The border crossing into Chile was breathtaking. The fact that it was over 16,000 feet may have had something to do with it!

Flamingos on the Chilean Altiplano

Our first night in Chile was in the small town of Putre. It was our 14th anniversary and Mardis Gras. Many people were dressed up in flashy costumes and there was a parade through the cobbled streets. Although the scenery on the altiplano wasn't much different from that of Bolivia, the accommodations and food were much, much better. We had a nice dinner in the only restaurant in town where Dave tried the llama which he thought tasted like venison.

We had ridden 200 miles since our last fill and it was 100 miles to the next town but the only way to get gas was to buy 10 liters from the grocer. When he brought out the container, it was a 10 liter container only 3/4 full. Dave tried to get him to use a coffee filter to filter the gas before putting in our tanks, but he didn't want to. After more convincing he agreed, but then poked the hose right through the filter so we decided not to get gas and take our chances on making it to the next town. Our motorcycles have fuel injection so we got really good gas mileage at high altitudes, 86 miles per gallon. Our reserve lights didn't come on until we reached 283 miles so it turned out that we had nothing to worry about.

The ride down the mountain led us through varied scenery from well above the tree line, down through the desert and cacti out to the Pacific coast to the town of Arica where we stopped for fuel.

We rode south to Iquique, stopping along the way to see sculptures in the desert. We spent a couple of days exploring the city of Iquique. We were excited when we finally found a device that heats up a cup of water, now we could make tea in our hotel room again. The one that we purchased in Mexico wouldn't work in Peru or Bolivia so we had given up drinking coffee in Lima because it was too much trouble to find a good cup of coffee in the morning.

Chilean desert scenery

We followed the coast south for several hundred miles with beautiful vistas before turning east toward Argentina.

Pacific coast, northern Chile

The Atacama Desert is the driest in the world and we were thankful not to have any breakdowns because it was a long way between towns.

I'm thirsty!

We spent the night in the village of San Pedro de Atacama. This was a tiny town of red clay streets with adobe buildings, no billboards or neon. Our guide book said they just recently got electricity for 24 hours a day. We had to take our showers quickly after we checked in to the hotel before the town shut the water off for the evening. In the morning, we cleared Chilean customs before riding a couple of hours to the Argentine border at Paso Jama. We met three Brazilian motorcyclists on the way and rode with them to the border.

The border crossing was slow, almost 2 hours and they didn't know what to do with motorcycles registered in the US. Dave's paperwork from customs now has his bike registered in Brazil, we'll see what happens when we try to leave! The northwestern part of Argentina is very arid and we stopped at a dried salt lake where we met two motorcycle travelers from Colombia. Dave went for a short ride on the salt flat and felt strange as he thought there should be ice-fishing huts out there somewhere.

Grand Salar, northern Argentina

A road made for motorcycles

The ride south and east to San Salvador de Jujuy was phenomenal. When we crested one mountain and looked down into the valley, we could see endless switchbacks and clouds obscuring the view into the bottom of the valley. We lost track, but there were probably forty switchbacks on the way down. It was more like skiing down a mountain than riding down it. The treeless mountains were multiple shades of brown, red, and green rock. It was getting late in the day but we couldn't help stopping to take pictures and enjoy the views.

Too many switchbacks to count

We arrived in Jujuy in the rain just as it was getting dark. At one point, we had to ride on the sidewalk to get around a group of belated Carnival partiers in the street.

The next day, we decided to take the scenic route to the town of Salta. This took us past pretty farms in rolling hills with every kind of farm animal on the road - goats, cows, sheep, and for the first time, free ranging horses. We were enjoying it until it became a very twisty single lane road with two-way traffic, started to rain and the fog rolled in. There were more cars on this road than we would have imagined for such an inconvenient route. It seemed like the type of road that one would only take for a leisurely Sunday drive. Eventually we came upon a car going in our direction and we stayed behind it to use as our blocker for traffic coming from the other direction.

Road to Salta (the wide part)

We decided that we needed to pick up our pace if we wanted to get to the Lake District before the weather got too cold. We hopped on the freeway and rode to San Miguel de Tucuman. The next day, we had one very long day of riding to the city of Cordoba. This route was straight highway and at one point we could have sworn we were in Iowa or Indiana (other than the mountains in the distance) because of the corn and soy bean fields.

The next morning took us through some gorgeous twisty roads through low mountains with beautiful weather and almost no traffic. Fortunately this was the case as time and mileage had taken its toll on Deb's chain which was stretched to its limit and it finally decided to jump off the sprocket. Twenty minutes later our middle-of-the-road repair was complete and we were on our way.

Deb's Break down

We spent a night in a town called San Luis enroute to our destination, Mendoza, where we would have some much-needed maintenance done on our motorcycles at the BMW dealer. We liked Mendoza the minute we rode into to town. It had wide shaded avenues, sidewalks lined with outdoor cafes and beautiful plazas. We spent a week there gorging ourselves on delicious, thick, 3 dollar steaks and ice cream by the quarter kilo. Deb's bike got a new chain, sprockets and a set of tires. Dave's bike got rear wheel bearings, a chain and sprockets. They even washed Deb's bike, but not Dave's as he told them he preferred it dirty.

One of many parks in Mendoza, Argentina

We left Mendoza with only a few days of riding left to reach the Lake District. Our route through the sparsely populated province took us on a road where sometimes the pavement was very good, sometimes almost missing, sometimes gravel and sometimes just plain dirt with miles of washboard surface. It was great!