After having said goodbye to Ross, the kiwi owner of the Sunny Days hostel in Arica, we were on our way to ‘base camp’. Our base camp (or place for acclimatisation) for three days was going to be Putre, a small indigenous village close to the border of Bolivia. The 125 km was relentlessly uphill, going from sea level to an altitude of 3500 meters. The scenery was changing all the time, we drove up mountains that looked like sand dunes and roads carved into the sides. There hardly seemed to be any other cars around, just large amounts of Bolivian trucks going up and down.

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