HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY:Getting through 2 border crossings
BUMMER OF THE DAY: Argentina border crossing was a shambles
WORD OF THE DAY: Border crossings can suck…..
DISTANCE TRAVELLED: 576KM
Towards Ataca, near the deserted coast, you see a land without men, where there is not a bird, not a beast, nor a tree, nor any vegetation.
Alonso de Ercilla, 1569
We’re leaving Argentina today and heading into Chile for 2 weeks. The rain held off during the night, but there was still a storm brewing as we packed up our tents and ate breakfast. The showers and toilets were finally free of cleaning people for the first time since our arrival, but we were there just before 6am, so it would have been surprising had they been there that early. Funny, well not really, but funny all the same.
We were due to depart at 7am and we were just waiting on malar, who was at the bathroom, and it’s funny cause Seamus and I both commented on her tardiness as she got on the truck that it was 7.04am, we were late leaving by 4 minutes. Those 4 minutes can be life or death for some-one and unfortunately as we were coming out of the camp grounds drive way, a motor cyclist tried to go around our turning vehicle and didn’t leave enough room, he panicked and the next thing we know, we hear a skid and look out the window to see a rider on the ground. The truck didn’t touch him, he did the wrong thing by trying to get around us and he came of second best. He got up clutching his ankle and then fell back on the grassy verge just grabbing his ankle and saying something in Spanish. The camp ground people were quite good about it and they stood the guys bike up on the side of the road and the police were called. The rider’s ankle didn’t seem to be swelling, but he wouldn’t let anyone near it to have a look, so an ambulance was also called. He had a superficial wound on his knee and his raincoat pants were ripped, but we weren’t going fast at all, I don’t know how fast he was going, but he looked okay to me. We only had to wait about 15 minutes and the Police and ambulance all rolled in together, it didn’t look like too much paper work was done and after about 10 minutes we were given the all clear to leave and the rider was taken off in the ambulance. What an eventful morning and we had only been on the road for 30 seconds. So the title of the blog goes to Malar, as we all figured if we had of left at 7am, we would have been already in the road and leaving town when bike rider came along at 7.05am….. It goes to show it is all in the timing and 4 minutes to us is 4 minutes to someone else.
I’m getting back into the swing of tent/camp sleeping and I am back to getting a good night’s sleep. Thank goodness I still have Gray’s inflatable mattress, this is a god send, but I probably could have purchased one by now if I had to, but his is quite new and very comfortable. As we will be camping in the desert for the next 3 nights I might need to invest in a blanket. There are a few ‘truck’ ones floating around, but you have to be first in to get them and once people have used them, are they then theirs, even thoughit’s not theirs? Or is it back to fair game at the end of each day. Tricky spot to be in, I would prefer to have my own, so will have to keep an eye out for one. The ‘truck’ ones are just like my African one I left behind in Cape Town…… ….. Sigh
We travel up and over the Andes today for the last time, well the high Andes anyway. Up to 5000m is the max we go as we pass through the Atacama Desert. The Atacama Desert is a plateau in South America, covering a 600-mile (1,000 km) strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes Mountains. It is, according to NASA, National Geographic and many other publications, the driest desert in the world.The Atacama occupies 105,000 km2 in northern Chile, composed mostly of salt basins (salares), sand, and felsiclava flows towards the Andes.The Atacama Desert ecoregion, as defined by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), extends from a few kilometers south of the Peru-Chile border to about 30° southlatitude.
Atacama Desert is commonly known as the driest place in the world, especially surroundings of the abandoned Yungay town(in Antofagasta Region, Chile). The average rainfall in the Chilean region of Antofagasta is just 1 millimeter (0.04 in) per year. Some weather stations in the Atacama have never received rain. Evidence suggests that the Atacama may not have had any significant rainfall from 1570 to 1971. It is so arid that mountains that reach as high as 6,885 meters are completely free of glaciers and, in the southern part from 25°S to 27°S, may have been glacier-free throughout the Quaternary, though permafrost extends down to an altitude of 4,400 meters and is continuous above 5,600 meters. Studies by a group of British scientists have suggested that some river beds have been dry for 120,000 years. However, some locations in the Atacama receive a marine fog known locally as the Camanchaca, providing sufficient moisture for hypolithic algae, lichens and even some cacti.
