Into the Atacama

The driest place on the planet (that isn't at a pole) is the Atacama desert.  Naturally one must pop in when one is in the same continent, if only to say "Huh, this is a very picturesque blighted hellscape, don't you agree darling?".

We flew to Calama, the closest thing to civilisation, before making our way to San Pedro de Atacama.  San Pedro exists in the middle of several points of natural beauty and therefore serves as hub for adventurous tourists and some truly certifiable cyclists.   The town looks poor, but as far as I know it might just be scruffy because everyone apparently insists on building their own place - sometimes in a heroic triumph of optimism and economy over competence and utility.   The preponderance of unbaked adobe brick (if nothing else, this trip has left me well versed in brick) would mean that half the town would dissolve in a day of British drizzle.

Forsaking the numerous tours offered in the area, we hired a vehicle to see it all for ourselves.  This time we got something more appropriate in that we had a diesel-chugging behemoth 4x4 pickup truck. Behold El Monstruo:

 

Leading to several yells of "It's gripped; It's sorted; Let's offroad!" before totally fucking up the diff lock and stalling.

Suitably saddled up, we set about it.  I did forget my passport and immigration receipt on the second day, which made for some awkward conversation at a police checkpoint near the Bolivian and Argentine borders.  They wrestled with whether to press the issue after it became clear that I was clearly an imbecile who couldn't speak Spanish.  Ultimately they erred on the side of laziness and waved me on with a scornful look.

The desert is dotted with volcanoes, salt flats and the occasional lagoons, and is home to a fair abundence of wildlife. They have guanacos here -as in Patagonia- but also llamas and vicuñas (a smaller variant with different colours- the national animal of Peru, no less): They also have the occasional donkey.

Flamingos also feature - especially at the Chaxas Lagoon, which is home to three varieties.  They live off the brine shrimp found lurking in the salty water. Brine shrimp are a bit weird, by the way: they lay eggs that can lay dormant for decades, being hatched when required.  There were also a few lizards and other birds knocking about, eating what the Flamingos kick up when they're looking for food.

There was also a rather inprobable valley filled with vegetation, which was originally irrigated by the local natives and was improved upon subsequently.  It was very modestly reminiscent of Zion national park in that it was a very green oasis full of life in the middle of desolation. The caves cut into the cliffs and the remaining petroglyphs are also a bit similar to the Pueblo villages we saw in New Mexico.

The first night, we were taken into the hills by the local astromical institute to do some stargazing. The absolute absence of metropolitan glare and the sheer space available make this area particularly suited for staring into the inky nothingness above.  Our Canadian guide -equipped with a very nifty green laser- pointed out the constellations, even thought they were all wrong and upside-down due to our being in an unnatural hemisphere. The aussies in attendance were somewhat baffled by the absence of the southern cross.  It is all a matter of latitude, my dear loaf-stealers. There were ten telescope of various types, pre-trained on astronomical bodies which we could walk around and observe.  Then there was a Q&A session in the lodge with cocoa.

I took a stab at some long exposure photos while I was there.  We have a bridge camera rather than an SLR, and the stabilisation circuit is playing up (I bought some screwdrivers in Santiago - it will rue the day) but here you go:

The first obigatory thing to do in this area is to visit Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) at sunset.  A stout fellow from Mexico named Diego helped us out at the admin point on the way in, in that he had change for the ticket and could translate for us.  The day was running out so we threw his bike in the back and he came along with us to see what there was to see.  This first picture below is called Las Tres Marías (The Three Marias), because that is literally what they call anything they find that has three things in Latin America. This area is where NASA tests it's rover vehicles, as it emulates forbidding alien rocky terrain rather well.

The second obligatory thing to do is catch the geysers at El Tatio at sunrise.  Unlike Yellowstone, where you can watch them gassing off all day, it's so hot here you need to come first thing where it's so cold one can witness brass monkeys frantically searching for a welder.  The rest of the day, they're just bubbling holes in the ground.  So we got up at Jesus fucking Christ o'clock in order to drive the 90km up there in time for sunrise at 06:00.  It was quite pretty, even if my extremities turned black and fell off.  They don't bother with the Yellowstone-style secure boardwalks over tested solid ground here, so occasionally hapless tourists fall through the crust and have a bad day. Exciting.

