Friday, January 30, 2004
Bolivia-The Non-road Never Traveled
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid enjoyed a raucous life of robbing banks, loving the ladies, hatching schemes and dreaming of the big prize beyond the scope of civilized society's' imagination. They made it as far as Bolivia and their run came to an end. Che Guevara toppled an elitist government and mobilized a defeated people in Cuba to create one of the longest running revolutionary movements. Bolivia however rejected his call for uprising; he ended up with a bullet in his head.
You see, Bolivia like the rest of Latin America is a deceptively fun place to do as you wish. No lawsuits or lawyers to push for increased safety standards and the like make for a society akin to that of the Wild West. I say Yeeeeehaw to that as we hammer down the dust road to Copacabana on the banks of Lake Titicaca.
After a couple of days of the powerful Andean sun, bright red trout, rolling Fog on Titicaca and more Euro backpackers than I care for, we decided to follow a dirt track to the mining town of Potosi for some fun 50 meters below ground. All saddled up by 8a.m we followed our GPS crumb trail back to the road that we came in on. Fully laden we rumbled through the cobblestone streets and up washed out footpaths straight into a huge traffic jam in the main square. We weaved in and out of the jam-up until we were almost at the front of the line of trucks, cars and busses all parked in front of the central cathedral.
I think people are getting their rides blessed by a priest or something.
Sure enough, a young priest in a brown cloak was making his way through the traffic jam of florally decorated shit-boxes asking for the Lord's guidance and watchful eye.
Let's do it! God, luck, whatever we could use it!
We quickly fixed some flowers to our bars, and asked one of the faithful what to do next. With a splash of alcohol on our tires, shower of rose petals on our tanks, explosion of small firecrackers we were ready of some internal combustion sacrament.
Muy linda moto! the priest says as he pulls Jim and me over for a little prayer before he does the blessing.
A couple of dabs of holy water and he is off. I call him back and ask him to give my helmet and engine a little hit of the magic tooyou never know man, this country has claimed more than a few intrepid travelers!
Shopping in Latin America is wholly different that shopping back in the states. For some reason vendors of a given genre set up shop on the same street. There is the used book sellers street, the haircutters street, the tools and repuestos street, the soccer apparel street, the electronics street, the chicken roasters street, etc. Not sure why Roman's TV Repair needs to be right next to Tito's, Maria's and Ignacio's TV repair, but that's the way they do it. On the one hand, you can pit them against each other in a pricing war to get the cheapest service, but on the other hand, if you need a spare key made and you don't know where the spare key street is you are hosed.
Once in Potosi we hooked up with a guide by the name of Frank Sinatra that agreed to take us on a full tour of the mines for $5 each.
You should bring some gifts for the miners. They have very hard lives and would like some gifts of coca, grain alcohol, dynamite and cigarettes. You will see how it is living in the minesit is very hard on a man and he needs gifts like these to keep going.
Accordingly, we made inquiries.
Where is the coca, grain alcohol, dynamite and cigarettes street?
On the outskirts of Potosi under the shadow the miner's camp on the hill we found our street. It is called the Mercado de Mineros, and sure enough it carried the booty we were looking for.
For $3 we got 4 bundles of coca and a black, gooey catalyst of banana peel resin, a few packs of nasty hand rolled cigarettes wrapped in newspaper, some 200 proof grain alcohol that comes in a clear, nameless plastic bottle and of course some high explosives for our subterranean hosts.
May I never forget that I live a charmed life.
In all over the world people say Bolivian miners are the best there is. As you see, there are no strong tools of hydraulics and electricity. They use there bodies and their hammers until there is nothing left of them to work with.
Jim scales a rickety ladder and crawls under a boulder propped up by a gnarled support beam to watch one of the miners pound a hole in a rock wall to slip in a stick of dynamite.
HuuuhBAM.Huuuuh, BAM, Huuuuh, Clang! Shirtless and without a helmet the grime covered man rhythmically bounds the rock with hammer and chisel. Dust flies, mud trickles from the cracks in the walls; he smokes a cigarette and hammers at the mountain.
Puedo?
Jim takes the hammer and spike and gives it a go. After two minutes of pounding he slips back down from the perch with his yellow rubber suit covered in shards of rock with black sweat beads dripping from his face.
All day, he does that; all God damn day. Jim looks a little sad. I think he was hoping to help the young miner with his heavy load, but with mere hammer and chisel, the work is slow going, and our 5 hour tour into the bowels of hell is coming to an end.
We must move; you hear they are calling for Tio? Now there will be explosions.
