We anticipated about 80 kilometers of smooth driving up the valley to the town of Hurtado, a tough drive up over the mountains for 44 kilometers, and drop down into the gorgeous and green Valley de Elqui. We were getting a bit ahead of ourselves, beacause 80 kilometers takes an awfully long time when you're averaging less than 35 km/hour.
I hope that this does not come across as any kind of griping. Because at the time, we certainly weren't complaing about the drive. It really was quite beautiful. We were seeing the Chilean countryside in a way suitable for portrayal in the richly colored and glossy pages of National Geographic. Small towns, or rather very small villages were 10-20 houses of bright and contrasting colors were perched on the hillsides. On the narrow road, we slowly wound past adobe walls, thatched roofs, large stands of flowering cactus.
After about 2 hours of this unrelenting beauty, we decided to stretch our legs and have a quick drink. We were beginning to think we were getting too much of a good thing. So we were mistakenly relieved when we arrived at the turnoff toward Vicuña.
Within 20 seconds of turning onto this road, I was thinking it was a bad idea. I'd had a fair amount of experience driving on dirt/gravel roads in Washington, and I've dodged a fair number of potholes driving in San Francisco. But this was hellacious combination of all the bad features of any road I'd driven. For any given stretch, the road was composed of loose gravel, embedded rocks, hard-packed clay, windy turns, steep inclines, or some evil combination thereof.
It's difficult to say if it helped that the views were absolutely stunning. It made the harrowing driving seem worth the effort, but it made staring at the road that much less appealing, and harder to do.
A few minutes later, we were discussing how it was possible that we were in the most desolate place we'd ever been. The only signs of life were scrub brush and cactus. We'd seen one car in the last hour, which we'd just passed.
As Murphy would have it, right about that time the steering started pulling to the left. A quick stop (doesn't take long to decelerate from our speed of 10 km/h to 0) and a peek out the door confirmed it. We had a flat tire. We were 15 km from the start of the road, and 29 from the end of the road.
Perhaps Peugeot has little faith in tire durability, or maybe there are consumer-friendly rental car requirements in Chile, but either way, we were incredibly lucky that our car was equipped with a full-sized spare tire. Thus, we were, ahem, spared from becoming vulture meat, assuming we could successfully change the tire.
With surprisingly little difficulty (see the pictures for an abbreviated 'How to Change a Tire on a Desert Mountain Road'), we got the tire changed, and we were on our way. Our very, very, very cautious way.
I'm quite happy to report that, aside from some very grimy palms (Julie -- wisely -- did not want to waste our remaining water on cleaing wheel grime off my hands), the rest of the drive provided no further physical discomfort.
Herds of goats and then more pisco grapevines welcomed us down the valley into Vicuña, just as the sun was falling behind the mountains. We scrapped our plans to stop at one of the mountaintop observatories and made our way to La Serena.
Fortunately, "Hostel Jofre" (the sign on the front door includes the quotes) had not given our very small room to anyone else, and we were able to check in. Payment was another issue, though, as we were repeatedly denied cash from the nearby ATMs. Nearing the end of our emotional ropes, we tried one last ATM after returning to the hostel to ask for help. Those bound for La Serena take note: the ScotiaBank ATM is often the only cajero automatico that will serve foreign customers.
We wolfed down some long overdue food, giant and delicious sandwiches from Café Colonial, hiked back to our room at the hostel, and collapsed for a night of sleep.
The whole drive (buckle up!):
http://good-times.webshots.com/album/555612368DKSdKq?start=12
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