We had a very early start today, up at 4:15 ready to leave at 5:00am. Earlier than scheduled but we had another problem. The Argentinian customs officials were planning a four day strike closing all border crossings. We were scheduled to cross the border from Chile to Argentina the day after tomorrow, two days into the strike so Vikki and Eoin had to make a change of plan/itinerary and we had to have a big drive day and try and make it to the Argentinian border today, hence a very early start was required.
It was still dark when we left but soon we had a fantastic sunrise. We continued across the dirt tracks of the high Bolivian Altiplano. We had some stunning and ever changing scenery today, the landscape was just amazing, very wild and remote, the high altiplano is barren semi desert. It was bitterly cold and windy crossing the Altiplano, we reached 4800m. We stopped many times for 'Kodak moments'. We passed a few beautiful lakes which each appear different colours (red, white, green) due to the mineral deposits in the water. On the red lake there were loads of flamingos. The lakes are all surrounded by the dramatic snow capped volcanic peaks of the high Bolivian Andes. We also passed some geysers, sulphurous smoke and mud spitting thermal activity.
Just before leaving the Altiplano we reached the Bolivia/Chile border, a small building in the middle of nowhere, we all got stamped out of Bolivia and soon after we hit smooth tarmac road again. A longish downhill drive, 2000m descent, brought us to the outskirts of the town of San Pedro de Atacama and the Chilean border control. We woke the customs official up from his siesta, he was not happy! We all got stamped into Chile, they were being picky with us though, I don't think they like Dragoman trucks, we had to unload all our baggage from the truck and get it scanned plus hand in all our fresh food. Finally we made it to San Pedro town where we had a 45 minute break whilst Vikki and Eoin tried to find out more info about the Argentinian border strike. They were told the border was closing at 8pm, we were not going to make it, it was a further four hour drive to the border. They decided we'd stay in San Pedro for two nights as per our original itinerary and hope the border would be open again in a couple of days.
We found out the next day the strike had been delayed a week so we were OK to stick to our original itinerary for the time being. We do have to crisscross the Argentina/Chile border a few times over the next ten days so we'll see what happens? All part of overlanding fun!
San Pedro is a charming and quirky small tourist town on the edge of the Atacama Desert. We felt like we were in a small Mexican/cowboy town, you could imagine cowboys riding through the streets, very rustic looking. We camped in a lovely hotel complex, some people from our group upgraded to hotel rooms. In the evening a small group of us had a lovely BBQ.
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