Echoing through miles of four foot high paths through the guts of the mountain we could hear the warning. TIO!...TIOS! -BOOOM
El Tio is the God of the underworld. At home, we call him Satan, the proctor of damned souls. In the mines of Bolivia however El Tio is worshipped and made offerings to in hopes of a rich pull from the rock, higher prices on the mineral exchange in London and of course protection from cave-ins.
With a blast of air that extinguished our carbide head lamps, the world began to come to pieces. TIOS! WHAMMMM!
That's two, one more. Get away from the wall, it is unsafe.
Jim, we didn't sign any contracts for the tour. I wonder if we are even allowed to be herelegally that is? If this shit caves-in that's it, I doubt there would be much investigation.
At least our bikes were blessed.
Um,. Yeah!
TIO!!!!
When you look at a map of Bolivia you notice a couple of things right off. Firstly, there are very few `major roads' and secondly there is the world's largest salt flat that claims the entire middle section of the country. The pictures in the windows of the tour agencies show the Gran Salar or Gran Pampa with heavily loaded Land Cruisers cutting across the psychedelic landscape of endless salt flats. The sky and the Earth are absolutely indistinguishable and there are no roads or beaten paths to follow, just a wide open, inhospitable space that separates us from the Chilean border. Short of backtracking 2 days of hard riding to reach the paved road that would take us across the border, we would have to cross the flats.
Before we decided to head off into salt we went to HorizonsUnlimited.com to see if any other moto-travelers had attempted the crossing during the rainy season.
I rode 2 minutes at full throttle with my eyes closed
The most amazing landscape in South America.
I got stuck in a bog for 3 days and almost diedthere is nothing but more nothing out there.
Encouraged by the web reports we decided to gather up some provisions to make the crossing at first light the next morning.
OK, we will need water, auxiliary gas tanks, food and batteries for the GPS and satellite phone.
Sure man, you get that stuff, I am off to the miner's market for some booze, coca and TNT. The MAN shopping list
Good thinking bro!
The next morning we were all packed up and ready to roll before the sun. We were excited to start the 3 day trek across the Salar. Jim was to carry the TNT, blasting caps and ammonium-nitrate while I carried the extra 10 gallons of gas and grub on my rear racks. We kept on giggling as we suited up
Desperados
The first day of dirt was quite enjoyable. We rode down rocky paths past llamas, pueblos with little churches, watersheds and free standing rock ledges. This is what it's all about. Just like Butch and Sundance a hundred years before we head out into the open plains to ride the wave of freedom we have afforded ourselves.
We spent the night in Uyuni, the last outpost before things really got salty as we push west across the Salar and into Chile. There were hordes of tourists with backpacks on backwards (for security), American food stuffs and sun burnt noses making reservations with tour companies to ride an A/C Land Cruiser out into the heat.
Jim and I slug a raw egg vitamin drink we bought from some women selling veggies on the side of the road and counted ourselves lucky for having the means to go it alone.
5 hours later we are knee deep in mud and corrosive slime.
The GPS says we are heading dead nuts towards Rio Grande, and I think there is a path there that might lead to another path, etc
Franky is not built for this type of riding, while Jim's Honda is flying over the terrain.
I am shot, I have been thrown from the bike 5 times from hitting mud slicks and deep sand mounds, and now my front wheel is completely locked up by clay that has jammed the wheel against the front fender. I am skiing through mud but extremely slow and with clutch and transmission screaming for mercy.
On the horizon we see an old man on a 10 speed bicycle moving effortlessly across the flatsfree.
After 8 hours of pulling my bike out of rivers, mud bogs and sand traps we arrive at Rio Grande...just 60 miles from where we started in the morning. Dusty, unpopulated Rio Grande was still a hell of a lot better than fighting the elements in the Salar.
A group of kids appear from the dunes and start to give us the skinny on the town and our hope for getting out. The leader of the gang was a skinny kid, maybe 10 with a clean baseball cap and an interest in our maps.
No senor, there is no road out of here. There is the train tracks but with many bridges. You probably might die.
Kids always lay it on the line like that. Adults in some of these isolated pueblos have long since stopped caring about what lies beyond the wasteland. They don't know really, but will tell you whatever you want to hear.
Si, hay camino. Si, es con asphalto. Si, hay agua y gasoline en la proxima pueblo
We take the kids advice and ride the rails out of town as the sun starts dip to the west.
