How high can you go?

The trip from Salta to San Pedro de Atacama was a jaw dropping, finger tingling, headache inducing experience.  Of course the later two were from altitude sickness, whilst the former was from the absolutely spectacular views.  The scenery didn’t really start to be anything special until we had made it past the blockade.  We aren’t quite sure what they were protesting about, but they were obviously camped out there and had blocked the roads with logs, branches, rocks and anything else they could find.  There were also a fair few armourned trucks with police or army men which I assume is why we did get through it eventually (2 hours later).   From there the road began to climb into the Andes, past mountains, canyons and salt plains.  At various points the effects of altitude became obvious, there was that moment when I tried to sit up and my vision went blurry and I thought I would pass out – we were eye level with snow at that point though.  Around 4pm we arrived at the border crossing… or at least the Argentinian side of it.  We were all stamped through fairly quickly but then had to wait forever for the paperwork on the bus to be completed.  Whilst we were waiting Jason made the suggestion that we really should all just walk across no-mans land and wait for the bus on the Chilean side of the border.  (Something we had done frequently in Africa).  Shortly thereafter we were all piled back on to the bus and given our lunch (yes, it was a very late lunch).  We weren’t sure at this point if we still had a really long wait before the bus was going to be able to move, or the lunch wasn’t allowed across the border and they had just forgotten to feed it to us earlier.  The bus did start moving though and we proceeded to go through the longest border crossing so far.  It was 2 hours driving later that we finally reached the Chilean immigration – actually in San Pedro de Atacama!