My last stop in Chile was the town of Arica. Historically an important town, I was more interested in the national park La Lauca which starts a few hours towards the Bolivian boarder. As always one of the first things I do is to see when I have transportation to my next destination. I asked in the bus terminal but all the companies crossing the border to Bolivia were on strike. Apparently the Bolivian government introduced a new tax for these companies which they didn’t like at all. There is another terminal right next to it so I went to check there. It was the terminal for the Peruvian and Bolivian bus companies. The separation shows that these countries don’t like each other a lot. Entering the terminal I got a first impression of how it would be in Bolivia. It was chaotic. All the terminals were full of women with giant mountains of cloths; it was hard to make a way through there. When their bus came they wrapped up all the cloths into huge bundles. I couldn’t tell what belonged to whom, since it was one big sea of textiles, but somehow they organized themselves. Fortunately I found one bus company that wasn’t on strike and I bought a ticked for the day after tomorrow. I usually don’t buy tickets in advance but I though since it was the only company still operating, they would probably be full very quickly. I found a very good place to stay Residencial Tres Soles, with nice people running it, very close to the terminal.
The park was too far away to do by bike in one day and it went up 4500 meters as well, so I booked a tour for the next day. I didn’t think that they would pick me up punctual but they did and I wasn’t quite ready. The tour guide had to wait a few minutes for me and didn’t seem too happy about it. It turned out that all the other people on the tour were seniors. We drove up to the park; stopped at some interesting spots on the way, conducted an indigenous ritual, ate breakfast and drank tea with coca leaves and received some “agua de flor” I think it was called, supposedly to help breathing in the height. Close to the border we reached a lake, 4500 meters over the sea level with a beautiful volcano in the background and llamas having their lunch on the shore. After that we headed back down to the town of Putre where we ate lunch. We had a little free time to check out the town and then returned to Arica.
The next day in the morning I took the bus to La Paz. I had to find out that the bus took about the same street that I took the day before on the tour. So if you want to see the park and heading for La Paz, then you don’t have to take the tour, you see about the same with the bus, only that it doesn’t stop on the way. It’s certainly one of the nicest trips I made so far. On the Chile side you have the lake with the volcano and after crossing the border you get to enjoy the beautiful “altiplano” of Bolivia. The high plains have something magic to it and I liked it a lot, the colors are very special.