We start the ride out of town on the elevated banks of the tracks but that soon becomes impossible as the bridges are not wide enough to wheel our bikes across. Eventually we are both riding on the rail road ties flanked by rusty metal rails on either side. A fall on the tracks would be very painful and most likely tear the bike to pieces. Slowly we rumble across thousands of wooden ties into the town of Julaka some 50 miles from the Chilean border.
Julaka was once a water filling station for the old steam engines that used to ride the tracks. Now it is a shell of a town populated mostly by children. We found an old boxcar where we could escape the wind and began to set up camp. An old rail worker told us the kids use it as a bathroom and directed us to an old ticket station that has benches we could sleep on.
The sun has gone down and we tried to keep moving to stay warm. Layer after layer of Gortex and smart wool and we are still freezing in the abandoned building. Outside the town is black, no electricity, no candles -just the glow of outsiders' headlamps to fight back the damp darkness.
One by one all the kids start to come out to touch our clothes, bikes and gear. Many are shoeless and dressed in t-shirts. They smile at us through their shivering.
What is your name?
Xavier.
How do you say that in Spanish?
Javier.
How do you say Guillerrmo in English?
George maybe
How do you say Rosette, Carlos, Diego, Consuela
There was a child that was much dirtier than the rest wearing a McDonald's t-shirt shivering by the door so I gave him a piece of gum. He smiled shyly and put it in his mouth wrapper and all. Jim went outside to brush his teeth because he didn't want to make the kids more aware of their poverty (no such thing as dental care in the Salar) as I readying my computer to give them a taste of Old School rap- Straight from BoliviaNo trivia.
They liked us very much and we liked them. We rode out at first light in hopes of finding a path that would take us to a decent road. The tracks were hard on man and machine. We road the rails until our teeth threatened to fall out, then we cut off east back into the Salar for some more mud. By noon on our 3rd day in the Salar we had no more water, were running low on gas and were starting to get sick from exhaustion. We yelled at each other a bunch, crashed, got stuck in the mud, lot maps and even began to worry a bitto be expected really.
Finally, as the clouds began to darken for the afternoon rain we came upon some 4x4 tracks through the reeds and sandy mud that led us to a beaten path around the marshes that circle the Salar.
Thank God, we are back!
That's why they call it Adventure Moto-Travel.
Yeah, I guess it was pretty fun huh?
Not the tracks or pulling the bikes out of the mud so muchbut it does feel good to blaze your own path.
Pass the bottle will you. I say we blow a mountain up before we get to the border.
HehehDesperados...
posted by Xavier - RoadWarrior on 5:28 PM
You see, Bolivia like the rest of Latin America is a deceptively fun place to do as you wish. No lawsuits or lawyers to push for increased safety standards and the like make for a society akin to that of the Wild West. I say Yeeeeehaw to that as we hammer down the dust road to Copacabana on the banks of Lake Titicaca.
After a couple of days of the powerful Andean sun, bright red trout, rolling Fog on Titicaca and more Euro backpackers than I care for, we decided to follow a dirt track to the mining town of Potosi for some fun 50 meters below ground. All saddled up by 8a.m we followed our GPS crumb trail back to the road that we came in on. Fully laden we rumbled through the cobblestone streets and up washed out footpaths straight into a huge traffic jam in the main square. We weaved in and out of the jam-up until we were almost at the front of the line of trucks, cars and busses all parked in front of the central cathedral.
I think people are getting their rides blessed by a priest or something.
Sure enough, a young priest in a brown cloak was making his way through the traffic jam of florally decorated shit-boxes asking for the Lord's guidance and watchful eye.
Let's do it! God, luck, whatever we could use it!
We quickly fixed some flowers to our bars, and asked one of the faithful what to do next. With a splash of alcohol on our tires, shower of rose petals on our tanks, explosion of small firecrackers we were ready of some internal combustion sacrament.
Muy linda moto! the priest says as he pulls Jim and me over for a little prayer before he does the blessing.
A couple of dabs of holy water and he is off. I call him back and ask him to give my helmet and engine a little hit of the magic tooyou never know man, this country has claimed more than a few intrepid travelers!
Shopping in Latin America is wholly different that shopping back in the states. For some reason vendors of a given genre set up shop on the same street. There is the used book sellers street, the haircutters street, the tools and repuestos street, the soccer apparel street, the electronics street, the chicken roasters street, etc. Not sure why Roman's TV Repair needs to be right next to Tito's, Maria's and Ignacio's TV repair, but that's the way they do it. On the one hand, you can pit them against each other in a pricing war to get the cheapest service, but on the other hand, if you need a spare key made and you don't know where the spare key street is you are hosed.
