Lima, 5 months after this trip :
Leaving Bolivia to reach San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, it is leaving the Altiplano too. In just a few miles, the altitude is dramatically dropping from 15,000’ to 6,500’. One can rediscover heat here, or the easy life of tourists who just have to walk a few steps to taste some great food and some Chilean wine. There is no need to fight some crazy wind to set up the tent or to find a shelter for the stove in order to try to cook some pasta. Yes, it is great to taste this relative luxury!
However, after few weeks in altitude, in the wind, being sure of nothing, this contrast is pretty dramatic and it doesn’t take long before feeling a powerful call from the road and the solitude. Then, it is actually quite easy to leave the city and the crowd.
On the way back to the Andes, the road is getting closer to Argentina. For a mysterious reason, travel guides are not mentioning this area and for us the consequence is quite fantastic: solitude. And we are just going through entire days alone on the road, incredible bivouacs, amazing places that we totally ignored that they even existed.
And those evening thunderstorms. Incredible. From west, the sun is shining over some yellow grass and from east the storm is coming. The clouds are so dark and so threatening. The contrasts are stunning and it is so good to watch the show, well sheltered in the car. It is violent, intense, noisy, and quite often it brings an immaculate white touch on the higher summits.
And there is Fiambala in Argentina. There is nothing special in Fiambala : it is a little town that lives slowly, waiting for the next Dakar race. It is a spot that we could totally ignore if it wasn’t an open door on the high Andes and the amazing rounded 20,000 feet high summits. Here, we are entering in a complete no mans land, one of the most beautiful and unexpected mineral landscape. It is here, on the border with Chile, that the Nevado Ojos de Salado stands, highest volcano on earth (sheltering the highest lake on earth in its crater) and second highest summit of the Andes (and therefore in South America), at 22,614 feet. This is the goal of this 6 weeks trip. We could expect a dense crowd, hungry for such a conquest on the mountain’s slopes. It is the exact opposite. The mountain is harsh, high, far. The path goes through multiple valleys and large and long plateaus. The step is shorter in this deep sand; the nights are not that easy at more than 16,000’… But soon I’ll talk more about this incredible adventure: our attempt on the Ojos de Salado.
Few months later, there is rarely one day without some thoughts for those incredible mountains: ice penitents in front of the bivouac, clouds moving so fast in the sky, temperature of 0 or -5 F during the night and more than 95 F in the tent during the day, the wind that is changing so quickly, this sand that one more time is taking over everything and the warm sun that is shining every day. And nobody else.
