A First Taste of Bolivia

Current Location: Uyuni, Bolivia
Distance Cycled to Date: 16,538 km
Flat Tires to Date: 58 (Keenan - 32, Jeff - 26)
Coldest night while camping to date: -15 C

It's been awhile since we entered Bolivia, and in the past couple weeks we've done some pretty sweet things and seen some pretty cool stuff - probably too much to even fit into one blog entry, so we'll fill you in until we got to the Salar de Uyuni, a few days ago.

It was a beautiful ride out of Copacabana, up and down a few hills, along Lake Titicaca (which is, did you know, the highest navigable lake in the world?). Every piece of literature about Lake Titicaca mentions that it's the highest navigable lake in the world. Do you know what that means? We don't exactly - we even looked it up online, but found a pretty poor defintion - but we did find out that we sure do like saying it. Navigable. Navigable. Try saying it out loud - it's pretty fun. We entertained ourselves for hours while biking by saying both 'navigable' and 'Titicaca'. Pretty good times.

That afternoon we both started to feel a little off, so after reaching Huatajata, and the only cheap hotel that we knew of between Copacabana and La Paz, we decided to call it a night. After seeing some traditional reed boats used on the lake and eating a fresh trout supper, we went to bed around our usual time of 8. But, it wasn't a great night, as something I ate started to fight back, and I spent most of the night in the bathroom outside. Not fun at all. And the next morning, I still didn't have the energy do anything other than move between my bed and the bathroom, and so we decided to stay one more day. On the plus side, it let me recover, and gave us a chance to meet two more British cyclists that happened to stay at the hotel the next night, heading north. But the bad side to it was that it left us pretty much out of money. We had changed over all our excess Peruvian soles at the Bolivian border, but after two unexpected hotel nights, it left us with 10 Bolivianos, or about $1.30 to get us the 90 km or so to La Paz.

So, leaving the next morning we ate a few of the granola bars that our parents had brought for us in Cuzco, and set out in the freezing weather. The sky was cloud-covered, our first poor weather day in a long time, which meant that the temperature hovered around 4 degrees most of the day. Add in a little wind, and an uphill to 4100 metres, and it meant that our fingers and toes would be alternate between numbness and shooting pain all day long. We stopped around lunchtime at a roadside restaurant, and worked out a deal to get 2 cups of coffee and 2 pieces of bread for 3 Bolivianos. Not bad at all, though not quite as filling a lunch as a cyclist really should have.

We fought the crazy traffic through El Alto, the sprawling suburb perched 500 metres above La Paz, and then sped past the 'No Ciclistas' sign on the freeway, downhill into the city. Snow and sleet started to fall as we crested the rim of the canyon, and that familiar feeling in our fingers and toes remained. We stayed for two days in La Paz in a youth hostel in the city centre, and enjoyed some good hamburgers, pastries, and the company of backpackers from all over the world. Then, we rode back past another 'No Ciclistas' sign onto the freeway, and started the slow ascent back up to El Alto, and onto the rest of Bolivia.

The first 360 km or so out of La Paz were paved, so we planned to keep up a good pace, and get through the pavement in 3 days. And so - we did just that. The first few kilometres through El Alto were some of the craziest city traffic we've biked in - our heartrate was kept at a maximum as we wove our way around collectivos, biking in whatever lane of the 4 lanes of traffic that we wanted. we were constantly being cut off, and cutting off in turn - and all in all, it was actually pretty fun. But it finally died down and turned into a paved highway with a narrow shoulder, and so we put in our ipods and just biked along the relatively boring, flat-ish landscape for 3 straight days. (Ok, so we stopped to sleep in there too. But it all was pretty much the same). The possible highlight of those 3 days were that we biked along Lake Poopo, and into the town of Poopo itself. They just have great lake names here! Sure, we're closing in on our mid-20s, but we sure think Lake Titicaca and Lake Poopo are pretty funny. That was more entertainment for us.

After the town of Challapata our pavement ended and the road split, and our photocopied map that we picked up in Copacabana became increasingly useless. We stopped to ask a lot of people which was the road to Huari, or Quillacas, or Llica - whichever town they might know. Even the police weren't entirely sure, which made us question a bit just what kind of road we were planning on taking. We made it to Huari (on what actually was a paved road - how did the police not know where that road was?), and then had some difficulty finding the next road. They don't seem to use road signs here, so every time the road splits in a Y you kind of wonder which way to go. So it became a guessing game, and luckily we did pretty well. Finally one of our choices led us to a field, where the road became little more than a set of tire tracks through sand, so we thought our streak of correct choices was over - but then a truck came by, and when we asked him which way it was to Quillacas, he told us straight ahead, and in fact, he was going there as well. So we set off on the sand tracks, and the trail quickly became a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' game. Do you want option a) bone-rattling washboard, or option b) thick sand that feels like riding along a beach? Or of course, there was always option c) just go overland, dodging clumps of grass through the fields. Sometimes it worked the best, or sometimes not at all. You just never know! It was a fun little game, where sometimes Jeff and I would be hundreds of metres apart on different trails, racing each other, hoping to find the best route.

We spent a night in a hotel in the village of Quillacas, where this time we were warned before taking the room that there was no bathroom, no water, no shower. 'Is there a public bathroom in the town?' we asked. 'No,' was the reply, 'but you can pee...' and he ended the sentence with a wave of the hand down the street. Well, just so long as neither of us had to go bano bano, as we've come to calling number 2, we would be fine. We walked around the town in the evening looking for some supplies, and we were told that the next morning at 8 am, the president would be in town. The President of Bolivia. It seemed hard to believe, but they were setting up a stage, and it seemed to be the word on the street. We thought it would be pretty cool to meet El Presidente himself, so after a poor night's sleep in a bed made for a hobbit, we got up, packed up, and made our way to the town plaza. But by 8:30, there was still no sign of the president, hardly any people in the plaza either, and the fact that we hadn't gone 'bano bano' yet was starting to urge us to get moving out of town. So we decided to give up on Evo showing himself (that's the president), and we got on our bikes and got moving, and found a nice mound of dirt outside of town.

And just as we started biking away, we saw a helicopter flying towards the town - the first helicopter we've seen in South America. So what do you know - the president really was showing up. But we had places to go, and it was uphill to go back to town, so we kept going, making good time on a much-improved road. Until that is, we came to a bridge under construction, crossing a pretty wide river. With a lot of snow and ice in it. We looked around and took quite some time discussing all our options - the riverbed looked too rocky to ride across with our narrow tires, so we decided that was out. Our best choice would be to wait for a truck to come and get him to ferry us across, but after waiting nearly half an hour with no traffic coming our way, we decided we'd have to take off our shoes and socks and walk (or run) our bikes across the freezing river. I thought it was kind of funny. (Jeff on the other hand didn't really think so). So, I volunteered to go first, and after tying my shoes to my bike and stuffing my two pairs of socks in my handlebar bag (it was still freezing cold out), I started across. Through the snow. Across the sharp rocks with the nearly frozen water running over my ankles. And then onto the thin ice, with my bare feet breaking through, the ice cutting me on the way, and the heavy bicycle sliding around on the ice, before finally breaking through and having to cut through the ice as I pushed it, trying to gain traction under the running water on the rocks.

It wasn't fun. I got a little over halfway across and the pain in my feet was so intense I wanted to stop and cry. But, that didn't really seem like a worthwhile plan at all, so I just kept going. And then - of course - a pickup truck came, heading the opposite direction as us. And as he drove across the river he rolled down his window and asked if the water was hot. I wasn't really in any state of mind to start joking with anybody, so I just told him that I was almost across, but if it would be possible to take my brother across the river, that would be very nice. He looked over at Jeff on the other bank, and said 'of course!', and then proceeded to drive across, help Jeff load his bike in the truck, and drive back across the river - all while I continued to fight my way through the ice and snow.

We got to the bank around the same time, and then I spent a half hour or so trying to warm up my feet and regain the ability to move my toes, but without too much success. Jeff then finally agreed, 'yeah, that was actually pretty funny'. I tried to laugh...

The rest of the next two days we spent playing Choose Your Own Adventure, and alternating between fantastic new gravel, and terrible old washboard. After a night of camping where the temperature reached -15 and I sincerely questioned the -12 rating that somebody gave our sleeping bags, we made it to Salinas, where we planned to stock up on supplies and spend the night before heading out for 3 days on the Salar de uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world. We reached the town early, and began a thorough search of all the tiny stores in the town for baked goods, yoghurt, and water. We found some stale-ish cakes and a lot of mini-bags of yoghurt drinks, but we found out, much to our surprise, that they don't sell bottles of water in the town.

We did however come across another touring cyclist, Martin, from Denmark. He had left La Paz the same day as us, and had been just a little behind us for a week. People kept telling him that there were two cyclists just ahead of him, so he kept pushing and finally caught up to us. So we all spent the night at the same hotel, and planned to head out to the island in the middle of the Salar together the next day. Unfortunetly, none of us had water besides the 2 litres that Jeff and I still had from a few days before, so we stocked up on Tampico Citrus Punch, and Martin bought a few bottles of Coke, and we all hoped that we'd have enough liquids to get us across the salt flats to Uyuni where we could re-stock. And so we went to bed with possibly enough food, definitely not enough water, and a lot of excitement about reaching the Salar, a place we'd been excited to cycle across since long before leaving home.

We decided the Salar is worth it's own blog entry - and we don't want to bore you by making this too long. So, you'll have to wait just a few days to find out just what this Salar is all about, and just how much fun it was biking across drinking nothing but citrus punch!

Also, we finally got on our horse and updated our Central Peru photo albums. We took a ton of pictures there, some pretty sweet ones even, so we put them up in two different albums. Check out Central Peru I and Central Peru II here.