May 15 - The Last 700km Back to Chile

So it was a long last day into Chile, but one of the best days of riding so far.  Even though it was my second time doing part of the road (or maybe because it way), I was able to really enjoy it.

It´s an old story but the impact doesn´t get old - massive ascents and descents with twisty roads and alien landscapes.  The mountains in Peru and Bolivia feel steeper and more ¨mountainous¨, but they are more familiar in a way.  This sterile part of the Andes is just bizarre and beautiful.

There was actually a point where I felt like I was moving, but not going anywhere (sounds bizarre - it was like a bad dream).  My wheels were turning, the road was moving, but 15 minutes would pass and nothing on the horizon had moved.  The ground around you is so flat, the air is so clear, and the major references are so far away (and so massive), that they stay fixed in place, sometimes for an hour or more.

It was also a lot colder this time around than when I did it in mid April.  Back then I would need to shed layers when I stopped - the temperature sometimes was as warm as 70 or 80.  Now it was cold even in the warmer parts, and the highest parts of the road were downright freezing.  Luckily there is no chance of ice or snow (it never rains).  I slipped on almost every layer I had (including my secret weapon - the mittens) and was more or less comfortable going through.  Some of the volcanoes up there have permafrost but no snow cover... since its cold but never snows.  More bizarre facts.

And after a non-event of entering Chile it was time to decompress and celebrate with a steak-egg-fried-potato masterpiece and some good Chilean red wine.  I made it.

Just before the road in Argentina turns west toward Chile you drive through a spectacular massive canyon, with clouds from the low-lying jungly parts just over the ridge.

Climbing up into the Andes... massive terrain features below.  Those canyons are thousands of feet deep.

And settlements in there!  People hanging out after a meeting of some sort?  Or church?  Unclear.

Dirt roads leading into the corners of canyons.

After a little run up the canyon, the road turns abruptly and forces its way up and over the mountain pass.  You can see the same canyon terrain from higher up here.

....and higher.  Ridiculous switchbacks.

Dramatic engineering!

Watch out for the gravel!  Mostly a great road but still need to be careful.

And then it starts to descend into the Altiplano with another ridiculously fun and twisty road.  It´s like a riding paradise, and at this altitude the wind isn´t a factor!

Crossing a salt pan, still on the Argentinian side of the border.  So bright!

How about some soccer?

An example of the salt pools they use to extract salt - there are alternating levels of water and hard salt throughout the salt flat.

More mechanized than the Bolivian sort of mining!

Chile!  Home base!  500km in, 157km to go to San Pedro.

And the road keeps climbing!  The highest point is 4,850m (15,912 feet), about 100km from here.

Back into the lunar la la land landscape of the Altiplano Atacama.

Smooth desert and then...  a patch of giant rocks.  So weird.

This is where I had the bizarre feeling of moving without going anywhere.  All the reference points are so far away (close to a hundred miles, at least) that they barely move, or get bigger or smaller.  But the air is so clear that they don´t seem that far away.  I drove for half an hour and swore I didn´t move.

Truck traffic near the highest part of the road.  It was cold!  I took of my giant mittens (which saved my hands), and my hands hurt from the cold after a few minutes of taking pictures.  Must have been at least a few degrees below freezing.  The nights in Uyuni (about 4,000 feet lower) can get down to -20C in July... I am guessing it would be a little bit colder up here at this altitude.

My camera... but looks like it could have been taken by a space probe on Mars or Venus.

A bizarre and beautiful landscape.  The impact of riding through it was even bigger the second time around.  

Signs of life in the sand.

I felt like an astronaut out there. 

Finally, the nearly 2 mile deep descent to San Pedro de Atacama.

Chilean customs at the bottom!  And 2 other 650 riders from Brazil.

The 3 amigos.

Man vs. Food Argentina

I am going to miss 16oz steaks (with eggs and fries) for $8 and half quarts of wine for $2.50.

Don´t cry for me Argentina.

Serious case of meat sweats and meat hangover the next day though.  This takes training.

There are fried potatoes with mayo if you want to go veggie.

