This place is littered with cacti. This one reminded me of something else.
I thought this one was a bit rude.
The road became long and straight again.
And dead quiet.
We were on our way to Salta where we would have our replacement phone sim card sent to. The route to Salta takes you through all sorts of towns, big and small. This one named Londres (Spanish for London) kept us in the dark about which way to go. Getting directions was a bit problematic.
We found this awesome camp site on a river bed. Jeez it was nice to stick our feet in soft sand again.
The roads became a bit boring after a while....
and because everyone referred to us as the riders in black we became inspired to give them what they wanted and gladly started posing as Power Rangers.
The road became twisty again towards Cafayate which surprised us how much of a tourist town it was.
Good place to have a coffee though.
The road between Cafayate and Salta is this awesome twisty road through these beautiful valleys lined with stunning rock formations.
It wasn’t too hot and zipping through these twisty turns was just a great surprise and change.
It all ended when we entered Salta.
As usual finding the main square was pretty easy and it´s always a good reason to stop for a cuppa.
Everywhere along our trip people asked us if we were contesting in the Dakar Rally, but the people of Salta took it a step further and celebrated the arrival of the first contestants with a parade through the streets passing the bikes in honour.
We didn’t have the heart to tell them we’re not doing it this year. Maybe the next.
Because the Sim card hadn’t arrived yet we thought we’d take the opportunity to ride out to Iruya where the Guinness add was filmed. The one with the massive pint glass made of books that gets set off by a domino off all this local crap lying around.
Anyway. The road takes your across the tropic of Capricorn.
The weather became worse the further north we went. And although we were lucky by not having any rain during the day, we had our fist proper rain storm that night. We found a camp site along the side of the road littered with cacti and other thorny scrub. So we had to be careful finding our way through it.
They are really everywhere.
Handy place to dry your thongs though.
The next morning we met an Argentinean biker from Ushuaia (the southern most city in the world) on his way back there from a trip including Bolivia. He had some good info for us and we were already looking forward to that place.
As the clouds starting coming in we took the turn off from Ruta 9 to Iruya. The scenery became very alpine.
You do have to endure the occasional dickhead though. Two in this case.
This area must have seen consistent rain for a while because the dirt turned to mud a lot.
With heaps of crossings.
And then it became just riverbed.
This road was a dead end road to Iruya so we’d have to return this way again. My GPS showed that we’d done several km’s of this stuff already and there was at least 20-30 more of it until it would cross a larger creek. With the clouds starting to let go some thunder and us being knackered, we decided to turn around.
We got to test our rain gear at least.
So after spending Christmas in Salta, we´ll be spending New Years here as well. At least I get to set off some fireworks just like back home in Holland. All in all, it´s not a bad place to be holed up in.
The memory of being stuck in Almaty in Kazakhstan is still very fresh in our mind.
It felt great to finally be on the road again. We’re not that great at sitting still. We took Route 9 the way we came back from our failed attempt to conquer the road to Iruya. This time it didn’t rain. It’s a nice ride really. Nice and green, a pleasant change.
There was going to be no sitting around sipping latté’s until we’d hit San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. The aim was to cross the famed Paso de Jama. To get there you go over several passes and it was beginning to get cold.
Argentina has it’s own salt lake (as does Chile) but it’s no patch on the Salar in Bolivia. It’s set in this eerie valley that as luck would have it would be our camp site.
It felt like there was no-one and nothing for miles around, and being low on fuel didn’t help the eeriness. Nice sun set though.
We felt hardcore in the morning though. Funny that, eh.
The border post surprised us with this massive queue.
But they finally decided to open a separate desk for private vehicles. So it was time to conquer the pass.
The colours were just beautiful, and we were getting very excited about the Bolivian Altiplano. (BTW, the pass it fully paved. Just couldn’t resist to pose on the dirt).
The pass peaks at 4830m, and I have to say. Again we felt justified to choose the so called unreliable F650 for our travel bikes. FI is awesome. It´s like you’re riding a diesel. You turn the throttle and nothing happens. On the steep sections I had to down shift, but it purred like at sea level. A bit harder to start though, due to the narrow air intake, but it gets there every time.
In town we found some nice parking for the hard working beasts.
The town itself surprised us as well. It’s a collection of tourist tack shops, tour agents, money changers and pizza restaurants.
Mars had come down with what we thought was a bladder infection and was on sickening antibiotics for a few days now, but it didn’t seem to lift. We did a bit of homework, and we found that it can become rather serious, so we decided to head to the hospital in Calama and hour out of town.
The road passes the Valle de Luna (Lunar Valley) which I had completely forgotten about. Again you have to go over a pass to get into another valley towards Calama.
It’s a desert really. I think it marks the start for the Atacama Desert. No trip goes without visiting a desert it seems.
While waiting for the necessary tests we decided to head into the Valle de Luna, which made for a nice day trip.
The doctor who saw us spoke reasonable but broken English, and said that the drugs we had taken is considered immune for this infection in Chile and gave Mars these other ones. These ones make her twice as sick unfortunately. The list of side effects is pretty rough. So heading into Bolivia’s altiplano was going to be no picnic, but she wanted to keep moving none the less. Hopefully these pills would kick it.
The first attraction on offer was Laguna Verde. We nearly missed it, and actually lost the track going to it. So after a bit of off piste action we were back on track.
Or several tracks really. All as bad as each other. Often heavily corrugated, but also often loose sandy/ gravelly soil. Weird really. Definitely the worst and deepest corrugation we’ve seen. Worse than Kazakhstan (although there it’s the huge crater potholes on the once paved roads that are the killer) and Mongolia. So deep that we couldn’t speed over it, although the big sandy section made sure of that. Luckily the whole bit was within our fuel range anyway.
It is absolutely stunning there though. The colours are so vivid. So we didn’t mind going slow.
Sometimes there is a track though. This one is on the way to the customs office, which is 14 or so kilometres from the immigrations office because of a mine. Must be keen to get those taxes, eh. The customs happens to be at an elevation of 5024m. Unbelievable, and a record for us that will remain for some time I reckon. Getting off the bike makes you short of breath. We had to actually find an officer, but in the absence of one a helpful mine workers gave us the forms and even stamped it for us!!!!
Second attraction (yep, it’s a national park with all this listed out) are some hot springs. But as we arrive there was a whole bus of backpackers hanging out in it, so I took a miss. It’s a concrete pool, not a natural rock pool, for all you romantics.
