Date : November 14th, 2000
From: America Latina 2001
Subject : Bolivian preparation
Place : Chiloe

We've just arrived in San Pedro which is a nice small oasis of more than 1000 inhabitants and which is lost in the Salar de Atacama. For the first time since we left, we can feel a real change of scenery ! We hastened to find some information about how to enter Bolivia via the Cajon pass at the bottom of the Licanbur, but no decent map enabled us to know whether we had a chance pass through it or not. We went hunting for information in the several agencies of the village. But the result was rather mitigated : the Chilean, on the whole, trust the state of the road leading to Uyuni, but the European people living in San Pedro, in turn, were really pessimistic about our chance to pass through.

As another solution we waited at the customs house for a group of tourists to come back from Bolivia in order to get a report about of the situation; but once again, each gave his own point of view : impassable road, sand, crossing of a river...

Collecting all our information, the situation was as follow : the road was tarred over the first 30 miles till the Bolivian border that stands 2.7 miles away; there was no problem of corruption of the customs officers; the road till Laguna Verde is in a good state, then the approaches to the Laguna Colorada was to be a 4x4 rugged dirt track; it seemed impossible for our 505 to drive on the next miles. We therefore decided not to go through the Lagunas and to take the main road leading to Uyuni.

We spent the 4 days to discover the Moon Valley, the Salar de Atacama and we tried to reach the Los Flamencos Park. Indeed, the 505 gave up on us when we were at an altitude of 4000 meters : the temperature there exceeded 100 Celsius degrees, no engine power output at all, the radiator was boiling... let's say that our going to Bolivia was shaping up very badly ! Back to San Pedro, the mechanic of the village told us that we'd better drive when in the "fresquita", meaning very early in the morning. He made a tuning on the engine "advance the spark" and we decided to try and go up till the Bolivian border the morning after.

On Tuesday, we left early in the morning and we dove up the 2000 meters of difference in height without any difficulty... even if the limit of the 4000 meters was not psychological at all.

At the customs house, we talked with the Bolivian about the formalities to be able to pass through with the car. Gradually we could feel the effects of the height, Philippe was stammering and we started to have headache !

The custom officer was very surprised at seeing a tourist car that was not a 4x4 ready to go into this region. Besides, he didn't really know how to deal with it and we were told that we would have to pay a 6000 pesos tip (around $ 15) and pay the entrance of the Lagunas Park (3000 pesos) : not really appealing !

Olivier and Philippe