Chile/Peru Border to Nazca

Chile/Peru Border to Nazca

By roychinnorNo Comments
The run up to the border today was truly breath taking. Much of the time I was driving through flat single coloured desert but from time to time without any warning Bridget would turn a corner around the crest of a mound and there was a valley with drops of between 1500 and 3000 feet. Eventually I realised, the reason that such a huge change could appear without warning is that whilst driving across the desert the landscape appears flat, so that massive valleys are not evident until you are right on the rim. The roads drop right to the bottom of the valley only to climb up the other side. Long stretches of the road has no crash barriers even though the drop is almost vertical. If you lose control of your vehicle, for any reason, there is nothing between you and the long drop. We ran out of petrol today and Bridget’s jerry can came in useful once again. We...
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Santiago to Peru

Santiago to Peru

By roychinnorNo Comments
We left Santiago at around 8:00am and followed the route recommended by the hotel which turned out to be OK but not quite perfect. After a short detour I navigated us in the right direction, more or less! For the first one hundred miles there are hills and mountains in every direction I look. It is really beautiful and just as I am becoming accustomed to it we turn a bend and there ahead of us is the Pacific Ocean. The first thing to strike me about it are the rollers coming into the shore, they are between 15 and 20 feet high although the ocean doesn’t appear to be generally rough. Further on and there are white caps everywhere across the ocean. Off to the east I can see the snow capped mountains of the Andes and to the west the Pacific Ocean. I know from studying the map that they are converging and pushing in on the highway. When they actually...
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Mendoza to Santiago

Mendoza to Santiago

By roychinnorNo Comments
After a quick check of all Bridget’s fluids and filling her with fuel we left Mendoza a little after 8:30am. The plan for the day was to travel the 250 miles leaving behind Argentina and entering Chile. In between are the Andes Mountains. I was still felling fairly high after the previous days paragliding experience so I thought that there might be a risk that whatever today brought would be overshadowed. I need not have worried. I got my first glimpse of the Andes as I drove south from Mendoza on Route 7. We turned west towards Uspallata and the mountain range stretched out before us. In nature my two great loves are mountains and deserts, so the sight of what was to come really thrilled me. Having already on this journey experienced the foothills of the Himalayas and on previous journeys visited the Alps, the Andes and Rockies are the only two major ranges that I learnt about at school that...
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Just One Of Life’s Little Ambitions

Just One Of Life’s Little Ambitions

By roychinnorNo Comments
The day started in darkness. The hotel had a power break just as I awoke and I had to dress in darkness. So with my pants on my head and my sweat shirt inside out I went down for breakfast. After breakfast I went for a run to try to keep at least some semblance of fitness. I was collected from the hotel at 14:00 and we then proceeded to pick-up two guys from the USA staying just down the road from me. Then we headed off to the north of Mendoza. There we found a range of mountains up to around 3,000 feet high. We joined another party of lunatics and headed, in two 4x4 utility trucks, up one of the mountains. The track was very steep and strewn with boulders. Eventually we arrived at the launch area where our paragliding equipment was laid out. Yes, at last I had found somewhere that I could try paragliding without having to go through various...
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Road to Mendoza

By roychinnorNo Comments
Day 1 of the third leg and I’m really quite pleased. We left the hotel at around 8:00am joining the morning rush hour which is always a good initiation into driving in a new country. I have found that often the most difficult part of the journeys is getting on the correct road out of cities. You obviously have to watch the traffic at the same time as trying to spot signs and safely execute manoeuvres, so I was particularly pleased that our exit from Buenos Aires was fairly straight-forward. All I had to do was locate Highway 7 and follow it. The road conditions are generally good and the standard of driving is reasonable. I had forgotten that I still need to run-in the engine since its re-build and so we drove along at between 45 -50 mph so as not to exceed 3,000 rpm. We covered 400 miles in Perth before leaving and so we only have to do this...
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