May 14 - Potosi to Argentina

View Larger Map

So today was big day... drove a good 10 hours all the way to Argentina.  Even though there´s still over 1,000 miles to Santiago, it feels like I´ve done the equivalent of summited and the rest of the trip is a descent to base camp.  Bolivia really was the most challenging bit, and once I´m in Chile I´ll practically feel like I´m back home.  No risk of getting stuck somewhere for weeks waiting for parts - at that point its just a truck ride back to Santiago!

I actually didn´t expect to make it to Argentina today, but about half of the unpaved roads turned out to be paved roads and the going was good.  The road from Potosi starts out high and bitter cold.  There was frost in the air and it might have been below freezing.  You descend a bit on a good paved road and then it turns to dirt about 90km out.

The road is under construction, and sometimes it is great new concrete or asphalt, sometimes solid groomed dirt, and sometimes nasty riverbed type of stuff with creek crossing and big rocks sticking out of the dirt.  But anything that´s passable for a public bus is easy game for a 650... you just have to take it slow sometimes.  I actually drove along a river bed so long that I thought I had gotten lost and asked a passing truck to make sure.  Yup - it was just a long long detour while they were paving the real road.  I wish I could shake that feeling of anxiety, of not really being sure you´re on the right track - but when you´re on dirt in Bolivia it´s hard to know.  Mental note - a GPS with good tracks is crucial for this part of the world.  I mistakenly assumed road signs would be adequate.

The only town of any real size between Potosi and Argentina on this route is Tupiza, which is a wild-west kind of town with limited services, one gas station and dirt roads in a river valley.  It´s beautiful countryside but there´s not a ton to do... I decided to push on to Argentina, about 100km further down the road.

I made it around 4 - not bad!  And the Bolivian exit was a piece of cake.

Getting into Argentina was another story - I don´t think any of the dozen customs people on duty had ever dealt with a rented Chilean motor bike driven by an American and they made a big fuss about it.  Copies of this and that, talk to my boss, etc. etc., and then finally a phone call to some supervisor cleared it up.  I have to say, on the 2x2 of competence and arrogance Argentina gets the bad corner.  Bolivia and Peru weren´t too quick either, but they were very very nice.  Chile is nice and efficient (and very thorough... which means there are usually lines).  But this wasn´t the first time that a bunch of Argentinian border guards puffed out their chest and were rude and ridiculous when they had no idea what they were doing.  Sigh.  World famous Argentinian bureaucracy and machismo meet at the border.

At this point in the trip I was so used to the Bolivian countryside that Argentina seemed rich by comparison!  Town squares with a cafe or two... a nice restaurant in a hotel on the edge of the map.  It is crazy how quickly your brain gets used to one thing.  Coming back to the US is going to be interesting.

And from here the plan is to make it to Chile tomorrow - it´ll be one of the longest days of the trip (almost 700km), but it´s all beautiful road at altitude, so it should be a breeze.

Almost looks like something out of southern Colorado, but bigger.

Another one for the cute stray dog collection.

Country living in Bolivia.

A slightly worrying tunnel.

Fields just after the harvest.

And then... the road flattens out one you get close to Argentina.  Straight with lots of blue sky.

Striking country living.  Talk about isolation.

Yikes!  Get ready to get dirty.

Ok, here we are at the border.  It doesn´t look too organized, but it was a breeze to get out.

It all looks so funny with the hand-painted signs and police dog (on the right).

And here´s the inside... do you think they use that safe?  

Hello Argentina!  It´s a long long way to Ushuaia.... 5,121 kilometers.

May 13 - The Potosi Mines (or... one of the world´s worst jobs)

So, Potosi.

It´s hard to describe just what a horrific history this Auschwitz-colonial-silver mine has had.  Historians estimate that 6 million people have died in the mines over the 400 hundred-odd years the mine has been in operation.  When the Spanish came to the new world they never found their city of gold, but they did find an enormous mountain of silver at Potosi, and spent the next few hundred years forcing locals into bringing the silver to market.  The silver funded the Spanish empire and made Potosi the era´s Dubai - maybe one of the wealthiest cities in the world.  Over 100,000 people lived there (at a time when Paris had less than half that number), at 13,000 feet, and the economy of most of the region was reconfigured to supply the miners and export the gold.  Cities as far away as Salta became agricultural centers just to export crops up to Potosi.

