more photos have now finally been uploaded... they are here
After some nice days in the crazy bustling city of La Paz we left again with Chloe and Nicolas, heading east towards Cochabamba. But La Paz lays in a deep valley, it was quite a drop down on a big motorway from the Altiplano into town, and we were all not very keen to spend half the day cycling through heavy city traffic on a motorway uphill. Therefore we spent a bit over an hour on the morning we left looking for a truck who could take us and the bikes the 20kms and 700m up out of town, back onto the Altiplano. We were lucky to find an affordable and nice one that saved our day, saved us probably 2 hours of climbing – and our lungs from the city pollution. The cycling was easy on the flat Altiplano, we were refreshed from our rest days and happily moving on. However, we quickly got bored of the landscape – it wasn't the idyllic serene Altiplano we had crossed in Peru, but a brown, dusty, trash blowing around sadness – so we decided to hitch a ride in a truck to get a bit further. A few hours and 150kms later we arrived in a disgusting and filthy town where the 4 of us shared a hostel room, cooked our dinner and tried not to touch anything and use the bathroom only if absolutely necessary. From there it was a nice 2 days ride to Cochabamba over a 4460m pass, through a beautiful canyon area and into an agricultural valley. We arrived on Cochabamba's Anniversary so there were parades and parties at night, everyone was out and about.
We only spent one day in town before heading off again as we were anxious to get to the village where Kat lived during Peace Corps times 8 years before. So it was time to say goodbye to Chloe & Nicolas, and cycle for the first time in a long while by ourselves again. It took us a bit to get out of town and its suburbs, but the area continued to be densely settled and accordingly trashed and dirty for the next 50km. So again we decided its not worth spending our time cycling through ugly areas, besides there was a heavy wind and storm clouds coming up behind us. We ended up in another truck for some 100km till the little town of Epizana. Kat spent the whole night here unhappily on the toilet, and thus was totally exhausted the next morning – therefore she needed to rest in our room till midday and then was still feeling weak so we hitched a ride again, this time in an old semi-truck that broke down less than half way to our destination. Luckily we got quickly another ride on a totally overpopulated truck till late at night, and luckily again some of the other “passengers” shared their warm blankets with us as it got freezing cold after dark. We got stranded in a small town hotel for the night, where Kat recovered over night from her toilet visits so that the next morning we could get back on our bikes towards Vallegrande.
Vallegrande is the next biggest town to the village of Pucara where Kat lived years ago, and she had come here for market supplies every couple of weeks. So lots of memories came back up while we walked over the towns nice plazas and through the little alleys and revisited some of the places she had stayed at and the market she had shopped at. Unfortunately her favorite restaurant at the time is now only open at weekends, and it wasn't a weekend, but the town is lovely and we had a good time strolling around. From here it was a days ride to Pucara on difficult and very very steep and windy dirt roads that made us push the bikes a lot of the way. Still we got there in the late afternoon.
It was such a shock for her to see the old village suddenly (if you can call 8 years suddenly), changed from a town of 250 people with no electricity or running water to a prosperous town with electricity, plumbing (flush toilets!!), water, a new hostel and several restaurants, a new hospital, a new school house, the plaza was being rebuilt as well as a new “stadium” and 3 big greenhouses with many plants filling them – Kat had built the first and smallest of the greenhouses and it was still there but a little run down. There were even trash bins on the plaza. So after getting over the initial shock, she got a warm welcome by some friends who were still there and invited us to coffee and cakes. We got all the news on those who Kat knew back then – the high-school kids are now mostly studying in the University in Santa Cruz (departmental capital) or have finished studies and are working, married and/or having their 2nd or 3rd kids, the husband of a friend is now the mayor (responsible for the improvements in the town) and the parents and teachers are still around. It was a nice surprise to see how well everyone was doing.
We took the next day to walk about 10kms to the small town of La Higuera to visit the Che Guevarra museum/shrine that an Argentine volunteer had been working on during Kat's time there. This was the town where he had been captured and killed in 1967. It had been finished and the volunteer long since gone, the museum was extremely well done and interesting. The log book shows many tourists arriving daily to visit and the walls full of little notes from admirers and fans of the revolutionist and guerrilla war-farer. Fortunately we got a ride back into town where we quickly packed up our stuff, had some more coffee with friends and said goodbye – Kat didn't want to get stuck here for another year and a half we decided to make it a quick trip – as the bus arrived to take us to Sucre – another improvement! In Kat's day there was no transport besides a big truck that could take you to Vallegrande and now there are daily buses going from Pucara to Sucre. We thought we would have had to bike the horrible dirt road out again but were pleasantly surprised to learn we didn't have to back track and could go direct on the bus.
