Wednesday 22nd January 2025: A trip up to the altiplano
It seemed a shame that we didn't get to see the altiplano, or Puna as they call it here. So this morning we decided to head on up there for hat would be a good day's expedition. Our guidebooks are now quite dated as they are 2008 editions. But the world has changed sine we bought them. They were once useful sources of advice on where to stay and where to eat, but now all that is covered by Booking.com and TripAdviser. However, what to see rarely changes - gorges and mountains stay the same.
One thing that has cahanges since we first started travelling in South America in 2002 is the state of the roads. Both in Chile and Argentina, the roads were often "ripio" - bumpy, unsealed with loose pebbles flying everywhere. It felt as if you were travelling over a ribbed washboard and often you would see cars overturned as the smallest mistake could throw your car on it roof. It used to be a shock that major routes like the RN40 here in Argentina and the TransAmerican/Ruta 9 in Chile were major arterial roads, like the M1 and M6, but were nothing more that what would be considered off road tracks at home.
However over the last two decades, stretches of these roads have been ungraded to tarmac or "Pavimento." t takes away some of the adventure, but also some of the stress. (Puncturing a tyre on the rocky Carretera Austral on Christmas Day was always a fond memory. We had to leave Chile and drive hundreds of miles to Esquel in Argentina to replace the spare.)
The Ruta 40 is an amazing road that stretches the whole length of mainland Argentina from the border with Bolivia to Rio Gallegos in deepest, darkest Patagonia, It doesn't get down to Tierra del Fego as a bit of Chile gets in the way!
As I said this is a major road of 5224 kilometres but so far it has been almost exclusively single carriageways. And often where smaller rivers cross the roads, they don't build bridges but have a cross road drain called Badens that make for a bumpy road if you don't see them.
Mostly on this holiday (and others), we've ised the Ruta 40 as our thread of connectivity between places, except of course last week when the RN40 was closed at the 5061 mountain pass at Abra de Acay.
Anyway I digress. When we first bought our guidebooks the road up to te altiplano from the Ruta 40 was a rough dirt road, requiring a 4WD. Whilst doing here research for this trip, Joan discovered that the section from El Eje to Antofagasta de la Sierra had very recently been paved. This almost halves the time it takes to drive along it. So we decided to drive up there and back for the day. We decided Antofagasta was a bit too far so chose to drive to El Penon, another altiplano settlement that was 220 km away, in all a six hour trip and climbing from 1255 masl to 3400 masl, nearly 2 km higher! (And via a 4000 masl pas)
We headed off up the RN 40 and turned of at El Eje and almost immediately took the wrong road. After we passed through a village called Corral Quemado, the road became narrow and a dirt track. We knew this was not right. So we turned round and Joan remembered she had (again) downloaded Google maps for this area so we could use them offline. We'd travelled 20 minutes in the wrong direction. We eventually made our way back to the place where we took the wrong turn and were reassured that there were no road signs to tell us we were leaving the Provincial Ruta 43!
Back on track, we began to slowly climb.
It's difficult to describe just the magnitude of the Argentinian countryside. It is immense, awe inspiring and relentless - breathtaking scenery that goes on for 100s and 100s of miles. You can almost get immune to it, but not quite!
The road wound up gorges and across vast swathes of high plateau. We had seen what looked like glaciers in the Sierra de Fiambala, but it turns out these were huge sand dunes.
So far on this holiday we have seen llama, alpacas and guanacos - all Andean camelids. But here were were rewarded with the sight of vicuna, the most elusive and dainty of them all. However, here they were in large groups, very near the road and a little less timid than usual.
Sand dune
Volcano on the altiplano.
After long climgs, zigzags and roads with no visible bends we began our descent to the altiplano. The landcape here is all greys and browns. Snowcapped mountains and dry up lakes.. The air is thin and tastes different. We barely saw a soul all day. In the distance, you could see the cone and pumice fields of a black volcano.
It would have been tempting to drive further on but you wouldn't want to navigate these roads in failing light. We took a few minutes to absorb the beauty of it all, and began the long trek back. We were so happy that we had made this trip. The photos do not really do the scale and wonder of it all justice.
Comments
Post a Comment