On the way to Arequipa Christelle and I wondered if there were any interesting sites along the way that we could visit. On the map we found the Reserva Nacional de Salinas y Aguadas Blancas. So we took a detour through there. It was mostly a high altitude desert but with great panoramas and lots of alpacas and vicunas. At one point we got out and walked around a bit but there was not much interesting stuff to be found. ...
Before arriving to La Paz I had to stay another night somewhere. I found a nice mountain pass with a small maintenance road to an antenna tower. It was a little windy but in the slipstream of the car I was able to cook some dinner without the wind blowing out the gas stove. El Alto On my way to La Paz I had to go through El Alto. El Alto has a larger population than La Paz itself. While La Paz is in the valley, El Alto is on the plane around the valleys edges and is much more of a sprawl than La Paz. The quality of the buildings is also significantly lower. From La Paz there is multiple cable car lines going up to El Alto. ...
The drive from Sucre to La Paz takes 9 hours (even though it is a fairly well maintained toll road). It is a beautiful ride but after 5 hours I started looking for a place to sleep for the night. On the iOverlander App I found an entry for a camping spot that seemed good and on OpenStreetMaps there was a road that went there. I found the entrance to the road and it did go for some 500m to an old graveyard but sadly it seemed like the map was outdated after that for there were fences crossing the section where the road should have been and behind the fence there was already plenty of grass. So the map must have been outdated for some 10 years already. This was not the first time OSM had been wrong though so I was not entirely surprised. So I turned around and wanted to look for a new place but the way back went in a right turn around the graveyard and in my turn and with only my headlights to go by I must have missed the ditch that was there. In any case, I ended up plowing my car more or less straight into said ditch. ...
After Humahuaca it wasn’t far to to the Bolivian border anymore. I was already in the altiplano at over 4000 meters and I wouldn’t get below 3000 meters until I went to Sucre later. Along the way I saw huge herds of alpacas and llamas that were grazing on the huge planes. ...
The Flight The first weird thing that I noticed on this journey was that there were a lot of german dudes going to Santiago de Chile with me. In a glimpse at one of them I saw that they all had their names and Bayern International on the card that was dangling around their necks on a leather lanyard. Definitely something political going on there. ...