.....it took us one whole day and part of the next after we spend the night camping right next to the road. Seems like in Chile and Argentina camping is safe enough. We are heading to Argentina, but nobody told us we would ride through one Salar after another - dried out Salt Lakes in high altitude with eerie and highly unusual landscape - at times I didn't know if we were still on planet earth:
Sometimes we had to just stop pedaling and stare and look and breath and be in awe.....
Look at it:
Some of it truly looks like somebody painted it:
It took hours....days......to ride through this wonder landscape of our planet earth. Not quite prepared with enough water and food we ran out of both and camped the second night at a look out - kind of a parking lot overlooking a lake with Flamingos in the distance.
I was happy to have a water source and James and I started pumping to purify our drinking water after we tasted it to make sure it wasn't salty. We had pumped enough to fill all our water bottles when a small car had parked and one of the men saw me dipping a cooking pot into the lake to fetch water to boil for dinner. I saw him waving in the distance - no, no, no.....coming closer he explained that the heavy metals in these high altitude lakes are poisonous and could lead to sickness and death - amongst others he named arsenic. All the purifying wouldn't help and you wouldn't even be able to taste it. These men were from Santiago Chile and were on a business trip to San Pedro de Atacama to test the drinking waters in the area. I guess we have our guardian angles with us.....They gave us bottled drinking water - enough to cook and satisfy our immediate thirst, but for the next day we would need to stop some motorists and bum some water off of them. There wasn't a whole lot of traffic on that remote road, but we were hopeful. The night was clear and cold- we were up over 4500m at that point and some of the water in our bottles had frozen solid! In the morning, as soon as the sun had risen it heated up pretty quickly through the thin atmosphere and before we knew what the day would bring, the parking lot started filling up with motorcycles and a few fwd vans and jeeps. We ask if anybody had some water to spare and all and everybody started handing us water in bottles, thermoses....even crackers and cookies. One of the tour guides had started cooking breakfast for his guests - making scrambled eggs on a camper stove in the parking lot. He made enough to feed us too! We had scrambled eggs with ham and bread while more and more motorcyclists stopped (it was a group of 23 they told us - mostly from Holland but also Denmark and Germany.) and handed us more water. At the end and when they had all left, James and I were by ourselves again and wondered what- the hell- had just happened??? We stood there with our bellies full and some extra food and with almost more water than we could carry. It felt like the sky had just opened up and poured all we needed on us and then closed up again. The surroundings are already so bizarre - enough to wonder if we were still on planet earth, the altitude helped to make our brain a bit fuzzy and then all these"angels" came and gave us food and water and disappeared again as fast as they had appeared from one moment to the other. We were so lucky!!!! Can't even imagine what would have happened if we had drunk the water from the lake.....
I felt drunk from all the good things that happened to us and we continued our journey through this beautiful part of our earth. Now it felt like we had wings......the wind can be described now as a TAILWIND! I really thought that would never happened, but here we are......I couldn't even tell exactly where that 4800m pass was - this plateau has not been very dramatic in the ups and downs. At some point I could tell that breathing got a bit more labored when James announced we are well above 4700m. The views were breathtaking in themselves, so it didn't even matter...The good feelings about the human race and the tailwinds had us across the border to Argentina and in the little village of Jama in no time -the same day! There we hit the ground of reality again: A no -real -reason town with nothing to offer. It felt and looked like 'Bagdad Cafe'
We asked to camp and got no real answer- we asked for food and there was no restaurant. A little store and a gas station with chips and crackers - we spend the night camping in a construction sight - a seemingly abandoned half build house... good enough!
We had a morning cafe and tea at the gas station the next day and were off into more remote, but slightly different areas. It seems like every time we cross a border I expect drastic changes. The desert continued- more salt lakes and seemingly endless roads into nothing. It wasn't quite so stunning and pretty anymore.
We aimed for a little village called Susques. It was mentioned in one of the travel books, but it was a windy, dusty little town with little to offer. The winds seemed to come from all directions and we had a hell of a time staying upright on our bikes. We had ridden 120km that day and still got to town early to hang around a bit ..hoping for an invitation of sorts. Well, nothing materialized and James wound up treating us to a hotel with a hot shower and pleasantly clean and firm beds - warm and comfortable we gathered ourselves. We stocked up on some food and water again and the next day we headed into the continuation of the most remote areas we had ever ridden. Thankful the road was paved and the winds were still in our favor. The salt lakes started to tire me out - there were still more and more and I had just finished verbalizing my growing impatience when the landscape suddenly changed drastically!!! I mean, suddenly and shockingly:
We had to stop to look at the rock formation -the geology- in wonder and awe...the colors......the shapes....how can this all be?
There was a pass, we heard, one more before the road will finally take us down to much lower elevations on the east side of the Andes on our way to Jujuy and Salta. The days are longer now - we are heading into summer in the southern hemispheres- we only had about 400m to climb, but at the end of the day it seemed a little much. We had a good lunch though and I had some extra strong green tea...we're gonna do it...the road wound itself high and higher.....and then we saw the switch backs into the sky....OK, it'll take us probably an hour and a half, not counting the wind.
From the top it doesn't look quite so dramatic!
We attacked this last pass the same day- I admit I had to get off the bike and push at times, because the winds were CRAZY it got me shaking for fear that it would push me off my bike and under one of those huge truck wheels passing me on the way up (or down - sometimes it pushed me all the way to the other side of the road - I had been totally out of control a few times.) At the top - only 4200m high
the wind blew our minds and we saw the other side.......
THAT is one dramatic pass - especially at the end of the day and it wasn't even mentioned on the two maps we carried. We heard about the pass from a french cyclist who had come down while we climbed up ...riding the other way. Shit!!!! While the day neared it's end we rushed down the other side into some rugged looking barren mountains towards some warmer climate. The ride down (and we are actually not even down yet) - but thus far- took us an hour and a half when we called it "a day" and camped on the side of a dried out river bed, setting up the tent in some wicked winds. By now we have enough practice - though you can still hear us cussing....
Further down we rode the next morning - only 10km to the pleasant, but very expensive and touristy little town of Pumamarca and here we are camping near town after we ate ourselves silly and marveled at the colorful mountains all around us:
The Cordilleras Colores. Stunning, no?
