Live, Love and Laugh

This was the first time, I was crossing the equator and going to southern hemisphere; it was good feeling. After long journey, I landed in ‘Calama’ and then drove to ‘San Pedro de Atacama’; when the plane was landing, I felt like it was really landing in desert. Our base camp is at altitude of 2400 m and 7 km from San Pedro center (which is really small city and center is a one small street ;-)). From next day, I started going to APEX which is altitude of 5100 m. Until now, I have heard a lot of high altitude but experienced it for the first time. I had strong headache for first two days, felt like drunk for few more days but got adjusted to it afterwards. Somehow it does not feels good after eating lunch so I figured that I should eat less (which is also important to sustain!). Somehow our cook really does not know anything to cook other than fish and chicken so we were all really bored with the food after two weeks! There were many people from Bonn visiting APEX so I and some of my colleagues had to stay in ‘Casa den Thomas’ hotel. I was driving 4-wheel Panda car from base camp to hotel. It was really small, old and rusty car; it needed lot of choke in the morning to start! I had my first snow storm experience. We saw that the storm is coming so we decided to go down early; I decided to give company to one of engineer, Leon so I volunteered to stay with him. We were only 10 minutes late but we were really stuck in it. He drove very slowly because it was simply impossible to see anything but as soon as we were at relatively low altitude, it was all clear and no problems! Leon told me that this was a very minor storm and some people have been stuck in much worse storms. I have heard many stories from Christophe, Juan, Rodrigo and other engineers. I was going up everyday, learned lot of new things and saw some real use of my work! On my last day at APEX, I took a small walk towards a small mountain, ‘Sarichiko’. It is about 300 m from APEX and at the altitude of 5250 m so this was my personal best! Overall whole trip was very eventful, LABOCA, optics alignment, very cold weather, very strong wind, very low oxygen, Jamasa, Piqunies, donkeys, foxes, ALMA, Nantan-II, CBI, OSF, fish, chicken, salad, chocolates, barbeque party, Pisco sour, very nice people and many more…

(By the way this all happened between 31^st August and 20^th September 2006!)

posted by Nikhil @ 9:39 AM