Once in Potosi we hooked up with a guide by the name of Frank Sinatra that agreed to take us on a full tour of the mines for $5 each.
You should bring some gifts for the miners. They have very hard lives and would like some gifts of coca, grain alcohol, dynamite and cigarettes. You will see how it is living in the minesit is very hard on a man and he needs gifts like these to keep going.
Accordingly, we made inquiries.
Where is the coca, grain alcohol, dynamite and cigarettes street?
On the outskirts of Potosi under the shadow the miner's camp on the hill we found our street. It is called the Mercado de Mineros, and sure enough it carried the booty we were looking for.
For $3 we got 4 bundles of coca and a black, gooey catalyst of banana peel resin, a few packs of nasty hand rolled cigarettes wrapped in newspaper, some 200 proof grain alcohol that comes in a clear, nameless plastic bottle and of course some high explosives for our subterranean hosts.
May I never forget that I live a charmed life.
In all over the world people say Bolivian miners are the best there is. As you see, there are no strong tools of hydraulics and electricity. They use there bodies and their hammers until there is nothing left of them to work with.
Jim scales a rickety ladder and crawls under a boulder propped up by a gnarled support beam to watch one of the miners pound a hole in a rock wall to slip in a stick of dynamite.
HuuuhBAM.Huuuuh, BAM, Huuuuh, Clang! Shirtless and without a helmet the grime covered man rhythmically bounds the rock with hammer and chisel. Dust flies, mud trickles from the cracks in the walls; he smokes a cigarette and hammers at the mountain.
Puedo?
Jim takes the hammer and spike and gives it a go. After two minutes of pounding he slips back down from the perch with his yellow rubber suit covered in shards of rock with black sweat beads dripping from his face.
All day, he does that; all God damn day. Jim looks a little sad. I think he was hoping to help the young miner with his heavy load, but with mere hammer and chisel, the work is slow going, and our 5 hour tour into the bowels of hell is coming to an end.
We must move; you hear they are calling for Tio? Now there will be explosions.
Echoing through miles of four foot high paths through the guts of the mountain we could hear the warning. TIO!...TIOS! -BOOOM
El Tio is the God of the underworld. At home, we call him Satan, the proctor of damned souls. In the mines of Bolivia however El Tio is worshipped and made offerings to in hopes of a rich pull from the rock, higher prices on the mineral exchange in London and of course protection from cave-ins.
With a blast of air that extinguished our carbide head lamps, the world began to come to pieces. TIOS! WHAMMMM!
That's two, one more. Get away from the wall, it is unsafe.
Jim, we didn't sign any contracts for the tour. I wonder if we are even allowed to be herelegally that is? If this shit caves-in that's it, I doubt there would be much investigation.
At least our bikes were blessed.
Um,. Yeah!
TIO!!!!
When you look at a map of Bolivia you notice a couple of things right off. Firstly, there are very few `major roads' and secondly there is the world's largest salt flat that claims the entire middle section of the country. The pictures in the windows of the tour agencies show the Gran Salar or Gran Pampa with heavily loaded Land Cruisers cutting across the psychedelic landscape of endless salt flats. The sky and the Earth are absolutely indistinguishable and there are no roads or beaten paths to follow, just a wide open, inhospitable space that separates us from the Chilean border. Short of backtracking 2 days of hard riding to reach the paved road that would take us across the border, we would have to cross the flats.
Before we decided to head off into salt we went to HorizonsUnlimited.com to see if any other moto-travelers had attempted the crossing during the rainy season.
I rode 2 minutes at full throttle with my eyes closed
The most amazing landscape in South America.
I got stuck in a bog for 3 days and almost diedthere is nothing but more nothing out there.
Encouraged by the web reports we decided to gather up some provisions to make the crossing at first light the next morning.
OK, we will need water, auxiliary gas tanks, food and batteries for the GPS and satellite phone.
Sure man, you get that stuff, I am off to the miner's market for some booze, coca and TNT. The MAN shopping list
Good thinking bro!
The next morning we were all packed up and ready to roll before the sun. We were excited to start the 3 day trek across the Salar. Jim was to carry the TNT, blasting caps and ammonium-nitrate while I carried the extra 10 gallons of gas and grub on my rear racks. We kept on giggling as we suited up
Desperados
The first day of dirt was quite enjoyable. We rode down rocky paths past llamas, pueblos with little churches, watersheds and free standing rock ledges. This is what it's all about. Just like Butch and Sundance a hundred years before we head out into the open plains to ride the wave of freedom we have afforded ourselves.