Geographically, the aridity can be explained by the following reasons:
The desert is located on the leeward side of the Chilean Coast Range, so little moisture from the Pacific Ocean can reach the desert.The Andes is so high that it blocks convective clouds, which may bring precipitation, formed above the Amazon Basin from entering the desert from the east.
An inversion layer is created by the cold Humboldt Current and the South Pacific High.
Noteworthy, an extreme Antarctic cold front broke through the rain shadow bringing 80 cm of snow to the plateau in July 2011, stranding residents across the region, particularly in Bolivia where many drivers became stuck in snow drifts and emergency crews became overtaxed with a large number of rescue calls.The total rainfall for the summer of 2011 was sufficient for wildflowers to bloom in the Atacama.
In a region about 100 kilometers (60 mi) south of Antofagasta which averages 3,000 meters height, the soil has been compared to that of Mars. Due to its otherworldly appearance, the Atacama has been used as a location for filming Mars scenes, most notably in the television series Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets.In 2003, a team of researchers published a report in the journal Science titled "Mars-like Soils in the Atacama Desert, Chile, and the Dry Limit of Microbial Life" in which they duplicated the tests used by the Viking 1 and Viking 2 Mars landers to detect life and were unable to detect any signs in Atacama Desert soil. The region may be unique on Earth in this regard and is being used by NASA to test instruments for future Mars missions. The team duplicated the Viking tests in Mars-like Earth environments and found that they missed present signs of life in soil samples from Antarctic dry valleys, the Atacama Desert of Chile and Peru, and other locales.In 2008, the Phoenix Mars Lander detected perchlorates on the surface of Mars at the same site where water was first discovered. Perchlorates are also found in the Atacama and associated nitrate deposits have contained organics, leading to speculation that signs of life on Mars are not incompatible with perchlorates. The Atacama is also a testing site for the NASA-funded Earth-Mars Cave Detection Program.
Because of its high altitude, nearly non-existent cloud cover, dry air, and lack of light pollution and radio interference from the very widely spaced cities, the desert is one of the best places in the world to conduct astronomical observations. The European Southern Observatory operates two major observatories in the Atacama, The La Silla Observatory and The Paranal Observatory, which includes the Very Large Telescope. A new radio astronomy telescope, called ALMA, built by Europe, Japan, the United States, Canada and Chile in the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory officially opened on 3 October 2011.A number of radio astronomy projects, such as the CBI, the ASTE and the ACT, among others, have been operating in the Chajnantor area since 1999.
We had one stop before lunch and it was at another salt flat. They make for interesting photos and this one was flooded with water up to our ankles. We just went for a wade with our sandals on and got a few pictures with the beautiful Andes Mountains as a back drop. There were mounds of salt on the flats as we drove through, this is also a tough life and looking down at my legs they were white from the salt water drying in my legs and leaving 100% pure salt. I could rub a few tomatoes on my leg to season them that how much had dried on them. We dipped a finger in the water to taste it and it was like tasting a bunch of salt straight from the shaker, it was so concentrated. Ughhhhhhh.
