May 9 - The Altiplano Highway - 450km

Yesterday´s battery drama turned out to have a relatively straightforward fix.  After 2 hours of charging in a little shack that makes Midas look like the Taj Mahal, the bike started out fine.

I left La Paz at 11am.  That left almost 8 hours of sunlight to Cochabamba.

The start out of La Paz was hectic.  It is a 3,000 foot ascent out of the city into El Alto, a hantytown that grew so big it eventually was reclassified as a city (it´s almost the size of La Paz proper).  The bustle is reminiscent of India or the Middle East - there´s something non-Western about the whole place.  To get out of the city I had to push through taxis, minibuses, trucks, dogs and carts of oranges.  

I finally began to understand what people were talking about when they talked about the remoteness of Bolivia.  Once you´re out of the city it is nothing but plains, mountains and adobe farmhouses.  Bolivia has about a half dozen major cities.  And outside of these cities, it is almost medieval.  

There is no running water.  No electricity.  No industry.  No commerce.  Forget everything you take for granted living in the States.  Diseases that we conquered generations ago are still a daily threat.

For example: August 2010 - La Paz - Bolivia declared a health alert on Tuesday in northern La Paz after a 14-year-old boy died from bubonic plague, the Health Ministry said.

People basically live a self-sufficient lifestyle.  They get water from the river.  They eat what they grow.  They make their clothes from the wool of their sheep.  If they have a little left over, they sell that to buy something at the corner store.


Gas stations don´t always have gas, and when they do, its stuff with an octane rating in the low 80s.   Always give yourself plenty of room when planning for fill ups, and leave your high-compression rice rocket at home.  I´d also recommend a good fuel filter - I actually saw them refueling the storage tank at the gas station this afternoon by pouring gasoline from the fuel truck, into a bucket, and then carrying the bucket over to the underground tank.  [Cringe].  Who knows how much dirt and dust is in that gas?


There are romantic moments and there are shocking moments.  With the mountains in the background, sometimes the scenery almost looks biblical.  There are shepherds, golden fields, and villages in foothills of beautiful mountains.  The people are earnest and kind.  Then there are villages without electricity or running water and you wonder... 


After about 100km along a spectacular ridge route, the route dropped into a valley with Cochabamba as its focus point.  It feels very different from La Paz - almost like a Mediterranean metropolis.  Too bad I can only stay a night before pushing south towards Sucre.


That will be the first test of what a ¨primary dirt road¨ means in Bolivia. It is 350km - a 10-12 hour bus ride.  
150km are on dirt, the other is paved.  Wish me luck.

The most remote basketball court in the world?  Do you have to re-learn how to shoot free throws at 10,000 feet?

Hanging out after school, on top of the Andes.

As you head north the mountains get much more wrinkled and steep.  Just after that last range in the far background is the start of the Amazon basin.

The road follows a high ridge and it feels like you are flying over the Andes.

A former (current?) convenience store at a fork in the road.

I want to say this was one of the best rides of the trip... but I want to say that almost every day!

Truck traffic in the stratosphere.

A lot of crossed on the side of the road... related to the next pic?

And a alarming number of crushed guardrails.  Feels like about half have at least some damage.

There are dozens of placards along the wrong advertising public works funded by unicef, USAID, among others.

And there´s this creepy guy that keeps popping up... why?

Village life - getting to school.  As a side note, all the diesel cars / trucks in Bolivia seemed extra polluting.  I wonder if they use lower-quality diesel?

Another precarious part of the highway.

One last glamor shot.