Good Roads, Death Roads and No Roads At All
Bolivia is a strange and wonderful place. We have been at high altitudes now for over a week and it is slowly getting easier though we still get occasional nose bleeds and we are constantly out of breath. The landscape and the people however make up for this many times over.
As we leave Potosi (after yet another struggle to find a service station that will actually sell us fuel) we are immediately poured onto an amazing ribbon of tarmac that has seemingly been flung carelessly over the rugged and barren mountain scape in a series of perfectly engineered twists and turns that plunge and soar over this beautiful land. The road surface is perfect, the corners are perfect, there is no traffic and the altitude varies between 3,400m and 4,200m. The bikes lose a little power in the thin air but on the flip side fuel consumption improves markedly with the lower wind resistance.
A short way out of Potosi we stop at a dusty little village of maybe a hundred inhabitants. https://compassexpeditions.com have a made tradition of visiting the school here to talk to the kids, bringing them gifts of writing materials, books, toys and sporting goods. They sing us the school song as a welcome, then we play soccer and basketball with them while JC diligently gives every child a ride around the town square on his bike and Juan serenades them with his guitar.
Everyone gets a ride!
Hell’s Angels in the making.
The entire school consists of 30 kids from four to fourteen years old, two volunteer teachers and a volunteer cook.
Sally’s maternal instincts are very strong. This is the 2yo daughter of the volunteer cook.
The children arrive on Monday morning and go home again on Friday night as most of them live far out of town in mining communities or on farms and there is no practical way to send them home each night. They sleep in two bunk rooms with two or three to a bed but despite these hardships, it seems the less people have the happier they are. These kids are living proof of that.
Kids are curious the world over.
By days end we arrive in Uyuni, the town at the edge of the salt flat of the same name. It is a desperately poor looking town so it is a pleasant surprise to book into a very nice hotel with a great pizza restaurant and cold beer on tap. Next morning, we head out onto the salt flat and well, just wow! It’s another of those places we can’t do justice with words, so we won’t even try. It is so vast, so flat and so white, all perspective is lost. Just check out some of the pictures and vids below.
In the palm of her hand.
There are also about 100 abandoned steam locomotives parked on the edge town. These were once the beating heart of a thriving mining industry in the region but when the mines ran out so did the need for the trains so they were just driven here and left to waste away.
A sad end for such magnificent machines.
Uyuni also hides about half to two thirds of the world’s lithium reserves beneath it’s salty vastness so one wonders what monsters of current engineering will be left to waste away after the resource is inevitably exhausted.
It is impossible not to notice the number of unfinished buildings in Bolivia. On closer inspection we find that most of them actually have people living in them despite looking like abandoned building sights. The reason for this is that a completed house becomes subject to a tax but an incomplete house suffers no such impost. There are many thousands of people living this way in Bolivia.
Next we hit La Paz and if we thought traffic in Buenos Aires was mad then this is next level. In fact it is so crazy we leave our bikes in a secure compound in El Alto, an outer suburb and catch a cable car, yes cable car to our hotel. You see La Paz is a city of almost 2 million people built in a huge, steep sided bowl. As the city grows the houses keep piling on top of each other up the mountain side so the local authorities spent millions installing 10 cable cars to help alleviate the traffic congestion. It’s a great idea and a wonderful way to see the city but the traffic is still mental.
La Paz
No visit to La Paz would be complete without at least a look at the Death Road, so a few of us hire some bicycles and give it a go. The road earned it’s dubious reputation in the latter part of last century when it was the only access road to several mountain villages and larger towns. On average there were over 300 deaths per year on the 60km stretch. In 2006 a bypass modern highway was finished so now it is little more than a tourist trap. It is truly no more dangerous than any forestry trail in the Australian high country but it does make for some great photos.
One wrong move…DEATH!
After a couple of days in La Paz it’s back on the bikes to Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world at around 3800m. It’s a beautiful, serene and vast body of water on the Peru/Bolivia border. To reach our hotel we must cross a narrow straight on some very antiquated barges before the last dash over a small mountain range to our base for the evening.
We had to hold the bikes to prevent them falling over if the water got choppy, which of course it did.
During the ride however several of us start to feel the effects of a stomach bug, possibly from drinking the water in La Paz, and we stay close to the bathroom as the healthy ones take a 4-hour boat ride to the islands of the Sun and the Moon, sacred to the local indigenous people. For the rest of us confined to quarters, at least the hotel is super comfortable and the view is great.
Titicaca at sunset from our hotel room!
Normally a https://compassexpeditions.com trip would continue from here a few short km to the Peruvian border, but Peru is in a serious state of civil unrest in the south so the border is closed. Apparently the Peruvian authorities believe that Bolivia is smuggling weapons to the resistance/rebels (depends on who you believe) so they have closed all border crossings. We retreat to La Paz to regroup and implement a very elaborate plan B! We will let you know how it goes.
