Potosi, the world’s highest city (of its size-100,000) at 12907 ft / 3934 m is famous mostly for mining in the nearby mountain, Cerro Rico. The abundant silver was drained by the Spanish using indigenous people and as well as imported slaves to do the work. Now, people still mine in cooperative groups looking for tin as well as zinc and other metals. On our tour of the mines, our guide said that while some miners do strike it rich by finding large veins, most work for more meager wages. The most interesting part of the tour was just walking through the network of mines and hoping that our guide knew how to get us back out. We were touring through working mines, so when we came upon miners the guide would ask them some questions then the group would give them some gifts of soda, cigarettes and coca leaves. It seemed a bit exploitive, especially when we were looking at some of the tour brochures later “See the child miners!” they touted. We did learn a lot from our guide, who is a former miner now in college, but planning to return to the mines when he can as the wages are considerably more than the average worker earns (though the lifespan is considerably shorter).

After our time in Potosi, we headed out on what are considered good dirt roads toward the town of Uyuni. We had a miserable first day of riding out of town due to constant rain as well as me feeling generally weak and unwell. We managed to make it to a small town, but without any restaurants we had to refuel ourselves on salchipapas, a small bowl of french fries topped off with sliced up hotdogs, ketchup, mayo and salsa. The next morning, I was still feeling unwell and the rain was still coming down, so we decided that it was time for a bus ride. Unfortunately, busses going to Uyuni were still full of passengers from Potosi when they passed us, so we had to get a bus back to Potosi and from there get on a bus to Uyuni. The trip went pretty smoothly and we arrived in Uyuni before nightfall.

Uyuni is mostly visited due to its proximity to the largest, highest salt flats (the Salar de Uyuni) in the world. The typical thing to do is take a 3 or 4 day Jeep tour, spending one day on the Salar, then driving south through some crazy desert scenery, visiting red and green lakes, tons of flamingos as well as the Arbol de Piedra or stone tree. We were hoping to ride our bikes out on the Salar and camp on one of the cactus filled islands for a night, but as it is the begining of the rainy season we weren’t sure how much water we could expect to encounter on the Salar. Plus, we wanted to visit the colored lakes, so we signed up for a three day trip. We went with Colque tours, which turned out to be an okay choice. We didn’t have any problems and the company didn’t misrepresent what we should expect, though we found the portions of food to be a bit small. The scenery more than made up for it though. It was truly incredible. The pictures can’t do it justice, but we will try to get them up for you soon!

We also visited a doctor in Uyuni. I was certain I had a parasite or some sort of intestinal infection, but it turned out to be a bladder infection. We decided to hang out in Uyuni for a couple days, waiting for the antibiotics to do their job, then headed out on a overnight ride on the Salar from Uyuni to the island then back the next day. The ride was much fun, though we were into a headwind all the way out to the island, which slowed us down quite a bit. We also ended up pretty sunburned from the reflections on the salt. The ride back to Uyuni was extremely hot, as we were now going with the wind and also because we were wearing long sleeves and pants to protect our already sunburned limbs. When we finally made it back to land, there was a nasty storm ahead. Due to lots of lightning, we decided that we should either stay where we were or try to get a ride. We noticed a bus seemingly headed in the right direction, but it turned out to be going north. One of the bus helpers said his boss was coming in a Jeep and would be able to help us out, so we waited around a bit. The Jeep arrived just as we were deciding to find a hotel and bike to Uyuni in the morning. We were quickly loaded up in the Jeep, dropped some people and headed off into the just clearing skies to Uyuni. The road was pretty muddy and had lots of large puddles, with which passing trucks would have surely soaked us, so we weren’t too disappointed to have taken the ride.

We ended up spending quite a bit of time in Uyuni and the area. One of our most exciting finds in Uyuni was Minuteman Pizza, which is run by an ex-pat from Boston. He worked in the Boston pizza business for quite a while until he met his Bolivian wife and set up his own restaurant in the back of her family’s hotel. The food is quite spectacular and gave us a much needed taste of home. It was expensive for Bolivia and consequently we only saw tourists eating there, but since we end up eating at the less-than-a-dollar-for-a-complete-meal local joints quite often as well, we didn’t feel too guilty about it. Plus, at around US$5 each for a meal it even fit our budget! And did I mention the chocolate cake and chocolate chip cookies?  mmmmm….

Uyuni was our last major stop in Bolivia, so it was time to head for the border. We had the choice of biking for five days over what are considered bad dirt roads, which include some river crossing (no bridges) and a couple kms where the road is actually a river bed, or we could take the train. We searched for information about the conditions of the road and were told there wasn’t much rain so the rivers were nothing to worry about right now. With no excuses to not ride, we set off on the bikes. It was nice to be outside and riding, despite the washboard roads. The first day was great, there were some small patches of sand on the road but easily avoidable. We made it about 75km out of town, which seemed like pretty good progress for bad roads, mostly uphill and into a headwind. We camped in a field behind a deteriorating adobe building. Due to the wind and our lack of a windscreen for the super-cat stove, we decided make a dinner out of our crackers, cookies and candybars. The next day, unfortunately, was a considerably less good day. We only had about 30 km to go to the town of Atocha where we had decided to stay the night in order to rest up for the 70 km of bad roads and lots of climbing that lay on the other side of town. That 30 km to town took forever. There were tons of sand on the road, one patch of which caused me to fall at a fairly high speed. No major injuries were sustained, just some bruising, but it made me extremely cautious for the rest of the ride. I was also completely exhausted from lack of a good dinner the night before, plus the constant fight against the sand. When we finally made it to the river bed we were esctatic to find hard pressed dirt. It was like riding on concete!

