Moving on to Chile — Lisa's (& Steve's) Travels

We took a bus (that picked us up on the side of the road outside our hotel in Purmamarca) to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. It was purported to be a 7 hour trip, but after wasting 1 1/2 hours in multiple lines at immigration at the Argentina/Chile border, it was much longer. We’ve decided that, in comparison, the slowest airport customs and immigration look downright lightning fast. Unfortunately for some, the altitude of the border crossing at ~14,000 ft caused acute altitude sickness. It seemed to hit younger folks - 2 teenage girls sat on the floor or laid down, while we stood in the interminable lines, but got markedly better after receiving oxygen at the infirmary. Two little kids vomited. To add insult to injury, after waiting all that time, we then had to collect our bags that were unloaded from the bus, and haul them into the station for the customs agents to rifle through by hand. After the bus was all reloaded and we headed on our way, we continued to climb to ~16,000 ft. I later learned that this is the highest paved road in the world.

Interestingly, at the outset, we were the last ones to board the bus, and the 2 front seats with great window views were open. I’ll share a few pictures that Steve took with his phone, but please excuse any bug smears, or window reflections you might see. ;-)

This was usually the type of view we had, for a number of hours in the middle of the trip. Then random rocks would pop up -

Then other, more majestic structures would pop up.

On our first full day in San Pedro de Atacama, we drove our rental pickup truck to Valle Arcoiris (Rainbow Valley), and I think you’ll see that it was aptly named. But first, along the way, a guanaco posed like he was gracing a tourist pamphlet:

Then the llamas did it -

The roads in Chile are ever so much better than Argentina.

Ok, ok… Rainbow Valley -

Our trusty steed:

On our way to see some petroglyphs, we noticed that the cacti here at 15,000 ft don’t grow very tall:

We were really glad that we had become acclimated to the altitude back in Argentina, because most of our jaunts around this area involved climbing up to “nosebleed” heights. On another note, about cacti, we had noticed in Argentina that they had a cactus line, like we have tree lines in the US at altitude. It appeared that the tall cordones (like saguaro) couldn’t thrive above 12,000 ft.

As we drove on to see the petroglyphs, we passed a herd of llamas very close to the road. We’ve learned that llamas and alpacas (I haven’t gotten any pictures of the latter yet) are domesticated, while vicunas and guanacos are wild. Thus, the first poser in this post is wild, as are the vicunas you saw in earlier posts.

This young llama had such soft looking fur, I just wanted to reach out and pet him. I loved the curly little tail. The variety of colors in the herd was quite interesting: