26 Oct 06
It's Tuesday morning in San Pedro de Atacama and the locals are busy about their business.
Tour guides sit expectantly in their shops and local restaurateurs punt coffee, cake or pizza. A couple of mangy-looking dogs patrol the pavement, searching for scraps of food left by careless tourists. The roads are dusty and narrow, while the modest buildings have a ramshackle quality that a guide book would describe as character.
Situated in the picturesque heart of northern Chile, San Pedro de Atacama is a comfortable haven for ambitious tourists who've made the journey north from the capital, Santiago, or west from Argentina. Most will soon move out again, crammed into age-old buses or 4x4s.
Later today, I'll also be leaving the town but my transport will be from a very different world. For the next five days, I shall be behind the wheel of a Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano.
I'm here to take part in Ferrari's Panamerican 20,000, an epic, 20,000 mile adventure that began at a Fiat factory in Belo Horizonte, Brazil on 24 August and is due to end in New York on 17 November. The Ferrari caravan arrived from Argentina last night and today we'll start the journey north before we tack west into Bolivia, reaching the city of La Paz by Friday. This should be quite an adventure.
