June 19th Status Update & San Pedro de Atacama

Our adventuring has been in full-force since our last blog update- so much so that it’s been two months since our last posting and there are still many stories yet to tell prior to that. It looks like we’ll be stationery for a couple of days, so I’ll give you all a quick update.

Today we really thought we were going to reach Bolivia. After several days of fighting altitude problems including nose bleeds, a vicious sinus infection and collapsed sinus, we’d finally gotten me acclimatized enough to be able to cross over the 5,000 meter pass and stay at a 4,200 meter level without too much concern. So this morning we called and wrote our parents saying we’d be out of touch for a few weeks, we filled up on water, gas, Bolivian currency and said our good-byes to our new friends Paul and Helen. Both of us were feeling very excited about adventuring in a new country, seeing some great sights and getting to Cochabamba to start volunteer work. We left the in-town campsite and headed to the Chilean point of exit, which on our route is on the outskirts of town (San Pedro de Atacama). With all our excitement we really only drove about ½ mile, anxiously hopped out of the car, and after some confusion trying to locate the emigration officer we were told they were “closed.” Well, this is Chile after all we thought, so maybe someone had a family emergency or an odd-hour siesta or something. No, they were closed because all of the roads out of Chile from around here are closed. Apparently a huge snow storm hit yesterday and the roads from here to Bolivia and Argentina are snowed-in. There are border crossings further north of us that we could pay several hundred dollars to drive to that might be open (gas is EXPENSIVE here), but then we’d miss out on the southwest corner of Bolivia which has some of the most pristine, un-touched wilderness area in the Americas. Don’t want to miss that. So, what to do? Well, we drove back to the campsite, said our third good-bye to Paul and Helen, and now we’re in a holding pattern until the weather and roads clear. Carl was positive enough about the situation and remarked that it’s better to be stuck here in town with services than up in the snowy mountains (where we could be forced to burn our car tires to survive).

Below are some photos of the last 10 days in the San Pedro de Atacama area including our trip to Valle de la Luna, the Tatio Geysers, Lagunas Miscanti and Miniques as well as the town of Socaire that we camped outside of during the acclimatization process (where they’re trying to re-introduce terraced farming with aquaduct-water from the mountains) and our San Pedro de Atacama campsite as well as the town square from which we spent hours Skyping with Mom’s geography classes (which was quite fun). 🙂

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P.S. If you don’t get the burning of the car tire joke we can fill you in another time. There are just some places city-folk shouldn’t go.