The next morning, we awoke to rain and soreness. As we headed out we found the roads to be quite muddy. We were happy to be observing the road conditions from the inside of a bus! The bus ride wasn’t the easy transport you might think, however. The passengers were outside the bus helping it through the deep mud on several occasions. I was usually quite happy not to be inside the bus as we watched it slip dangerously towards the edge of the road then ran ahead to help push it back on the road. The bus brought us to the ”old-west” town of Tupiza. After the 8 hour, 100 km bus ride that got us there, we decided perhaps we should jump on that train to get to the border. Yesterday morning we were able to get tickets and sat on the train for a couple hours before the conductor came through and told us that the train could not go. Apparently the rains had damaged a couple of bridges. As the entire population of the train headed over to the bus station, we decided to give the roads an extra day to dry out. We bought bus tickets for today. Hopefully, we will be in Argentina next time we write!

I also wanted to talk about my search for the next Harry Potter book (#5, Order of the Phoenix). I finished #4 in La Paz, thinking I would have no trouble finding the next installment in the Bolivian capital. However, much like Quito, I went to several bookstores and couldn’t find it. Bookstores aren’t too plentiful in Bolivia, so I think I will have to wait until we cross over into Argentina to get the next book. I was very excited to find out (via harrylatino.com) though that the Spanish version of the last book, Harry Potter y Las Reliquias del Muerte, will be coming out on my birthday (Feb 21) in 2008! I think I know what I’ll be buying myself for my birthday next year…

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.

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.

Leaving the city of Cusco, we had our first taste of the Andean altiplano. It reminded Matt of the time we have spent in the mid-west, particularly the flat farm country of North Dakota. I wasn’t fooled, however, as the Andes were clearly visible rimming the edges of the wide plain, whereas in ND there is a extremely straight line dividing land from sky. The flatness (aside from one pass—our highest yet!) was nice, however, and allowed us to make good time on the route from Cusco to Puno, Peru.

In order to make it to Salta before Christmas, we have mapped out our days, giving ourselves an allotment of days to ride between cities (based on what others have done) and an allotment of days to see cities and other sites of interest. The allotting of days turned out pretty well, we won’t need to skip, or even short change, anything that we had on our list, but we don’t have a lot of wiggle room in case of sickness or injury. Luckily, we also chose some slow people on which to base our riding estimates—we decided to push ourselves a bit on the way to Puno and were able to gain two extra days and will gain one more between here (Copa-copacabana) and La Paz. Hopefully, the trend will keep up and we will be able to bank some extra days in the rest of Bolivia as well (we have already used our extra gained days—part of the incentive to ride further is knowing we can take a day off )

The most exciting thing that has happened on this leg of the journey is that we have run into several other bike tourists. About 15 km before we reached Puno, Peru, two French women rode up behind us. When we stopped to chat, we found out that they were on their way from Lima, Peru to Santa Cruz, Bolivia and had about a month left to go. They were about to stop to eat, so we told them where the hotel we planned to stay was and decided to meet up again in Puno. Unfortunately, the hotel ended up being fairly expensive and the French ladies decided not to stay (we were too tired to care by the time we got there), so we missed seeing them again.

The second set of cyclists we met were heading into Puno as we were riding about 15 km south of town. When they saw us, they pulled over to our side of the road and waited for us to arrive. It turned out to be a German couple who has been on the road for 4.5 years making their way from Germany to Africa, then Australia, New Zealand and Asia before arriving in Patagonia and starting the last leg of their journey north to Alaska or Canada (depending on whether they can get a second US visa after leaving for Canada). We chatted with them for quite a while—they had a lot of good information for us regarding the rest of our trip, though we couldn’t help them much with Peru past Cusco. They will be passing through Seattle in April/May 09, so we hope to see them again!

And finally, we ran into the two Colombian cyclists that we had met way back in Latacunga, Ecuador. We were more than impressed that they had made it from Latacunga to Copacabana, Boliva in less than 1.5 months. When we had a chance to chat with them, we learned that they had hitched at least a couple rides, which made us feel a bit better—though, even so, they must be pretty strong riders! We also learned that although they look obviously Latino, the campesinos working in the fields and kids on the side of the road still yell “¡Hola, Gringo!” at them. I knew it was the bikes!

We were a little nervous about the ride from Cusco to the Bolivian border—there is one fairly old story of a cyclist being robbed on this stretch. It was several years ago though and we were itching to ride, so we decided that because we knew of many many people who have ridden the stretch safely since that time, we would go for it. We were both a little on edge and suspicious of everyone, but it mostly just made us feel guilty for suspecting everyone of the worst. What would commonly occur is that a man with his whip (for herding animals) would come out of the field and walk along the road. We’d get all tense and ready to sprint if necessary, then when we passed him, he would give us a huge smile and wave saying, “Hola, Como estas?” And then we’d feel all sheepish. Another nice occurance along the road is that although many of the kids still are asking for money, alot of them run over to our side of the road so that we can slap their hands as we pass, when there are several in a row it’s almost like the begining of a game.

We haven’t done a whole lot besides riding, though we did take a day trip from Copacabana to visit the Isla del Sol, where the Incas believed the sun and moon where created by their god. The boat was extremely slow, but the trip was good nonetheless. There are some interesting ruins, including the spot where the sun originated. Lake Titicaca is pretty amazing as well. As we were riding along the lake on our way to Copacabana, it was easy to imagine that we were riding along the Puget Sound. We even had snow-capped mountains to admire on the distant shore.