of costumery including horns and face masks and brightly coloured costumes with mirrors sewn in them.  The band included three men with extremely large drums which they all thumped in unison, several saxophones and a startling array of silver trumpets which made a shattering loud peal when they all puffed their cheeks out and blasted together.  

Rock formations - Quebrada de Humahuaca

Lucy in the limelight

Cactus wood gate - Uquia

Giant cacti - Quebrada de Humahuaca

We spent much of the following day wandering around the various villages and then in the late afternoon went to the Serrania de Hornocal.  When we had driven up a steep and windy dirt road for some 25 kilometres we finally reached the viewpoint of this spectacular mountainside with its amazing colouration and shape. We both agreed that we had never seen anything quite like it before and the only thing that detracted from the delight was that we were up at 4,300 metres and finding it quite difficult to breathe, but a small price to pay!  On the way back down much of the view consisted of vast fields of giant cactus, all giving the high sign to an indifferent sky.  

Serrania de Hornocal

Still standing at 4,300 metres

After our stay in Quebrada de Humahaca we set off on the two-day journey across the Andes that would take us into Chile. We drove up through dramatic mountain passes and then emerged onto the Altiplano.  The road took us through the Salinas Grandes salt plains which were quite stunning.

Llama - on the road over the Andes

Senora Chica - Salinas Grandes

About three quarters of the way up the Andes we stopped off for the night at a dry, dusty little town called Susques, the only town actually. The wind blew all the time and so did the dust which got in our eyes, but the town had the most delightful little hotel called the Kactus Hotel (of course) which was spotless.  As we were up at 4,000 metres we were both feeling the effects of the altitude.  The locals all swear by drinking coca tea, so we did as in Rome and, whether there was a real benefit or it was just the placebo effect, it certainly helped.

All the way along on the Altiplano there were salt flats and some of them had shallow lakes and from time to time we saw flamingos feeding in the water.  There were herds of vicuna and some llama on the high plains, although how on earth they find anything to eat we do not know because the whole thing looks like the surface of the moon.

Our passage through Customs and Immigration at the border was very efficient and then eventually we commenced a long, steep and continuous descent to the little town of San Pedro de Atacama on the edge of the Atacama Desert where we are now. And so, we enter the next phase of our adventure.

Uruguay - Life is a Beach

Well, the old team is back on the road again for our third trip to Latin America.

Our first destination was Paraiso Suizo on Uruguay’s southern coast where Footloose Lucy, our Land Rover Discovery, has been in the tender care of Heinz and Sylvia for the past 10 months.

Our journey to Montevideo on Monday 4^th February went entirely smoothly.  Heinz met us at the end of the road, as arranged, and within 24 hours of leaving home we were back in the same cabana that we stayed in just before we returned to UK last April.  Nothing had changed and we were soon re-acquainted with the screeching of the parakeets in the trees, the short walk to the almost deserted pristine beach, and the sound of the waves crashing onto the shore. This place isn’t called Paraiso Suizo for nothing.

The beach at Paraiso Suizo

We have come to learn from our travels that if things appear to be going too well, then they probably are.  We weren’t wrong.  Footloose Lucy was neatly parked next to our cabana but Heinz had bad news.  As with people, it appeared that 10 months immobility had taken its toll on Lucy who was now anything but footloose.  Heinz reported that the battery wouldn’t hold a charge and there were no brakes.

The next morning, Wednesday, a recovery vehicle turned up and poor old Lucy was duly loaded and taken to the Dos Hermanos car mechanics at the nearby town of Piriapolis.  We heard nothing for a day and then the news came back that a new battery had been fitted but that the seals on the hydraulic brake servo pump had perished and needed replacing. We went along to the garage in the hope that we might have the proper bit in our spare parts box to fix the pump.  Indeed, Alan pulled out a piece of kit which said Master Cylinder Repair Kit and, filled with triumph and delight, he gave it to one of the brothers who scratched his nose in the South American manner and said “No”.  So, it appeared that the only way we were going to get Lucy fixed was for the replacement part to be ordered from Montevideo and this was unlikely to happen until the following week.

