Happy 2013! I hope you were all having a blast! We were thinking beach party at first. But instead, New Year's Eve turned out to be a lesson on altitude sickness... :-( On December 31 we learned the hard way, that you won't only get sick from going up too far or too fast, but from the altitude difference you've covered in total. In our case, travelling through the Andes went fine, but going up from 1500m to 4700m and then directly down to sea level, all within 24h, probably was a mistake. We made a thorough encounter with our hotel's bathroom :-) The plus side of all the drama: while everyone else was down with hangovers, we were fully restored by January 1 – ready to take on another park!
Pan de Azúcar lies about 100km north of Bahía Inglesa, and roughly translates into sugar loaf park. Azúcar = sugar = Pacific clouds. Guess, what wasn't there... After a steep hike in the burning sun, we reached a lookout, which treated us to some great views of the bay of Pan de Azúcar. Apart from that, it was the usual scene of the Atacama desert: cacti, ocean and sand. Lots of sand.
Pan de Azúcar lies about 100km north of Bahía Inglesa, and roughly translates into sugar loaf park. Azúcar = sugar = Pacific clouds. Guess, what wasn't there... After a steep hike in the burning sun, we reached a lookout, which treated us to some great views of the bay of Pan de Azúcar. Apart from that, it was the usual scene of the Atacama desert: cacti, ocean and sand. Lots of sand.