After stopping for lunch we hot the Argentina border at 3.05pm. It is one of those borders in the middle of nowhere and very different from the ones that we have crossed to date. There are no locals selling wares, food or soft drink. There are literally 2 buildings, one each side of the road, and I am now wondering if this is the highest border crossing we will do, I think we are around 3500m, I forgot to ask Mark who has this information on his watch. Anyways when we pulled in there was a bus already parked there and without the penny really dropping I guess the 40 odd people also need to get processed right! Well we entered the building and there was a group of 8 motor bike riders in front of us and a few families, it didn’t look too bad, till we noticed there were only 2 people processing and the first window had who we dubbed ‘bus boy’. Not sure how long he was there before we arrived but the first hour ticked by, the SECOND hour ticked by and we finally get to window 2 and as we are a ‘groupo’ we needed to fill in a form and wait for ‘bus boy’ to finish!!! By this time the waiting line was becoming a bit of a shambles with people pushing in and people waiting in the ‘groupo’ line as it did look shorter as some of us had now taken a seat. Little did people know about ‘bus bot’ and his 50 billion passports! They got the idea after a while that our linewasn’t moving and shifted back to the window 2 line. Something like that back home would be easy to explain, but when you have a language barrier, it sometimes isn’t worth it to try and explain, as it just gets more confusing. They worked it out. It was also then that we found out that we didn’t have to present ourselves; Mark could take our passports and get them processed so we were sent back to the truck at 5.20pm, 2 hours and 15 minutes later to wait for Mark to get our passports stamped. So exactly 3 hours later we were all back on the truck and heading into no man’s land.
Normally we walk across no man’s land. Sometimes it can be quite a distance, and we get a lift in the truck, but this WAS the BIGGEST stretch of no man’s land I have ever seen and travelled. I saw a sign post and it was exactly 160km!!! Of no man’s land. Whose durastrtiction does that amount of territory come under? Argentina or Chile? The road was in amazing condition, it actually looked new, so there must be some form of responsibility to both for the road to look that good. It was amazing scenery to pass through and a great introduction to the Atacama Desert. There were no signs of life, plant, animal or human – being no man’s land may have had something to do with the missing human link, but the land also looks uninhabitable full of dust, salt flats, marshes, canyons and ravines. It made for some amazing photos with black salt pans and the yellow dust of the mountains and some great views of 2 of the snowcapped volcanoes of the region. It was here we passed at 5000m before dropping back to enter into the Chile border formalities at 7.35pm. We have now officially been on the road for 12 hours and we were just hitting the border now. Wouldn’t it be terrible if we got stuck here for 3 hours as well? I don’t know how Gray can keep going… we are tired and we only sit in the back of the truck all day, hmmmmm maybe we don’t want to know!
Chile’s border control seems to have a bit more order and even though they were more picky than Argentina, the process kept moving. We lined up to be told we also needed forms here, so we had to step out of line again for the second time to fill them in and then re-line up. We were relieved to see that ‘bus boy’ was nowhere to be seen, which was weird, but as long as we beat him and his bus of people we didn’t care. Once we were stamped in, the truck then had to get checked over for fresh fruit and veggies. They were quite thorough with this as they have no food disease in Chile and they want to keep it that way, which is understandable, even at 8pm at night and 13 hours later. So we then had to take off our big packs and get then scanned through a machine, which was fine, till the customs guy went on the truck and asked for some of the hand luggage to also be scanned – okay I was at breaking point at this stage. The good thing was he pulled off what he wanted scanned, so we all didn't have to go back onto the truck-lucky. So with all our bags scanned, passport stamped and luggage back on the truck we had been at the Chile border for 50 minutes – leaving at 8.35pm. Our stop for the night was only a 10 minute drive from the border – San Pedro de Atacama.
WELCOME TO CHILE.
San Pedro Atacama looked a little divvy at first glimpse. The sun had just set at 8.45pm, so in its defence any small town looks a little dodgy. We have to keep in mind that we are in the middle of the driest desert in the world and this is one of the small oasis towns that survives in this environment. Try telling 12 dusty, tired travelers that, yeah not quite in the right frame of mind. So after pulling into camp, this is where Gray’s forward thinking (don’t tell him I said that) came into play and he had dinner heated and served in 15 minutes as we out up our tents and then after cleanup it was straight to bed for me. I was so tired and cranky by this point (hard to believe I know) that I would have said some things to people had I stayed up. Time for this tired cranky person to head to bed.
There is a nip in the air, and I have asked Malar for their blankets as they have upgraded for the 3 nights here. I think we are going to need them, remember desert at night time = freezing.
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