Notice: There are high resolution sattelite data available from Google Maps, so click the link title of this article and scroll to the end of it to see the included Google Maps applet. You can zoom in and see the houses, trails, river crossings and a lot more. Check out the border barracks of Visviri for example.
The clouds of the previous evening had been gone in the morning. We put the sleeping bags in their little protection and compression sacks, rolled the Thermarests and put the tent in it’s green bag to protect it from the dust of the road and the hardships of the day.
After 1.5 hours of cycling we reached the town of Charaña (pronounced charanya with the “a” pronounced like the ‘oo’ in blood). A lot more had we expected. At least we found a somewhat reasonable small shop with hundreds of different items and easily spent our last money there, about 20 €. Probably the biggest deal for the young woman owner of the show with her small, 1 year old boy.
We tried to get on the Internet but asked the owner of this small, 3 computer cybercafe for the speed and whether it’d make more sense to postpone the visit to the other world, to the world of NOW. He explained we should get NOW later on in Chile. That saved us a lot of headaches I guess.
So now we’re at the border, ready to get a 90 days tourist visa for Chile and have our luggage checked to protect the country from diseases. Diseases for their vulnerable mono culture growing food industry that is. All the cyclist coming here know that the Chileans don’t want that stuff, so we, too, had been prepared and didn’t buy any fresh fruit or vegetables.
In the early afternoon we started following road I-123 down south. The road follows the Chile-Bolivia border pretty close as you can see if you zoom in on the map. The Chileans were just upgrading the road to a new level and I guess in a year’s time it’ll be sealed. That was the first part only, then it got worse, in parts really sandy.
The colors from the evening sun got softer and softer and put the area into a nice yellow-orangish mood. With a wonderful view onto distant 6,348 m high Parinacota volcano we continued cycling. But the winds got harder, so hard actually that occasionally we had a really hard time staying on our bikes!
We decided to pitch the tent at a place where they were just upgrading the road. We put it right behind some little hills for wind protection. But then the wind changed direction and we had already put big stones on the leashes. The tent got deformed heavily while we were packing our stuff inside. The bikes got fixed to the head and foot of the tent both for the protection of the tent and bicycles.
We had dinner inside and a small dessert: Chocolate. The latter one we had every evening these days, not very healthy but calories. It came in the same silver foil as the chocolate in Peru, probably imported. We had bought a whole box for 4€ containing about 20 units. To get it the previous day we had to bargain with the woman. First she didn’t want to sell it to us at all, but then she realized she could make profit from the sale 
While we had dinner the lamas went on their way home to the paddock. I didn’t see anyone bringing them there, so I guess for them it’s a routine and they profit from the paddock because the stone walls give them protection from the cold winds and by sitting side by side they won’t get cold at night.
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