Take the bus to Arica and then to Putre in the highlands

So this morning the plan was to take the bus to Arica in the far north. Just under 300 km. Taking the bus was something that I wasn't comfortable with when I booked it. Driving through the countryside and getting to know the land and the people may be a great thing, but not for old people like me. The bus started 20 minutes late, there was a single-lane construction site in between where we stood in the desert for a whopping 50 minutes, and every hill the bus struggled to climb at 50 km/h while the other bus companies with their new buses rushed past us on the passing lane.

In addition, I have the problem of driving from Arica to Putre and be there by 20:00 so I can still check in. Actually not a problem, but Ruta 11 towards Bolivia where Putre is located is also a construction site. I was already warned about this from Germany or via email that it is possible that it is also closed, or that you have to drive on a gravel road as an alternative...

Ultimately, everything went quite well, I took a taxi at the bus station, which was probably not even a taxi, but the old man took me to Hertz for a small fee and the gravel road turned out to be completely and partly freshly asphalted. After the initially wonderful drive through the Altiplano, you could already see the rain front coming towards us from a distance.....

At one point, I saw a young Chilean family with a breakdown on the side of the road and despite all the warnings in the travel guides, I followed my gut and stopped, and indeed, their radiator was boiling. Only had a liter of water with me, but that was enough, together with what the Bolivian truckers (on Ruta 11 there are almost only Bolivian trucks on the way to Arica port) added, to get the young people back on track....

Then I arrived in Putre, a place that can serve as the top scenery for any spaghetti western, and had a problem. The 'Verano Boliviano', the Bolivian summer, as the originally Italian (!) landlady told me. Fog (you can hardly see 10 meters ahead).....What do you do here for 3 days with this weather?