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CHAPTER 6: Northern Chile
Tuesday 6th April 2004 – Chile – Leaving Argentina, Back on the Ripio, BM Trouble-Ewes!, On to San Pedro de Atacama Monday 5th April was a sad day, it was the day we peeled ourselves away from El Castillo. On the previous evening we celebrated our departure over a plate of Ceviche – a Chilean delicacy consisting of several kinds of raw fish & seafood marinated in lemon juice, coriander leaves and some cumin. Maria’s mother made it especially for us, and it was a scrumptious treat! I have to say that we rode off with big lumps in our throats as we waved farewell to all at El Castillo. We had opted for a northern route into Chile, first taking the road up to Jujuy (a lovely word - pronounced ‘whoo-whooey’ by locals who sounded like little steam trains when they said it!). As the road into Argentina from Chile through Bariloche way back in January was one of the best of the trip, so it was to be with the road out! It started with a narrow track winding through a jungly valley to the city of Jujuy, which was set against the most fantastic backdrop of over-sized mountains you could imagine. We rode up into these to the delightful little pueblo of Purmamarca, which made for an excellent lunch stop in it’s setting up against the ‘mountain of the seven colours’ a huge rock face slashed with rainbow coloured strata like some crazy modern art. The afternoon took us back onto some Ripio - actually it was a really good ‘bad’ road winding higher and higher up over incredible mountain scenery. Altitude would now start to play a role in our trip as we were climbing from 1200m (4000ft) altitude in Salta to up over 4000m (11,000ft) as we headed towards Chile.
The road to the Chilean border is in the progress of being paved and a good section had been completed taking us out over the Salinas Grandes to Susques, the last town in Argentina before the border. The Salinas Grandes are a vast salt flat startlingly white and penetrated by a road so straight it would have made a Roman weep. It was an awesome ride and at one point we took the bikes down off the road (which is elevated on a causeway as the flats flood during the rainy season) to ride out onto the salt and take some photographs against the shock white background. The whole area was ringed with splendid mountains and the net effect had the hairs on the backs of our necks tingling in response to the beauty of it all. We reached Susques around 5 in the afternoon, a little tired but elated at the end of this wonderful day on the road. It was a tiny little place, where we found fuel for the bikes but no rooms as both hotels on the road out of town were fully booked for the Easter week. We didn’t fancy heading on, as the next stretch of road was 70km of Ripio to the border & then 150km of paved road into San Pedro de Atacama, our destination in Chile. There was only an hour or so of daylight left and it didn’t seem wise to continue. Riding back around the village we found a Hospedaje (a B&B) that we’d missed and so pulled up outside the low windowless dwelling. Apart from the sign outside, there was nothing to suggest that accommodation could be found here. We gingerly knocked on the door and a scruffy Indian teenager answered it. We asked for a room and his toothless mother appeared wearing a bowler hat and a filthy sweater with about a months worth of dinner dribbles represented down the front of it. She mumbled something and gruffly led us inside to show us the room whereupon we entered her hovel to witness a scene of unimaginable poverty and filth, a dark dungeon illuminated solely by the light of a small television set around which there were several more grubby children. We were led through a dirty alley into a reeking courtyard to a door behind which lay the bedroom. We didn’t go into it. There was no need. We could see in the dim light, the filthy bedspread draped over the ancient bed and a quick look at each other led to profuse apologies and a hasty retreat. We would rather have slept out in the cold night air than risk our health in that place.
The sun was sinking fast so we rode back out to one of the hotels to see if we could maybe camp there and at least use their facilities. The lady owner rang a friend in town and we were told to go to Glady’s house, opposite the church on the main street. Gladys was an angel, but even better she was an angel with a room! She has a lovely little house with several rooms out the back. She doesn’t advertise – there were no signs that accommodation was to be had there – but she does provide rooms when the hotels are full and does enough business that way. There was covered secure parking for the bikes and she even cooked us a dinner – steak and gravy with mashed potatoes that tasted just like home. What a perfect end to a stunning day’s motorcycling!
