May 11 - Sucre

Sucre´s a cool city.  It´s the cleanest and most organized of the highland cities, and used to be the Spanish capital of Bolivia.  There´s still a lot of really well preserved architecture and narrow cobblestone street.  There´s also a big university, lots of cafes and good cheap eats.

I spent a day mostly catching my breath after 2 long days of driving and taking advantage of the pretty good internet connection.  There was a fantastic (and inexpensive!) french-bolivian restaurant right next to my hotel which was a great pit stop.  For $20 you can get a 3 course meal and half a bottle of wine.  I´m definitely going to miss that when I´m back in Chile.

Colorful signs on the buses.

Sucre has the big 3 college cuisines - here is Chinese, #1

Old school medical clinics.  A lot of places don´t use printed signs, just the hand-painted kind.  

Mexican, #2

and Pizza, #3

White walls and wooden and tile signs.  Very Sucre.

...and most of the menus in the restaurants are hand written on the walls too.

I´m not an electrician, but that doesn´t look so good.

The market... for me, it was look but don´t touch.  For the market people, it was all touch.  This is your meat being handled.

Lots and lots of potatoes in Bolivia.

Yogurt!

Egg and cheese mountains.

Locals hanging out in the park... preferring the ground to the bench.

Old Spanish colonial architecture.

Fresh juice.

Me after getting in after that 10 hour motorcycle ride... pretty tired, and my eyes were sore from the dust.

May 10 - The Cobblestone Highway to Sucre

What does ¨primary dirt road¨ actually mean in Bolivia?  It means 100km of cobblestones and 50km of rocky adventure.

 The paved road ends when you enter a small town called Torota.  The road turns to cobbles.  You think, hey, this is cute.

Then you leave the town, and the cobblestones keep going.  Well this is interesting...


And then they keep going, and going... and you shake and bump your way along a narrow two lane road along a ridge with a thousand foot drop to one side.  I guess cobblestones are better than washed out dirt?


Eventually you make it to a valley where you do a good 10-15 miles an hour along a riverbed with rocks and small streams as the main hazards.  It´s tough, and exhilarating.

Finally, the roads opens up and it´s good concrete for the last 90km to Sucre.  Or is it?

Earlier today, there was a road there, until there was a landslide (!).

Waiting while the CAT bulldozer makes a platform for traffic to use... 

First trucks across the dirt.  I held my breath hoping it wasn´t going to give way.

Not a lot of room for error for those truck drivers.

Unless there´s a landslide in the way.  Now that´s a tough job - landslide removal professional.  Let me just say that when I saw some sliding gravel during my traverse of that ¨platform¨ I got the hell out of there.  Yikes.

And then you ascend up a ridge to Sucre, which is built in a saddle in the mountains.  It´s incredible, city on a hill kind of stuff.  A white city with gorgeous cathedrals on top of a mountain ridge.  Wow.

Welcome to Sucre.

Almost like something out of Gladiator.

Driving on the top of ridges - what a view!

Part of the city nestled in the mountains.

Cobblestones and dirt.

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.

La Paz

So while I wait on my battery ... some pictures from La Paz!

It´s a tough city to describe.  Geographically, it´s built in a valley (looks like a crater), with tenements going all the way up the sides of the valley.  The city becomes wealthier as you go lower, with the wealthiest area at the very bottom.  There, it´s mild and springtime all year round.  Up top is a giant overgrown slum-turned city called El Alto, and at almost 14,000 feet it is cold and windy up there.

It also might be the most indigenous city in all of South America, and it feels that way.  Aymara and Quechua are the go-to languages.  The streets are full of vendors selling everything from oranges to electrical cord.  Some neighborhoods feel more like the Middle East than South America.  And, sadly, its very dirty and polluted.  The main river running through the city is basically an open sewer and the idea of being conscientious about litter or even human waste hasn´t quite taken a hold yet.  Leave your flip flops in your hotel room!

That´s why it seems most people love or hate La Paz... it has that raw energy that you find in Africa or the Middle East, but also the drawbacks associated with it.  It is inexpensive (my haircut was $1.50!) but it can be frustrating too (the slowest internet yet.)  There are pockets of modernity in a sea of traditional living.  And the city keeps growing up and out as subsistence farmers from the rural parts of the country make their way to city to try their luck at a new life.

So I took a walk around the city, got my aerobic workout for the day (doing steep hills at 10,000 feet is good cardio) and tried to capture some of the city´s character.  Now I´m holed up at a smoky cafe, with Pink Floyd on the radio, drinking $1 smoothies and cafe con leches while my pictures crawl their way onto the cloud computers at Google.  It´s all part of the adventure...

Flowers drying in the sunshine.

This little guy deserved a few pictures.

Feisty.

Crazy supplements from the ¨Witches Market.¨

Flowers that will make you lucky in business, work, sex and love.

Shrines to bring luck in this world.

Just a ... decoration?  Or does it have some special significance?

Dust to win clients... dust of hate.. and ¨guts of the devil.¨

How about a mummified llama to bury under the cornerstone of your house?

Local buses - old school (literally).

Street views....

Very La Paz - colonial architecture next to some newer, and less architecturally refined, housing.

Street vendors.

Fortune tellers - big, and serious, business.

Construction techniques feel... sound?

Stuck

Well, like a true pro, I parked my motorcycle in La Paz and locked the steering wheel.  With the parking lights on (I just discovered this is possible).

2 days later, nothing.  It´s like the bike didn´t even have a battery.

Ok, so first I tried to find some jumper cables.  Not so easy.  It was a Sunday morning.

I grabbed a taxi and asked the guy if he could drive me to a place with jumper cables.  We drove and drove, and asked and asked, but no one sells jumper cables.  There is a shortage of jumper cables in La Paz, or else no one really ever buys jumper cables, which is also plausible.

So after chatting with my taxi-drive / amateur mechanic about my options, we decided maybe we could just go to an electrician and get a few feet of insulated wire.  While it´s hard to get a jumper cable, tons of people sell all sorts of wire, so I gave it a shot.  A conductor is a conductor, right?

Next, I enlisted my taxi driver to give me jump.  And....No dice.

OK... so next step was to up the juice on the battery.  I took it out and charged it direct from the car for a half hour.  Almost.  I got the engine to start once.  But a minute later it died, and there wasn´t enough left for #2.  Close.  At this point I gave my taxi driver a heroic fare and thanked him for his help.

My next option - foolproof, hopefully, was to charge it for a good hour and a half.  But, it was a Sunday.  No mechanics (or electricistas) were open.  So I had some time to kill.  Off to the internet cafe.

The guy at the front desk of my hotel looked surprised when I walked through the door asking for my room back.  Hopefully this gets solved.