Ephemerica

Since we left La Paz, we put in 7 straight days on the bike, which is something I don’t think we’ve done since Baja California…so we are commemorating with a special post describing the journey!

Truth be told, one of the reasons we biked so many days in a row is because there are not a lot of places to stop along the way. This bike ride takes you through some of the extremes of Bolivia, in both standard of living and geography. We started out with a 2 hour climb out of La Paz back to El Alto and the highway headed south to Oruro. As I mentioned in the previous post, the rains tend to come in the afternoons, so most of our rides have been “go-as-far-as-you-can-before-you-hit-rainclouds” rides. The first place we stopped was a small village called Calamarca. We didn’t think there would be a hotel there, so we started asking around at the first “official” looking building we saw, which was a library (a rare sight outside of the cities). It just so happened that they had a room with bunk beds and a private bathroom for rent at the library! We ate lunch at the one restaurant in town, and then curled up in our sleeping bags for the cold night ahead. Little did we know that this would be among the better acommodations we would find on our journey…

The next three days to Challapata were really dead flat, and except for the last day, we didn’t encounter much in the way of headwinds, which allowed us to make really good time and get a day ahead of schedule. We allowed ourselves to splurge on a hotel when we passed through Oruro (hot shower! cable TV! woohoo!), recharging us for the road ahead. After Challapata, the terrain changed tremendously. Compare the picture at the top of the post with this one:

We went from altiplano, lakes and rolling hills to huge canyons with red, purple and green rocks jutting out everywhere. The biking instantly became much more difficult, not just from the climbing, but from the fact that we were much more likely to go over a hill or around a corner and encounter a thunderstorm that could force us to run for shelter. An added difficulty was the lack of facilities on the road—some of these villages we rode through resembled ghost towns more than anything else, many without even a store for us to purchase water. It didn’t take us too long to figure out that we needed to carry more water than we had been to make it between oases.

We ended up sleeping in a few places you won’t see on any map of Bolivia. We didn’t have too many problems finding places to stay with a little asking around, although those places included a hotel without bathrooms (public baños around the corner down the street), an empty room in an evangelical pentacostal preacher’s house (no electricity or windows), and an empty room in an empty house (this one had windows at least).

In most of these little pueblos, there weren’t any restaurants (our usual source of nourishment), so we were on our own for food. In a fit of stupidity, back in Costa Rica we sent home our MSR camp stove because we hadn’t been using it, and hey, we needed the space! When we were in Cusco, we realized that we were probably going to need to cook again in some of the more remote areas of Bolivia (not to mention southern Argentina/Chile). My mom sent ahead a package to us in Salta, Argentina with our stove in it, but what would we do in the meanwhile? Well, Cindy put Google to work and found with this alcohol-burning stove, made of all things with a cat food can! We bought the cat food and some alcohol, and lo and behold for a little over $5, we had a working stove. The designer of the stove made disclaimers about not having tested the stove at high altitude, but we’ve used it successfully at above 4000 m elevation, and it works great. It’s not much good for anything besides boiling water, but that gets us ramen noodles, oatmeal, and coca tea—what else do you need to fuel a bike ride?

Well, the last day into Potosi was the hardest, since we were starting to feel the cumulative effects of the previous six days. But we were feeling optimistic at the beginning—we were starting at around 3950 m elevation, and we knew that we only had to net gain 100 m to make it to the elevation of Potosi. We were anticipating that, like the previous two days, the hills would be smaller, around 200-300 m in elevation and that we would keep most of our elevation during the day. The reality was that after a brief hill, we fell all the way into one of those huge valleys around us, descending all the way to 3350 m! There went our easy day. We climbed back up to 3650 only to descend back down even lower than before, to 3300 m. At this point, however, we were about 10 km away from Potosi, so we knew that there was nowhere to go but up. So we settled into the climb, knowing that soft beds, hot showers, and good food awaited us in Potosi.

We are taking a few days off here to visit the mines in Potosi, and also the alternative capital of Bolivia, Sucre (by bus, however). Then we leave behind the beautiful paved roads we’ve been riding on for dirt roads that will take us to Uyuni and the Argentine border.

Update: We have decided that we will pass on going to Sucre right now. Bolivia is in the process of rewriting their constitution, and the party of Evo Morales is using their majority on the constitutional assembly to push through some reforms that not everybody likes. This resulted in confrontations between protestors and police this week, resulting in a couple of deaths. We talked to a German couple this morning on our mine tour that just came from Sucre, and they said that although it had settled down somewhat, that most things in the center of town were closed. That, and the threat of another strike involving public transportation have made us decide that we don’t want to risk getting stuck in Sucre (or possibly worse), so we’ll just head on to Uyuni a day early instead.

Posted by Matthew on November 30th, 2007 | Filed under: Bolivia