Wed, Oct 31, 2007 page13

• Natural high

  On a trek through the Andes Mountains between Chile and Argentina, it's not just the altitude that makes travelers gasp

  • By Euan Ferguson / THE GUARDIAN
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  There are, I am almost certain, wiser things to worry about at 4,800m. Quite how it is possible to be this cold and still alive. Whether you are, in fact, still alive, because the world is quite, quite black and howling; perhaps edema had after all set in and this was indeed it, this was the afterlife, albeit a rather pleasant one with the tang of high snow in the background. Wiser things to ponder, too: was yesterday the one full of the most fabulous and eye-twisting vistas I had ever seen, or was that the day before, they all tend to morph into one; and how on earth can the bright-eyed Chileans even think of playing soccer at this height, the white lines on their pitches of lava dust marked out in dirty blond sulfur scraped from the volcano burbling away so happily nearby, when I can hardly plant one foot in front of the other?

  But no, I, in my wisdom, was struggling to have a cigarette. Gasping for it. Here's a little-known fact, possibly because precious few fools have tried to light up at this altitude: cigarettes don't work at 4,800m. There is, baldly, not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to allow them to burn: instead the paper will huff and crinkle but sturdily refuse to catch, and you will be invited back into the warmth of the growling minibus with pitying glances and muttered Chilean versions of idiot.

  Well, I'm sorry, but still. I was higher than I had ever been in my entire life, higher than most people ever manage, well above half the height of Everest, past the point grizzled non-smoking climbers mark as very high altitude, and I wanted to celebrate, as I wanted to celebrate surviving the 100 or so hairpin curves that had led us up there, and give tearful thanks for our driver's keen brown eyes and happy genius with gears, and celebrate the monstrous beauty of this part of the world. And I count myself retrospectively justified in my clever little scientific test, and, I suppose I also count myself lucky. Lucky, in every sense, to have been there at all.

  

  This NASA photo shows the Andes Mountains, which appear orange in the sun's glow.

  PHOTOS: AGENCIES

  The high Andes between Chile and Argentina, around the Tropic of Capricorn, are astonishing, impossible and pretty much impassable, until very recently when travel company Explora began running travesias, journeys in sturdy buses with many acclimatizing walks along the way, from San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, up and over the range, to Salta in Argentina. To date, a measly handful of travelers has managed the trip - if you discount the generations of Incas who must have managed it rather a lot, given that the route follows the actual Inca Trail (and managed it, moreover, without wheels, which history tells us they discovered but then forgot on the grounds of uselessness for covering the terrain: they might as well have invented the Lilo or pogo stick). Anyway, discount them I happily did, because that was all a long time ago, oh, hundreds of years, and the hills were probably much lower then; I was one of the happy few to have survived it in the modern age.

  "Survive" gives the wrong impression. It was bliss; there was bliss every day. But survival is, starkly, an undeniable part of it, simply because of the altitude. You can't go straight up there: fly from sea level then drive high in the one day. It's not just that blood would start pouring from your ears and then your head would explode. It's that, long before, you would be functionally incapable of most actions other than sitting crying in a corner, rasping for air; your body needs time to reprocess its preponderance of red blood cells to grasp maximum value from the available oxygen. To this end, we spent four happy days acclimatizing in Chile, in the Explora base in San Pedro, thinking we were simply having fun while our bodies were actually getting on with some serious stuff.

  Acclimatizing

  

  A View of Santiago, Chile, with the Andes mountains in the background

  The first few days are relatively gentle: a bike ride in hot sun to an old Inca fort, its precipitous drops making you think of spears and spilled blood (and also, bizarrely, making me think of how splendidly not-Britain this all was; a tiny cardboard sign half-warned you not to go near the edges, whereas in Britain there would be giant rubber walls and screaming placards, rich with injunctions and featuring Braille). The bike ride back was hot and uphill. Even at 2,200m, San Pedro is high enough to let you know your body has some changes to go through; breathing, during exertion, is not exactly hard, but it's not quite right.

  It was more right the next day, during a fabulous walk through Valle de la Luna, a three-hour trek to sunset through surreal sands and canyons. The shapes and colors of the outcrops and mesas change every minute, as the sun lilts and dies on them. There are sudden red, pink, even somehow blue and green, pastel silhouettes of rock round each corner: parson's noses, eagles' wings, and several sudden vistas of golden ossified rock in repeating patterns, regimented, striated, so shockingly uniform they would have been rejected by Star Trek producers as laughably man-made. For the first time in my life I wished, albeit briefly, I had decided to be a geologist. Here, and in the sprawling Atacama salt-flats, where flamingoes wheel lazily overhead in search of another briny pool full of the tiny shrimp that give them their color, we walked on the flat, toughening up gently inside, processing the air, our bodies learning.

  The third day was the bugger. Each night, over drinks (all, like the food, included) in the absurdly comfortable Explora hotel, we met to plan, our guide assessing readiness for the next stage. Our next stage, we had decided, would be harder than the guide wanted: a high-level walk near the geysers of El Tatio, all above 4,000m. An easy long descent round the lip of a mountain, and a very long slow climb back up. Fools.