Next morning we were up for an early start, eager to tackle the Ripio and get back into Chile. It was not to be. First one bike refused to start, then the other. It had been a bitter cold evening with temperatures below freezing and we were up at some altitude. We pushed the bikes out into the sun to let them warm up and eventually got them going by push starting them down the street. So much for BMW reliability! Once running they were fine and behaved for the rest of the day. Unfortunately the road did not – Ripio with heavy roadworks, gravely patches and sand. It took us 5 exhausting hours to ride the 70km to the frontier with Chile at the Paso de Jama. Still the landscape was a continuation from yesterday with more salt flats and once again volcanoes on the horizon. The Argentine guards and customs officials were a great bunch and we were quickly stamped out of the country. It was a sad moment as neither of us wanted to leave this fantastic place. In our original plan we were only going to spend a few weeks here, really just to get to the Moreno Glacier and to see Ushuaia. But it has been such a wonderful land that we ended up spending the best part of 3 months exploring the delights on offer. It is quite simply the best country we have ever visited and the memories we carry away now will stay with us as the most valuable treasures for the rest of our days.
We had been lead to believe that the road to San Pedro de Atacama was all downhill from the frontier. Not true! Instead we climbed on paved roads through vast mountains, eventually peaking at over 4,600m. It was freezing cold and we ended up with thermal fleeces and wetsuits on in the chill early evening. We rode on past azure blue lakes and fantastic red and cream mountains until eventually the road began to drop into the Salar de Atacama, another salt flat set in a huge bowl in the mountains at the head of which stands San Pedro, back down at 2,400m. First glimpses of Bolivia also lay across to our right behind the most incredible volcano yet – Liconcabur, a majestic and imposing monster that dominated the scenery for miles. We were officially signed in to Chile at a straightforward border crossing (the customs post is in San Pedro itself) and found good welcome accommodation in the Hostal Katarpe. San Pedro de Atacama is a little oasis in a vast wilderness and made an excellent base for exploring the area, full as it is of volcanoes, mountains, thermal springs and geysers. Set in the altiplano, a high desert where it is warm by day but freezing cold at night, it would be our home for the next 5 nights.
Thursday 15th April 2004 – Chile – San Pedro de Atacama, Back to Sea Level – Iquique and Arica
We had a fabulous time at San Pedro with days out to see Chile’s Valley of the Moon, the nearby Tatio Geysers and the pink flamingos at the Salar de Atacama on Lago Chaxa. It is a place of staggering beauty perhaps best left to the photographs to describe. The town itself is fairly small and consists of a grid array of low adobe dwellings some of which have been transformed into colourful Andean restaurants so night time eats were always something to look forward to. We also spent a little time checking the bike cold start problem. The battery levels were low on Mags bike and about half on mine so we topped them up with distilled water. They still will not start on cold mornings with a bit of altitude and a look on the F650 owners club Website (www.f650.com) revealed that we are not alone with this problem. We now have to leave them in the sun to warm up (which fortunately it does fairly quickly) or push start them. Once they have started, everything is fine and they ride well all day, restarting first time at each halt for food, fuel, photos etc.
In San Pedro, we met some more fabulous people, fellow travellers on the road. Doris Mason is on her way home to Canada after 3 years travelling round the world on her Honda 750 Magna. She only has to complete the South, Central & North American legs and then her trip is over. Her friend Norma Davis, also on a 750 Magna, has joined her for the Pan-American section. We had a great dinner together and cracked a few beers on Good Friday in the little plaza in town. Doris & Norma are headed next to Mendoza & Argentina so we agreed that maybe we will meet up again somewhere further north. We also met a decent big Chileno lad by the name of Julio Cesare Pizarro on a BMW GS1100, currently vacationing in the north of Chile. He was headed in the same direction as us and we met up a day later in Iquique on the Pacific coast.
Iquique was our first city halt back in Chile. The run from San Pedro took us over the ugliest road in the world through the Atacama Desert. It was a big straight road lined with cold steel pylons drooping sad cables under which the desert landscape looked like the builders had been in and not done a great job of clearing up after them with spoil heaps everywhere and vehicle tracks running all over the place. Everything looked grey and sullen, the sort of landscape that can dampen the brightest spirit. Fortunately we only had an afternoon of it as far as the ghost-mining town of Humberstone, where the road split off to the sea and Iquique. The run into Iquique itself was spectacular, dropping out of the coastal cordillera like an aircraft coming in to land, with awesome views over the city and the massive sand dunes that utterly dwarf it. We found a decent little hotel and decided to check out the batteries and charging systems on the bikes before heading next into Bolivia & Peru. The following morning Julio was up early and went out to find some local cops. In Iquique, they use an older model F650 as a police bike so maybe they could help. We had breakfast & the 3 of us set off to a police roadblock on the main route into town (both bikes started first time now we were back at sea-level). Here we met Manuel, a bike cop, who was busy at work nicking speeding motorists as they arrived in town. We hung around for 10 minutes until he had filled his quota and then set off on a high-speed pursuit across town to the house of the police mechanic. We had to hang around for another 10 minutes to wait for the guy to turn up and we noted that the police bike had a baldy back tyre that would have earned him a hefty fine back home! The mechanic duly turned up and checked the charging circuits on the bikes. Everything was OK so next we went to a battery shop to have the batteries checked and their acid changed. Again everything was fine so it is looking like we are stuck with this cold / high start glitch. It seems it may be a feature of the fuel injection / engine management system and our next step will be to contact BMW for advice.