We spent the night in Uyuni, the last outpost before things really got salty as we push west across the Salar and into Chile. There were hordes of tourists with backpacks on backwards (for security), American food stuffs and sun burnt noses making reservations with tour companies to ride an A/C Land Cruiser out into the heat.
Jim and I slug a raw egg vitamin drink we bought from some women selling veggies on the side of the road and counted ourselves lucky for having the means to go it alone.
5 hours later we are knee deep in mud and corrosive slime.
The GPS says we are heading dead nuts towards Rio Grande, and I think there is a path there that might lead to another path, etc
Franky is not built for this type of riding, while Jim's Honda is flying over the terrain.
I am shot, I have been thrown from the bike 5 times from hitting mud slicks and deep sand mounds, and now my front wheel is completely locked up by clay that has jammed the wheel against the front fender. I am skiing through mud but extremely slow and with clutch and transmission screaming for mercy.
On the horizon we see an old man on a 10 speed bicycle moving effortlessly across the flatsfree.
After 8 hours of pulling my bike out of rivers, mud bogs and sand traps we arrive at Rio Grande...just 60 miles from where we started in the morning. Dusty, unpopulated Rio Grande was still a hell of a lot better than fighting the elements in the Salar.
A group of kids appear from the dunes and start to give us the skinny on the town and our hope for getting out. The leader of the gang was a skinny kid, maybe 10 with a clean baseball cap and an interest in our maps.
No senor, there is no road out of here. There is the train tracks but with many bridges. You probably might die.
Kids always lay it on the line like that. Adults in some of these isolated pueblos have long since stopped caring about what lies beyond the wasteland. They don't know really, but will tell you whatever you want to hear.
Si, hay camino. Si, es con asphalto. Si, hay agua y gasoline en la proxima pueblo
We take the kids advice and ride the rails out of town as the sun starts dip to the west.
We start the ride out of town on the elevated banks of the tracks but that soon becomes impossible as the bridges are not wide enough to wheel our bikes across. Eventually we are both riding on the rail road ties flanked by rusty metal rails on either side. A fall on the tracks would be very painful and most likely tear the bike to pieces. Slowly we rumble across thousands of wooden ties into the town of Julaka some 50 miles from the Chilean border.
Julaka was once a water filling station for the old steam engines that used to ride the tracks. Now it is a shell of a town populated mostly by children. We found an old boxcar where we could escape the wind and began to set up camp. An old rail worker told us the kids use it as a bathroom and directed us to an old ticket station that has benches we could sleep on.
The sun has gone down and we tried to keep moving to stay warm. Layer after layer of Gortex and smart wool and we are still freezing in the abandoned building. Outside the town is black, no electricity, no candles -just the glow of outsiders' headlamps to fight back the damp darkness.
One by one all the kids start to come out to touch our clothes, bikes and gear. Many are shoeless and dressed in t-shirts. They smile at us through their shivering.
What is your name?
Xavier.
How do you say that in Spanish?
Javier.
How do you say Guillerrmo in English?
George maybe
How do you say Rosette, Carlos, Diego, Consuela
There was a child that was much dirtier than the rest wearing a McDonald's t-shirt shivering by the door so I gave him a piece of gum. He smiled shyly and put it in his mouth wrapper and all. Jim went outside to brush his teeth because he didn't want to make the kids more aware of their poverty (no such thing as dental care in the Salar) as I readying my computer to give them a taste of Old School rap- Straight from BoliviaNo trivia.
They liked us very much and we liked them. We rode out at first light in hopes of finding a path that would take us to a decent road. The tracks were hard on man and machine. We road the rails until our teeth threatened to fall out, then we cut off east back into the Salar for some more mud. By noon on our 3rd day in the Salar we had no more water, were running low on gas and were starting to get sick from exhaustion. We yelled at each other a bunch, crashed, got stuck in the mud, lot maps and even began to worry a bitto be expected really.
Finally, as the clouds began to darken for the afternoon rain we came upon some 4x4 tracks through the reeds and sandy mud that led us to a beaten path around the marshes that circle the Salar.
Thank God, we are back!
That's why they call it Adventure Moto-Travel.
Yeah, I guess it was pretty fun huh?
Not the tracks or pulling the bikes out of the mud so muchbut it does feel good to blaze your own path.
Pass the bottle will you. I say we blow a mountain up before we get to the border.
HehehDesperados...
posted by Xavier - RoadWarrior on 5:28 PM