Today the city has a melancholy, charming feel.  It has lots of well-preserved colonial architecture and clean streets downtown (although the drive in was the worst so far - the last few kilometers of road are lined with trash trash trash).  The weather is cold and the sun is fierce.  There are a few tourists and a few modern mines, in addition the what´s left of the Potosi mine.  After being the Dubai of its day now it´s just another Bolivian backwater.

And the mines... people still work them today in conditions that haven´t changed nearly at all since the colonial days. Life expectancy in the mines is 10-15 years, before miners succumb to poison gas or silicosis of the lungs.  In in what could only be possible in a place like Bolivia, you can tour the mines.  So I did.  It was one of the most intense experience of the trip - a nightmare of sorts where at the end you get to back to the sunlight but the miners stay, working.

The shocker about the mines is that the miners are self-employed.  There´s no story here of forced labor, indentured servitude or foreign companies exploiting local workers.  Most miners are young and from outside of Potosi, and they come to the mines because of earnings that are several times that possible to them in other places.  So it´s a classic case of risk-premium... like young American men going to work on oil rigs instead of supermarkets.  Except in Bolivia, the risk premium is enormous and the extra earnings seem tiny, given the terrible state of the economy.

And then there are the ¨customs¨of the miners - the alcohol use, coca chewing and cigarette smoking which probably multiplies the effects of the job.  If they spent that money on face masks... well it isn´t fair to judge as a westerner.  But it´s hard not to think those thoughts when you see the mines.

Peru has it´s own version at La Rinconada, the highest town in the world.  That article by the LA Times rung true.

Slate and the BBC provide interesting color.

I also took a visit to the old Spanish mint, which offers some more sad irony.  Bolivia used to mint money for the entire world.  Now the country imports its currency from Spain (the technology for minting is too expensive these days).  Even the zinc and tin roofs of the shacks in Potosi are imported from Europe (despite the fact that Bolivia has big reserves of both), because the country lacks the industry to process the metals.

So I spent a melancholy afternoon reading a bit and trying to process the sights of the day... the nights are cold and central heating is a rarity so it means a lot of time spent sleeping (under the covers... the only warm place in the city!).  Tomorrow its off to Tupiza, and then a final push into Argentina for the last leg of the trip.

Let´s start out with dynamite and.... grain alcohol?  These two should be kept far away from each other, but, in the mines, people drink 196 proof booze while blasting holes in the walls. 

And then there´s the ammonium nitrate, fuses and some bica for your coca.  The miners drink, chew coca and smoke at the same time.  They say the alcohol helps them with the heat, the coca kills their apetite and ¨filters¨ the air, and the cigs ¨clear the air.¨ Peculiarly, they don´t eat in the mines because they think their food will get dirty.  Just unbelievable.

Other tourists suited up and ready for the mines.

Mining shacks on the edge of the mine entrance, with a good-luck prayer flag.

Pushing an ore cart out of the mine.

Tourists are expected to bring ¨gifts¨ into the mine for the miners, which usually means a few dollars a person worth of soda and coca leaves.  This guy guy a 1.5l bottle of lemonade.  The tours have actually paid for a lot of infrastructure improvements in the mines (like ventilation), and the miners get some freebies.

1 ton of ore stacked high in the ore cart and moved by pure human labor.

In the mines... a lot of the miners teeth are stained with coca and tobacco.

No lights.  It is 100% completely dark in the mine... these are just some headlamps in the distance.

Hauling ore by hand at 14,000 feet.  Unbelievable, back breaking work.

It was hard to get good shots with all the dust and total darkness, but you can get a feel for the conditions here.

Ditto here, shoveling ore by hand into buckets which are dragged by hand onto the surface.

A runner with a big bag of ammonium nitrate (!) to re-supply some miners.

Moving some ore in position to be dumped into the pick-up chutes.

Tired.

There it goes.

I can´t get over how inefficient everything in the mines is... here people manually sort some of the ore before it gets shoveled into trucks for transportation to the smelter.