High Plateau

Today I thought about driving west to the high plateau towards Bolivia and Argentina. The travel guide said that besides a spectacular road, there was nothing to see and only warned about the altitude. San Pedro de Atacama is located at 2,400 meters and the highest point of the road is at about 4,500 meters above sea level:

I set off in the morning and there was hardly any traffic on the route, and it was steadily uphill, but in long straight sections. I drove to the Bolivian border and asked the border post if I could get a stamp in my passport without filling out all the formalities, but unfortunately, it is not possible...

By the way, it is hardly known in Europe that Chile extended itself so far north only from 1879 to 1884. Large parts of the Atacama belonged to Peru or Bolivia, which lost its access to the sea after the war and is therefore, along with Paraguay, the only landlocked country in South America. That is one of the reasons why the three peoples don't really like each other...

So without a stamp, I continued towards Argentina, where I saw the old Mercedes bus that a young Argentine man owns with his family. It was built in 1946 and is therefore 70 years old. At the viewpoint with the bus, a young Argentine man had to vomit. Altitude sickness! Until then, I didn't notice anything myself, but when I continued driving, I started to have a headache and the fuel gauge dangerously tilted to the left, with no gas stations in sight. By the way, along the way, you can often see the vicuñas, a type of llama.

So I turned back and the headache became quite severe, so when I reached the bottom, I took a nap for 2 hours, which helped...

I also took a photo of the empty bottle, so you can see what a pressure difference the 2,000 meters make.

In the evening, I wanted to go to the tourist magnet...