Crossing the Andes (Iquique to Bolivia)

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The next part of our trip was probably the hardest so far. We had to cross into Bolivia from Iquique which involved climbing to just over 4300m from sea level (our hostel in Iquique was 100m from the beach!). The first day involved a steep climb out of Iquique to about 900m and headed northwards for a bit on the pan american so nothing too special, still the desert landscape surrounding us. The second day was a gradual climb up to around 2600m where we camped for the night to acclimatise a bit. The landscape was gradually changing too, becoming greener the further up we got. We felt fine up until this point and as the climb was gradual we could still maintain about 10-11kph so felt like we were making progress. The next day was a different story! After climbing another 100m or so the gradient became a lot steeper and we were gasping for breath trying to ride up it, travelling at about 6kph! We decided it was easier just to walk and push the bikes as it was only marginally slower and would mean we didn't have to stop as often to recover. This went on for pretty much the whole day, with only a couple of flatter bits we could ride, so we ended up walking for 20 miles pushing our bikes! We camped that night at 3900m, feeling pretty crappy after covering 35km the whole day but we hoped a night spent at that altitude would help us acclimatise. We also came to realise that it gets really cold at night at that sort of altitude. Anything left outside the tent froze (including my breakfast orange which i wasn't too pleased about!) and we were in our sleeping bags wearing all our clothes to keep warm.

After surviving the night we climbed the last few hundred metres to just over 4300m the next morning, with a mixture of cycling and walking. We then had the fun part of descending to the border which is at about 3700m. The scenery at this point was amazing as we were riding through the Volcan national park which has lots of volcanos and snow capped mountains on the horizon. The town we were aiming for on the border is called Colchane and has around 500 inhabitants or so. It's a mixture of Chilian and Bolivian culture, although it is on the Chilian side. Upon arriving we were lucky to meet the towns English teacher who took us to the hostel and showed us where to buy supplies which was nice of him! We also found out that the town only had electricity from 6:30pm - 11:30pm, a feature which was common for most of the small towns we passed in Bolivia. We stayed the night and planned to cross to Bolivia the next morning.

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Photos

Our dinner
We had alpaca stew for dinner in Colchane that night

Colchane
Chilian border town