Ephemerica

 

Cindy and I are real wusses about riding in the rain, so the fact that we are biking through Bolivia at the beginning of the rainy season is a constant worry for us…is it going to be raining when we wake up? Should we wait for the rain to pass? Is the road going to take us under that nasty black cloud ahead? I guess I should mention in our defense that it’s not just the rain, but the combination of rain and cold that we dread. One of the things that has been a constant of the altiplano are massive temperature swings, from 30 C when the sun is shining, to 10 C when the storm clouds come. So we follow the old adage of wearing lots of layers, and it seems like every half hour or so we are either putting on or taking off clothes to regulate our temperature.

We ended up spending an extra day in Copacabana to avoid some morning rain, and then continued on to La Paz. We stayed in a small town on Lake Huinaymarca (just off Lake Titicaca) with a family that was famous for building boats of lake reeds and sailing them in various parts of the world, including Lake Michigan. Our next day, we managed to avoid some more rain, ducking into a restaurant for lunch in El Alto just before a hailstorm hit. After lunch, we tackled the descent into La Paz, which is quite surreal. La Paz sits in the bottom of a giant valley, which seems to be built almost all the way up from the bottom to the lip of the bowl. So we cruised down the autopista to the middle of the downtown area and pulled off near the Plaza de San Francisco to start looking for a place to stay. We were walking our bikes on the street, when someone starts yelling at us. It took us a second or two to figure out who it was, but it was our friend Moises that we Couchsurfed with way back in Toluca, Mexico! Neither of us could believe what a coincidence it was that we happened to run into each other again totally randomly halfway down the continent. Unfortunately, he was catching a bus out of town that night, so we didn’t really get a chance to catch up much before parting ways again.

After spending a day doing a self-guided tour of the city, we spent the next two days on guided tours of the surrounding area. The first tour was of the ruins of Tiwanacu, which actually took us back towards Lake Titicaca. The Tiwanacu culture was active for thousands of years in the area before they were eventually overrun by the expanding Inca empire. The site itself used to be on the shores of Lake Titicaca (when the lake was bigger) and was thought to be a religious center of sorts for the culture. The interesting thing about this site as opposed to other sites we’ve visited was the fact that it is a relatively young tourist attraction and is actually under active development/restoration at the moment. There are a couple of bits that have been uncovered completely and rebuilt, but the vast majority of the site—including a giant pyramid—is still under the earth and grass that grew to cover it over the centuries of disuse. There was a small army of Bolivians working at the site to excavate the pyramid; according to our guide, they have completed one year of a 5-year project to renovate the pyramid. But we got the impression that as a poor country, Bolivia relies on tourism at the site and foreign investment to keep the work going…so make sure you visit the site when you are in Bolivia!

The next day we spent on a biking tour of the so-called “world’s most dangerous road”, called as such because about 200 some people every year die driving the road. There are a ton of companies in La Paz who do the tour now, but we decided to pay a little extra and go with the originators of the tour, Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking. They drive you out of La Paz to La Cumbre, a pass at 4600 m elevation. Then you bike 40 km downhill on a nicely paved road. Then you start biking down ”death road” for the next 30 kms, an entirely gravel road about 3 m wide with 100 m drops along the side for most of the way, ending up near Coroico at an elevation of around 1300 m. There is a new, paved road to Coroico that takes almost all of the traffic from the gravel road, so it’s not as dangerous as it once was to bike the road. Even so, it’s still a pretty hairy ride. We were reminded of that early on when a girl in our group crashed into a car on the road about 15 min into the ride (not hurt seriously, thankfully). Anyway, there must have been about 4-5 other companies that had rides that day, so the road was actually pretty crowded at times. In fact, the town of Coroico has instituted a 24 Boliviano (just over US$3) tax just for bikers that use the road! We could tell also that some of the other companies were, shall we say, less organized, and the bikers clearly hadn’t received the same instructions we had received about how to navigate the road safely. Our ride ended at a small animal preserve, where we had a buffet lunch and hot shower waiting for us. All in all, we were happy with the professionalism of Gravity and glad to have chosen them for the ride.

We spent our last day in La Paz doing some shopping and shipping, and also got to see our friends Brooke and Shane again. It had been over a couple of weeks since we had seen them in Cusco, and since then, they had hiked the Inca trail, gone white water rafting, gone back to Lima to see Bjork in concert, and then gone through Copacabana to La Paz—so they were a little surprised that we weren’t further ahead of them in Bolivia. They asked us what we had been doing, and we had to remind them that we had been biking, and so we don’t exactly move as fast as people who travel by bus We are going to part ways with them again, but are trying to make sure we hook up one last time in southern Bolivia in Uyuni to try to tour the salt flats together.

Posted by Matthew on November 21st, 2007 | Filed under: Bolivia