Next day we said farewell to Julio, who went off to visit a little mountain town called Pica & we agreed to try and meet again further north in Arica or Putre. We needed a day or 2 for some making & mending so we both had haircuts and did some work on the Website & answering emails. Iquique has a fine old city centre, with lots of wooden buildings. It hardly ever rains here and we spent a pleasant afternoon walking along the beaches watching the surfers in action.
A one-day ride took us back inland to Humberstone and then on a spectacular swoop of a road through the Camarones valley to Arica the last big city in Chile, just short of the Peruvian border and allegedly the driest place on Earth! Where Iquique had the feel of a busy business centre, Arica was a lovely laid back seaside resort. It has a beautiful plaza overshadowed by the Gibraltar like ‘El Morro’ – a huge rock and scene of a major battle of the War of the Pacific in 1879, which resulted in a Chilean victory and Bolivia losing all access to the sea to become the land locked country that it now is. The Bolivians still harbour a lot of resentment over this and to this day Chile and Bolivia have not exchanged embassies. The dry climate in Arica is lovely and is made tolerable by its proximity to the crashing rollers coming in from the Pacific Ocean. We had a lazy day or two here, mooching around the narrow alleys and market stalls before heading inland towards Bolivia.
Sunday 18th April – Putre – Last Stop in Chile, My 43rd Birthday
A short 90-mile ride took us back into the mountains to the lovely little town of Putre, an ideal place to stop for a few days to acclimatise to the severe altitudes we would now enter on our way into and through Bolivia. Putre sits at 3,500 metres and it is literally a breathless place to be. We found superb accommodation at the Hostal Pachamama for less than ten quid a night, with a large room just off a spacious sunny courtyard. The entire town sits under the Nevados de Putre, an awesome snow capped mini mountain range providing a tasty backdrop for photography. There are limited facilities here with a few basic café restaurants and at one of these we ate our first Alpaca steaks (an Alpaca is a small llama) and they were excellent. The altitude is severe, we were utterly breathless just tying up bootlaces and it can cause nausea and light-headedness in even the fittest of folk but fortunately we were spared this discomfort.
The other advantage of stopping at Putre is its proximity to the Lauca National Park, where I was to spend one of my best ever birthdays. The short ride into the park took us up another 1000 metres to 4500 metres (15,000 feet) and into a wildlife and volcano wonderland! As we climbed higher and higher we saw 2 phenomenal white tops peer at us over the chilly brown landscape, eventually revealing themselves as the volcanoes – Parinacota & Pomeranes. Eventually we crested a rise to drop us into the park and there they were in their full glory – the twin volcanoes, both of them at over 6000 metres and fully bedecked in snow. The road wound on around the two peaks to Lago Chungara, which offered fabulous mirror shots of Parinacota and views of the far off but even larger Volcan Sajama in Bolivia. We also saw Gualatiri – an active but less spectacular peak with a small vapour stream spouting out the top. The whole place was teeming with wildlife – Giant Coots, Ducks, Andean Geese and the odd Flamingo out on the lake whilst on land, herds of Vicuñas roamed the grasslands and we saw our first Vizcachas - giant long tailed Andean Rabbits – living in some of the rocky outcrops near the park entrance. To end our visit to this high altitude wonderland we had a hot soak in a natural thermal spring – very invigorating, especially when we got out to dry off! Back in Putre we dined with a pair of Geologists, up surveying in the area for Gold & Silver for one of the large mining companies and enjoyed a pleasant evening listening to their tales of life in the field. We hit the hay early as tomorrow we leave Chile for the last time and head into new territory – Bolivia. |
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