Auto News 5

"Are you feeling strange?" asks photographer Paul Harmer. I am. And so is he. Tingling limbs, light-headedness, shortness of breath -- Harmer thinks he's having a panic attack, while I fret absurdly about deep-vein thrombosis. This is not a good place to have either affliction. We may be sitting in comfort aboard an air-conditioned Mini Cooper S Countryman, but we're also climbing a dirt road deep in the heart of Chile's Atacama Desert, miles from the nearest doctor. But then it dawns on our travel-blunted brains: this is altitude sickness. We're closing on a peak topping 13,000 feet, around the altitude at which oxygen masks drop in the cabins of unpressurized aircraft.