Chan managed to get the hire car $171, rather than £171 as listed on Europcar's UK website. And the getting up early meant we got three days' worth of careering about for two days of car, so that was nice.  It's busy in Chantelle's head.  I'm just here to drive and lift things.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben die Atacama-Wüste gereist. Es ist die trockenste Wüste der Welt, sondern ist die Heimat von vielen Lamas und Flamingos.
Die nahe gelegenen Geysire sind spektakulär, aber wir mussten sehr früh aufstehen, um sie zu sehen. Es war sehr kalt. Wir besuchten auch eine astronomische Institut und blickte zu den Sternen. Die Wüste, ohne all die Lichter der Stadt, ist sehr gut für Sternbeobachtung.

Over the Andes

This post is liberally and randomly dotted with pretty pictures in dubious chronological order, as I can't remember which is from where.

We got from Mendoza to Santiago by way of coach, taking the winding road over the Andes mountains.  The terminal in Mendoza is a bit demented - 40 bus ranks, countless offices for bus and tour firms, money changers, water and empanada sellers etc..  More alarmingly, our bus wasn't on the departure schedule.  The bod in the ticket office helpfully drew a circle around the departure time on my printed-off voucher, which did little to assuage my doubts about the coach's actual existence.   Ultimately a bus did turn up, and we handed our bags over to the porter loading the luggage bay - along with half my surplus pesos for his trouble. They don't work for the bus companies, they just work for tips.  Anyone handling the bodybags when they've not been calibrated for domestic flight deserves my groats.

We had booked our seats ahead of time and had managed to reserve two at the top and front.  If you're making a trip as dramatic as this one, you want the view.  Our compatriots in the other two front seats were a friendly and chatty Irish bloke who was resident in Buenos Aires and therefore spoke a helpful amount of Spanish, and a middle-aged American guy who was pleasant enough but was also perhaps not entirely there.  He had the perpetual open-mouthed grin of the recently sedated or of serial killers. I think perhaps that the wheel was turning but the hamster was likely dead. 

The border is an adventure in endurance bureaucracy.  It looks even worse if you're doing it by car -we saw tailbacks for an easy three miles.  We had it easy by comparison in that the buses just drove around the cars and queue up outside a large hanger.  Bus by bus we disembarked and joined a spider of lines leading to desks variously staffed by Argentine and Chilean immigration staff.  The idea was that you got signed out by the Argies and stamped in by the Chileans.  It worked after a fashion.

Then we were paraded into another room with sinister looking metal table and a massive x-ray machine.  There we laid out any carry-on bags and waited while they dragged off our luggage from the bus and ran it through the machine.  We were in attendance in case they wanted to look inside.  Meanwhile, they go over the bus with a fine toothed comb and a team of very distractable dogs.  The point of all of this is partially to look for the normal contraband, but mainly to stop the import of biological matter like diary, meat, plants and untreated wood.  They're serious about it too.  Non of the various paramilitary-looking constabularies and government agents we've encountered in South America look half as geared up for war as the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture.

After a modest hour and a bit (the bus companies allow something like 1-3 hours for the border crossing on their schedule), we were back on our way.  At this point they passed around a hat for tips for the guys who handled our bags at border control.  I was prepped for this, so they got got the other half of my Argie monopoly money.  It's best to lose that benighted currency before you reach civilisation.

You have one job and you suck at it

On the other side,  the road winds perilously around sheer drops a dozen or so times.  This is made all the more fun by being on a duble-decker coach.  The scenery is spectacular on the way through; white peaks and rivers of snow melt all around.

As the scenery gets a bit more conventional once you've reached the bottom, they play a couple of films on the bus TV screens.  They played that new National Lampoon's film, which I'm pretty sure isn't on general release.  Their copy had Spanish subtitles overlaid on top of Chinese subtitles, which meant one of the staff had plainly Bittorrented it on his down time.  

The bus terminal in Santiago was another level of ridiculous. It was 20 coaches crammed into the space of 8, all of whom apparently on a mission to be the biggest possible obstacle. I'll talk more about Santiago in a bit because we're coming back here after a brief stint in the Atacama desert.   

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Wir überquerten die Anden mit dem Bus. Der Kerl, der neben mir saß, war vielleicht ein bisschen dumm.
Die Aussicht war wunderschön, aber die Grenze Bürokratie war lächerlich.

Tough on wine, tough on the causes of wine.