It was a good decision to take the bus. The trip on bike would have taken several days and been a bit rough, and we were glad to arrive in Sucre more or less rested and able to appreciate the colonial town and Judicial Capital of Bolivia. We quickly found a decent hostel and explored the city with its many nice plazas, got our clothes washed, did some interneting, called home, traded books, and even watched movies in a local gringo bar in the evening. They were showing one night an interesting documentary called “The Devil's Miner” on a 14-year old boy working on the silver mines of Cerro Rico in Potosi, our next destination.
The road to Potosi climbs a lot, as we had to get back to the heights of the Altiplano, leading mostly through more desert canyon landscapes constantly up and down, and so we were accordingly exhausted after 112km in the mountains on the first day back on the road. We only really pushed ourselves to get that far as the tiny dirty village of Betanzos is the only settlement on the way to Potosi with a hotel. And it was Kat's birthday next day, we thought it nice to be able to sleep in a bed and prepare a nice birthday breakfast next morning with fresh supplies from town. And so we did, with fried eggs and tomatoes, good bread, a nice tea and some apple cake from the local bakery.
Swen had a throbbing headache though, maybe from being back at the altitudes, and so we stopped cycling after the first 10km on the road and boarded a bus for the last 35km to Potosi. Once we arrived we found a hostel recommended by other cyclists we met on the road (valued for it's ground floor rooms – meaning no lifting the bikes up any stairs!) we rested and cleaned up, did some shopping, walked around the plaza, had some coffee, traded some books, and in the evening met up with our French friends for a special birthday dinner for Kat and Nicolas (his was the next day) which included a bottle of wine and champagne!
During the 16th and 17th centuries Potosi was the biggest city in the world, bigger than Paris or London at the time. It lays on the foothills of Cerro Rico, the “Rich Mountain”, which contained the richest silver veins in the world. Over the years of Spanish rule hundreds of thousands of TONS of silver were extracted from the mountain, around 8 million people, most indigenous slaves, are believed to have died in the mines during these years. By the locals it is still called “the mountain who eats men alive.” A few thousand miners continue working in the mines today under medieval conditions and non-existent safety measures, many of them being children. We experienced the mines the next day on a guided tour.
Today mainly Zinc, Lead, Copper and only some low quality silver are extracted from the about 400 mines crisscrossing the mountain. Our guide was an ex-miner himself, who had us buy some coca leaves, dynamite, cigarettes and sodas on the miner's market in town before we headed off. Before we entered the Rosario mine, exploited for over 250 years, he showed us how to use the dynamite outside – it made a HUGE blast, crazy!! In a small group of 5 people we headed into the tunnels. We followed the rails a few hundred meters into the mountain, when all of a sudden we heard shouting and metal grinding on the rails. Our guide made us all run back a few meters in the tunnel to a little opening where we all crouched to the side just in time for four men speeding past, hand-pushing a wagon containing two tons of mineral rubble. Quite exciting!
The tunnel system was huge, lots of little shafts branching constantly off up and down and to all sides; we would probably have gotten lost in there instantly without a guide. Temperatures varied from below freezing on the first few hundred meters, with icicles hanging from the low ceilings, to above 35°C (95°F) on the lower levels and further inside the mountain. We crouched through low tunnels – luckily we all had helmets – climbed through holes in the ground to the lower levels, waded through water and mud, froze and sweated. We penetrated nearly a kilometer into the mountain to finally see some of the miners at work, shoveling rocks into the wagons, hammering the walls, showing us little glittering pieces of mineral traces in the stone. The coca and soda we bought were for them – and it was all very gratefully received. We visited as well the temple of the “god” of the miners, the “Tio”, a devil mud figure with horns and a giant penis in a side tunnel, adorned with coca leaves, cigarettes and lots of confetti. We all gave him our offerings of coca, cigarettes and alcohol, praying to not get buried here. Shortly after a very muffled blast left us all shocked. Our guide assured us that the explosion was way off our way and no danger to us. Still, being deep inside a huge mountain in a very narrow tunnel and hearing dynamite explosions isn't the most reassuring feeling... we were worried our offerings to the Miner's Devil hadn't been sufficient. So we were glad when after over two hours in the mines we emerged eye-blinking back into the sunlight.
The rest of the day we spent relaxing some more and preparing for our morning departure to the Salar de Uyuni (the famous salt flats) which would take us 3-4 days to reach and another few to cross, then through the Lagunas Coloradas region and on into Chile. This time we would be 6: the 2 of us, our 2 French friends again, and another French-Swiss couple we met as well. The more the merrier because the next 10 days or so would be rough cycling.
We'll write more from Chile or Argentina! Until then!