While we waited for a new set of seals to be sent by ox cart from Montevideo we amused ourselves as follows:

On alternate days we walked down the beach or up the beach.  Going down the beach was much the same as going up the beach, but the sea was on the other side.  There were stones to amuse us, pretty stones, all different shapes and sizes and there were also shells, mostly small mussel shells which made a crunching noise when you walked across them.  Then there was the high point of the walk, discovering a dead fish.

We enjoyed having a swim in the sea, but that pleasure was short-lived after a woman was seen being carried off the beach with a bleeding foot and clearly in agony – a gift from a sting ray lurking in the shallows.  Sue could not be persuaded to enter the water thereafter.

The rest of the time we sat on the porch of our cabana and watched the Mockingbirds and the Monk Parakeets and the Southern Lapwings squabbling over insects in the grass.  Occasionally, to relieve the boredom, we caught the bus into Piriapolis and walked up and down the beach there.

Wednesday 13^th February was a good day.  News came from the garage that the new seals had finally arrived and they were in the process of being fitted, so armed with this knowledge we went for a celebratory walk along the beach.  After about two miles in the searing heat we finished up in a little village called Santa Ana where we discovered a restaurant. They cooked us some delicious fish and produced some ice-cold beer and after stuffing ourselves nicely we walked the two miles back again.

A call to the garage on Thursday revealed that the repairs were not quite finished yet. Maybe Manana?  And on Friday morning the work still had not been completed.  However, we had already arranged to go and stay in Montevideo so we departed without Lucy and left Heinz to continue liaising with the garage in our absence.

By Friday afternoon we were ensconced in a very nice, if somewhat quirky, B & B next to the Parque Rodo in Montevideo and just a couple of hundred yards from the sea.  The change of scenery was exceedingly welcome.

Our penthouse suite at the B&B

Parque Rodo

Saturday morning found us taking yet another long, hot walk along the sea front to the Ciudad Vieja (old city).  We walked and we walked along the Rambla which is made of red granite and is quite beautiful.  Down on the seaside there were stretches of sand and stretches of rocks and on every available square inch there were Uruguayans displaying copious amounts of flesh.

On one side of the Plaza Independencia there was an amazing edifice which from a distance we thought was a cathedral.  It turned out to be a concrete palacio, the Palacio Salvo, and whoever Salvo was he obviously had a very grand idea of his own importance.  This thing sticks up in the middle of the Old Town with protrusions and lumps and would no doubt be described by HRH as a carbuncle.  

Palacio Salvo

Some of the streets leading from the square down through the old town have been pedestrianised where we found lots of stalls selling junk and jewellery.  There were various street entertainers including an exceedingly sexy young girl with blue tail feathers who was dancing to a drum band with what one can only describe as gay abandon.

Street Dancer

Ciudad Vieja

On Sunday we visited a couple of street markets selling the sort of stuff that our parents would have thrown out and probably their parents did.  We then caught a bus back into the Ciudad Vieja for some lunch.

On the way back things got a little more interesting.  It was decided that in order to stay out of the blazing sun we would walk back inland rather than along the Rambla.  Passing as we did through one slightly shabby area a young man with some ambitions to be a master criminal sneaked up behind Alan and grabbed his camera.  Alan turned around and grabbed him by the throat, but he was rather slippery and he let go of the camera and ran off with Alan stumbling after him in a fairly poor facsimile of a chase.  We are told that Montevideo is generally a very safe city but even this place has its opportunists.

Danger lurking on a quiet back street

On Monday 18^th February Alan flew back to London for a few days.  A week or so before we departed for Uruguay, we received the incredibly sad news that Alice, his 26 year old great-niece, had died.  The funeral was on 20^th February and Alan was there to join family and friends in saying good-bye to Alice whose young life was cut so tragically short. Our hearts continue to go out to Alice’s Mum and Dad.

Meanwhile Sue stayed on at ‘Una Noche Mas’ B & B, got to practice her Spanish with the friendly proprietors Eduardo and Carla, continued her exploration of the city and relaxed a great deal.

It is now Monday 25^th February.  We are back at Paraiso Suizo, everything is fine with the vehicle (fingers crossed) and we are packed and ready to go tomorrow morning. Our plan is to head west from Uruguay into Argentina, then Northern Chile, Bolivia and finally Peru. Well, that is the plan, let’s see what happens.

Time to leave Paraiso Suizo