  

  The skyline of Buenos Aires, on the other side of the Andes

  The geysers were grand but my thoughts were on the trial ahead. Already, the change in altitude was obvious. There was ice, around the bits of the geysers, which weren't at that moment boiling. The clumpy dry grass was blackened inside, burned by ice. There were distant alpacas, llamas, a rhea, and weird fat green squirrel-bunnies. The air was impossibly clean, but also thin: the temperature confusing. The sun burns your nose while the air freezes your ears: you learn quickly the value of layering, thin fleeces and vests you can strip in and out of as you pass from sun to shadow, as your laboring body moves from downhill lope to uphill sweat.

  Goodness but there is a huge difference. One minute we were at the foot, walking roughly flat, still chatting. Eight paces into uphill, and I was chooing and huffing: you could hear me in Patagonia. Our peace of mind wasn't helped by a sudden grass-fire starting and raging a mere kilometer away: our guide, intrigued, explained that, out here, it could only really be a farmer who had mis-set a fire to keep a puma away, or a mistake by the only other humans likely to use the route: drug smugglers from Bolivia.

  

  The Aysen Fjord in southern Chile, just one example of the scenery that can be found in the Andes mountain range.

  OVER THE CREST

  Neither the threat from giant cats or armed coke-dealers could make me go faster, but eventually, two hours on, having fallen into something of a rhythm, and with a great many stops, the wind helped lift me over the last ridge: burned, frozen, sweating, chilled, immensely happy and ready more than ever for the bread, cheese, salmon, ham and chocolate brownies waiting by the van: seldom have I had a better meal. We had survived: we were, it turned out, ready. We had acclimatized enough to go higher: and enough to make, a couple of days later, the high crossing into Argentina.

  There were more hikes, each one more memorable, each around the same height, and I soon learned, no matter how reluctant or chilly I was on leaving the minibus, that nothing, not even the smugglers' nefarious cargo, would give me the high I felt on reaching any top, on seeing any view: even when the wind-chill factor was minus 15°C, when my waxen hands couldn't change the film in my camera (despite my forehead blackening with the sun), my legs were soon happily bouncing me downwards with a new high view of the volcanoes of the Andes every three minutes and a tremendous sense of satisfaction that carried long into the night.

  The panoramas were astounding in more than one sense. It is so strangely other-worldly up there. Past 4,000m above sea-level, bizarrely, the earth seems terribly close to the surface. You can see it, all around. The white powder on the cones around you is sometimes snow: but more often ash, or sulfur, gusted from just below; or sometimes salt, hectares of it, scoured from the dry beds by sudden winds and lifted hundreds of meters. The rocks, the impossible rocks, are layered and colored with copper, tin, lead and arsenic. The precious few towns are built on copper, trade and meager water, for the Atacama is the world's highest, driest desert. The cacti and shrub grass suck moisture from early-morning mist and adapt. The alpaca find high-ground oases, and their wool has adapted down the millennia to become about the finest warmest fluff in the world.

  Even I, eventually, adapted, enough to make the hairpin bends and the high crossing. I was sorry, in many ways, to have left Chile a couple of hours previously; an impression not leavened by the Gothic charmlessness of the Argentine guards at what must be one of the world's most godforsaken border posts - scoured by freezing winds, boiling by noon, billions of kilometers from anywhere, staffed by morons. The Chileans of San Pedro, with their quiet eyes and quiet thoughtful worries about copper, water and now tourism, and the easy professional charm of the guides and staff at the hotel, had been a big part of my life for a good few days, and had let my eyes share many sights; odd, unseen, resonant.

  And there is so much history. I could have filled seven notebooks, if I hadn't been enjoying myself too much during those times when I wasn't simply trying to breathe. Of invasions, love, discoveries, metallurgy, trade, blood, redemption and sacrifice. Only a few years ago they found, at the top of a 6,000m volcano, the absolutely perfectly preserved bodies of three children, given drink to make them sleep and then given to the gods: the most beautiful children from the village, 500 years ago. They are still making discoveries, every month, every year. This bizarre, beautiful, high Chilean land carries the rarefied history, almost, of civilization itself.

  BACK AT SEA LEVEL

  But onwards and upwards it was, and after the border, the high, high drive, the doomed cigarette and a long dark run down to camp: a tiny goat's cheese farm where Explora has set up tents, a warm stone bungalow with hot soup, a fire, and showers. It was all rather glorious, and we walked, again, the next day, high and happy, and spent two grand nights at a beautifully converted schoolhouse near Cachi, talking long into the night around barbecues, and walking cochineal peaks at sunset with our new leg muscles: and then it was another sturdy bumping long drive into the Argentine city of Salta, and civilization; happy and bustling, yes, but also the first red lights for eight days.

  Coming out of the plane from there to Buenos Aires, back again at sea level, there was, suddenly, almost too much air; just as the designer charms of the Faena hotel were almost too much. Although, do you know, after a few hours by the pool, and the sexiest tango show ever seen outside my dreams, of which there had been a good many - altitude makes you dream constantly in gaudy Hammer Technicolor only with (remarkably) even more ludicrous plots - I soon settled. It became hard to remember, so swift had our descent been from that high forgotten land, what had happened and what had been dreamed.

  I find myself strongly remembering a few things. Explora has done something special, and we could not have done the trip without the careful, subtle planning of its staff. And there is a delight in a certain amount of luxury in the wilderness. I feel happy, sometimes absurdly so, that my body didn't let me down: not even a headache. Perhaps I have a few more months left in me after all. Most of all, however, remembering that high, thin land, so far from the sea but so close, so piecrust-close, to the grumbling land below, just for having been allowed to be there, I feel an extraordinary, lasting sense of privilege.

  For more information on Explora, visit www.explora.com.
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