We left Salta with the plan to head to Susques for the night, before heading over the Jama pass to San Pedro de Atacama, Chile.

Upon leaving Salta, we found ourselves on a narrow windy country road which took us through thick green vegetation, reminding us a little of Sumatra – a very different experience to the rough, dry, arid landscape we had been in since Patagonia.

We then crossed a mountain range which was again, magnificent, unique and spectacular.

Dean and I had previously discussed the altitude we were climbing to over the pass and agreed that a night in Susques, on top of the elevation we had been in for a few days since Mendoza would be enough to avoid any altitude sickness.

We arrived in Susques earlier than expected and as usual wondered what we were going to do with ourselves for the rest of the day. Susques is a dusty small town with about 3 streets and it was 4 pm.

‘There are hotels at the pass… Should we keep on riding?’ I said, hoping to get ahead of the queues of trucks and buses the following morning.

‘May as well, there is nothing to do here’ said Dean.

As we were riding up the pass, it occurred to me that we hadn’t discussed the elevation gain we were making and the fact we would be spending the night at 4300 m. We also had got out of the habit of checking the Windy app…

The wind was picking up and I was vaguely aware of a slight headache…or maybe I was imagining it? I was certainly out of breath, having to take larger gulps of air the higher we went. It wasnt a pleasant journey and we were regretting our decision to push on.

We found a very simple place to stay with a lovely family and went to the only restaurant in town to get an early dinner.

We were both feeling very tired and experienced a prickly, itchy feeling all over our body…maybe it was the sand blowing through our clothes but it was pretty strange. We looked up symptoms of altitude sickness which included headache, fatigue and trouble sleeping.

We crashed early however both woke withing a few hours with our hearts racing. This continued all night and we were unable to sleep.

‘Why didn’t we just stay at Susques?! This sucks!’

It didn’t help that I had Kylie stuck in my head on repeat.

Early the next morning we headed to the border to beat the line up. There were already 3 trucks and about 6 cars ahead of us at 7.30am but we were glad to have missed any buses.

All was going well until we entered Chile and I saw the aduana guy shaking his head at Dean

‘You are not allowed to leave Chile with Chilian bikes as a foreigner’ he said. ‘I can let you back in, but you won’t get out again’

‘but we’ve crossed between Chile and Argentina 10 times in the past couple of months, and have had no issues’

‘Well they obviously didn’t know the law’

They spent time looking up the law and appeared to be confused but egos are big in these positions and once they’ve said one thing they are not going to let some foreigner tell them otherwise.

It made no difference to us as we were already in Chile however it did mean we had to change our plans, which was to cross back into Argentina on the same pass a few days later.

We left tired and confused and made the steep ascent over the Jama pass.

Dean had been told that the northern borders were harder to cross but this hadn’t occured to us when we had been planning our route.

‘Is it legal or not?’ I said to Dean in the intercom. ‘i can’t believe all 10 crossings had it wrong but this guy is right!’

‘We are going to be back in Santiago in a week if we can’t do any of these crossings…and we’ve just changed over $1000 to Argentinian pesos!’

We stopped by another border crossing into Bolivia on our way down the mountain to get their opinion.

‘What are you doing coming from Argentina?’ the border control guy said ‘you can’t leave Chile with a Chilian bike as a foreigner’

So it was clear what he thought and yet another one of our plans (to cross into Bolivia) was squashed!

Its pretty frustrating that even though we own the bikes, Chile has some control over where we go and what we do with it. They are concerned for some reason that we will sell it in another country…we have had to sign a power of attorney that we will return the bike to Chile and this document is usually all they need to give us a temporary export into Argentina but for some reason, in the north, they go by another set of rules.

We were happy to get off the mountain which was freezing and descended into San Pedro de Atacama, a touristy town in the middle of the desert with amazing landscapes.

There are hundreds of tour operators in the town which take you to a number of different excursions in the area. Tours aren’t our thing so we headed to a couple of places and tried to avoid the tour buses.

We visited Valle de la Luna which was stunning and watched the sunset with hundreds of others on one of the many lookouts.

The next day, we decided to visit one of the salt lakes. There was one close to town that lots of tours go to, and another one 45 mins away which has less tours. We found out what time the tour buses got there and timed our visit almost perfectly to miss them.

The lakes have 300 grams of salt per litre compared to sea water which has 35 per litre. It was pretty cool. You could float on your back, on your front and you could even stand horizontally without touching the floor…it was impossible to go under the water without really trying, which Dean did and found out how painful salt is in your eyes!

After doing some research on the law for foreigners leaving Chile with bikes, we decided to cross the borders in reverse now that we couldn’t cross back over the Jama pass.

We headed back on the road yesterday, prepared for a couple of days of boring highway miles to make our way south to get the the next pass. Today we arrived in Curico which is the last big town before the San Francisco pass. We feel pretty confident that we will be able to pass and have downloaded sections of the law that state that we can cross into Argentina. If this doesn’t work for us we will have to turn round and return back to Curico (175 kms) which will suck. If we are able to cross, we have a long day (480 kms) to get to the next town in Argentina.

Fuel tanks are full, as are our 10 litre fuel bags and 3 x 1 litre oil containers that Dean managed to find.

Altitude sickness shouldn’t be an issue as long as we dont get stuck on the pass for any reason.

Fingers and toes crossed .