Putre is a tiny indigenous Andean town, overshadowed by the remarkable volcano, Taapaca, which means Eagle’s Nest in the local Quecha language. At 3500m above sea level, it is literally breathtaking, as Nina soon discovered. When we first arrived we set out to find our hostel, using the least reliable app of all time, maps.me, an app we have loathed but I stupidly rely on no matter how many times Nina tells me to just use the map or ask directions . After about 45 minutes of wandering through the countryside, we found ourselves scaling a cliff, no hostel to be seen. We asked a local shepherd earlier where the hostel was and she pointed in this direction, so thought we were fine. When we came across her again, however, she said it was back in the town… Yep. A whole 100m from where the bus dropped us off. By now we were starting to feel the effects of altitude sickness, as well as the intense sun as there was much less atmosphere to protect us from it at this height. But we had no choice but to make the long walk back. Fortunately we came across some farmers who were heading back to the town, so we jumped in their red ute (all working utes in Chile are red, although we have no idea why) and they drove us all the way back! We skulled a couple of litres of water when we arrived at the shop and checked into our hostel. 
We still can’t decide on our opinion of hostal Cali in Putre. We couldn’t work out if the owners were nice or not, as we seriously struggled with communication. Chileans speak very quickly and with a strange accent, and this lady probably spoke Spanish as a second language as most do up here, meaning her pronunciation was stranger again. Combined with my awful understanding of the Spanish language meant difficulty conversing, and the owner seemed uninterested in making too much of an effort. Breakfast was cold toast with instant coffee, Nescafé which is the ONLY coffee option in all of Chile, something they are strangely obsessed with.
We came to Putre for one reason, we had seen some wicked photos of Lauca National Park and wanted some of the action for ourselves. We booked in for a tour in the office across the road, where the little niña of the owners was desperate to befriend us, stealing our sunnies and hat to wear for herself and asking if we wanted to see her room. The next day we left early for an amazing adventure around an amazing park. It’s hard to describe the beauty, about 4500m above sea level it was amazing to see so much wildlife, vicuñas, viscachas (local rabbit with a long bushy tail and whiskers like a cat), flamingos and other river-birds, an ostrich-like bird whose name I forget and many more. As well of this, there were local communities that farmed thousands of llamas and alpacas, who were very keen to see if we had biscuits for them (we did). I won’t write any further about this beautiful National Park, but instead will let the images below tell the story.
We had been planning on going to Peru next, but realised that we were so close to Bolivia now we should head there first. The lady at our hostel, after some difficulty translating, booked us two seats to La Paz, the unofficial capital of Bolivia and the highest (unofficial) capital in the world. Early the next day we ate some cold toast and Nescafé, then hopped in a van (we thought we were walking so this was an error in translation we were happy to learn) and got dropped off on an empty highway, no bus stop in sight, handed our tickets and told “Verde” (green).
Matching Mochilas 