Bolivia mang.
The drive into Bolivia is not easy. As you drive towards the border, the Chilean tarmac roads give way to dirt, and the road signs disappear. Entering the country from San Pedro de Atacama is pretty much impossible unless you have GPS co-ordinates or a guide. Unable to get the waypoints, we gladly took up a recommendation from lollysglobaltrek.com and arranged to follow a 3 day organised tour with a travel agency called Cordillera Traveller. They would charge us nothing but suggested to tip the guide if he was helpful. We were to rendezvous with the guide at 8am by the customs and immigration office, then follow car number 1 (a new white Mercedes Sprinter minibus) to the border where the passengers would get out, complete Bolivian immigration and then board car number 2 (a late 1970's Toyota Landcruiser).
We were going to Bolivia and we had to be ready. Our car was over-engineered for the paved roads of Chile and over-equipped for the jungles of Panama. But Bolivia would certainly put it to the test and no amount of preparation could possibly be sufficient. With news of flooding in the Santa Cruz region and road closures in the Cochabamba region, our plan was to stick to the south-west - make it on to the salt plains of Uyuni, whip out the camera, take the money shot and get out before something bad happened. E-J stocked up on enough water and tinned food to outlive a nuclear fall-out and MG made sure all the gadgets were fully charged (indescribable satisfaction).
At E-J's insistence we set the alarm clock for what seemed like some time the day before we had to leave and sped our way the 3 minutes to immigration where of course there was no-one anywhere and so we waited (E-J nervously, MG barely conscious) for the rest of the country to wake up. First in the queue when the officials arrived, we then waited for the white minibus which eventually turned up around 9am, as one of their passengers had overslept. We were given directions to the border and encouraged to go ahead as the minibus would catch up with us there. Whatever, thought MG, and burned off.
About half way up the hill, a bad smell appeared and after two denials of responsibility, MG spotted the temperature gauge on the dashboard shooting upwards. We looked at the GPS and realised we had been ascending at over 100m / minute. Some kind of smoke then started bellowing out the engine hood, so MG thought it perhaps prudent to calmly pull up on the side of the road. To say E-J was also calm at this point would be inaccurate. "IT'S GOING TO EXPLODE!!!" preceded a near TJ Hooker style roll out of the still moving vehicle with passport, sat phone and handbag collected on the way. MG lifted the engine hood and more smoke bellowed out. The coolant reservoir was bubbling away and spilling on to the ground below. When MG verbally presumed there could be a remote possibility that the engine might catch fire, E-J interpreted it as a clear signal to transcend into defcon 5 full-scale panic status and shout "oh my god oh my god oh my god" repeatedly while she ran round the back of the car, and dramatically salvaged bags and boxes from the boot as she fought back the tears. MG whipped out the sat phone and got Eddie Priscott of Oxon, UK, mechanic extraordinaire on the line for a 2 min crash course on overheating turbo diesel engines. MG put on an oven glove, and carefully unscrewed the radiator top. Error! A spout of superheated engine coolant and steam and all things very hot and dangerous shot out of the radiator and had it not been for the open engine hood which deflected the liquid forwards, the spout may have been 10 meters high. At this apex of MG's mechanical pride, like in the tortoise and the hare, the white minibus slowly rolled past us and our flashing hazard lights, open hood and supercharged geyser. A quick consultation with the guide concluded that after a full half hour of our promising venture into Bolivia, el burrito with all its fancy bells and whistles would not be in a fit state to continue to the trip. We re-filled the radiator with E-J's limitless drinking water, and rolled back down the hill to San Pedro in Chile.
That night, with the help of a local mechanic, we drained the radiator and re-filled it with Mobil's finest coolant. We also reloaded water, recharged sat phone and reset the alarm clock for something a little more civilised. Day 2 we took it much slower and stopped a couple of times on the way up the highway to heaven and much to E-J's disbelief, eventually made it up to the border and into Bolivia.
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The rest of the day was spent driving up though the most remote and incredibly beautiful scenery yet, stopping at the famous mineral coloured Laguna Verde and finishing the day camped up near Laguna Colorado. Along the way, we stopped at thermal pools where we dipped our feet and at the bubbling sulphurous pools where we held our noses. We also checked through Bolivian immigration at 5049m, perhaps the highest immigration in the world?
The guide went like the wind, and at points we struggled to keep up, but the large scale scenery gave the day's drive through the altiplano a dreamlike quality where at times you felt you could reach out the car window and touch the clouds as they drifted magically just above us.
The abundance of flamingos at Lago Colorado was incredible. 3 different species (with different coloured bill / leg combinations, fyi); 10s of 1000s of the funny creatures and not a palm tree in sight.
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That night we opted not to stay in the extremely basic refugio dorms with the members of the tour but to stick to our plan and brave the cold. At 4300m altitude we put our camping equipment to the test. Inside the roof tent, E-J laid out the john lewis top of the line hand picked and plucked hungarian goose down duvet, covered it over with the 87% alpaca 13% wool blanket from Alpaca 111 and we dressed up in our thermals and fleeces and socks and hats and scarves and hugged each other to near suffocation until we realised that we were actually quite warm and promptly fell asleep.
In the morning condensation from our breath had caused icicles on the corners of the tent and we congratulated each other on having overcome the odds by sticking to the simple but dependable strategy of deploying large amounts of cash in exchange for the best kit.