We had a couple of days in Bariloche, so I took the opportunity to get some laundry done.  Since this lot still resolutely refuse to speak the Queen's, I still had to pantomime an impression of a blithering idiot.  An impression that was done no disservice by me asking -in Spanish- if the launderette lady spoke Spanish. Apparently she did, and rather well as it turns out.  This didn't help me any, but at least it was an icebreaker.

While we were waiting for that, we drove El Shed up to the oddly named Llau Llau, which is a massive hotel and golf resort on a hill, peering over the city.  The chap who built the original Llau Llau (which burned down) was very influencial on the rest of Patagonia, so you'll see buildings in this style all over the place now.  We had afternoon tea again, because miniature cakes and sandwiches are apparently still where it's at.

We dropped El Shed off at the airport, whereupon the wheels exploded, the doors fell off, and twelve clowns jumped out of the boot.  Chan says I've done the clown car joke before, but I'm unconvinced so I'm running with it.

Off you toddle, you export market lemon

The last stop in Argentina was Mendoza, a place you'll have heard of if you like a glass/bottle/crate/cellar (delete as applicable) of Malbec now and then.  We didn't check in until about midnight, as we were in Buenos Aires for five hours waiting for our connection.  This is what happens when you fly with a Chilean airline (LAN) out of Jorge Newbery airport. The state-owned airline, Argentinas Aerolineas, is based out of there and would struggle to make money selling deep-fried heroin in Glasgow, as they are managed by some ridiculous Peronist youth group.  Accordingly, competent competition is afforded every possible discourtesy (when they aren't being kicked out of their hangers), you will find your flight delayed and -when you do board-  you will all be stuffed into one undersized bus and taken to the darkest corner of the airfield.  Aerolineas are still pissing pesos, mind.  Although this did work in our favour when they forgot to charge us for our ridiculous luggage on our flight to Ushuaia. 

As the Bard once said:

"You can call in all the favours with the minister of transport that you like - your airline is still a shower of shit."

Anyhoo, we were in Mendoza.  It's a place that should be a desert but for the vast irrigation system implemented by the natives and perfected by the Spanish in times of yore, which makes it now so suitable for grape and olives.  Our first day was a simple one:  we went to a local restaurant of some renown, drank wine;  we went to a local hotel bar of some renown, drank wine.

The restaurant was the Azafran Restó, where they don't have a wine menu, instead they take you to the cellar and help you pick one according to what you've ordered to eat, price and preference.  Or in Chan's case: whichever has the prettiest label.

"I'll have...the lot"

Then we went to the Park Hyatt, where they apparently did free wine tasting.  They did, but not until half six, and it was barely past lunch time.  So we bought some wine to drink while waiting for the free wine.  There are worse ways to spend the day.

The following day we used the public transport network to get across to the wine-growing area of Maipu, where one can hire a bike and cycle between various vineyards and wine shops at leisure.  Evidently one cannot be drunk-in-charge of a bike here. Or rather you can, but no one's going to book you for it,  and the random open drains on the pavements work as a very efficient moderator.   The bike vendors offer a selection of examples from various stages on the knackered spectrum.  After a few offerings with flat tires, we were given a map and sent on our way.

 

The first stop, Vinoteca La Botella, was fantastic.  For 40 pesos (about 4 quid or 6 US dollars) the bloke there gives you 5 generous glass of wine from local vineyards and throws in a bottle to take with you.  Also for 40 pesos, he'll give you a massive glass of wine and 3 steak empanadas.  This was agreeable.

"This tastes hysterical"

We made our shaky way (both mechanically and physically) up and down Urquiza, trying the local wares.  It was important to try everything,  lest we cause offence.

It's hard being me

Eventually we made our way back, using buses following routes that were confusing enough to start with without being drunk, before they are diverted all over the city because of random road closures due to this being Argentina.

The country has been by far the most awkward in South America: every interaction requires reams of paperwork and three times the amount of time you allow for, and buying goods and services was often tortuous (either they don't take card or you can't find an ATM that functions with foreign cards). But the locals have been very friendly (and often met my blustering gesticulations more than halfway) and the scenary frequently awe-inspiring.

So, back into Chile.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben eine Besichtigung der Mendoza mit dem Fahrrad gemacht, trinkt viel Wein. Es war toll.  Unsere Reisen in Argentinien sind beendet und wir fahren jetzt nach Chile.