The Andes are extremely high mountains.
It´s not entirely obvious when you´re on the altiplano, which looks a lot like the high deserts of the southwestern US. Those are also high. Basins around a mile high, ranges around twice that high. The altiplano isn´t very basin-and-range-ish. It´s mostly flat, and the mountains that poke up out of it are either humble rolling hills, enormous rugged teeth, or perfectly-shaped strato-volcanos.
As I´ve said, you just need to try to breath to realize you´re pretty high. But it all looks so flat that it´s hard to believe. Which is why I was so excited to experience just HOW high we´ve been by riding from the altiplano to the Pacific. Is there anywhere else in the world where you can ride from 15,350´to sea level in 189 kilometers, and on PAVEMENT no less? I kind of doubt it, but let me know if you know otherwise.
First we had to get out of Bolivia. The town of Tambo Quemado is just a customs office, a few restaurants, & a gas station at 14,100´. Volcan Sajama, which is something like 23,000´tall, dominates the stark surroundings. The south face of Sajama reminded me enough of the North face of Mt. Hood that my heart ached. The scale was about the same too. But Mt. Hood starts about 12,000´lower. Wow, y´know?
Most of the traffic from Chile is trucks carrying new automobiles. Most of the west-bound traffic is buses and empty automobile-carrying trucks. Add to this two bike tourists crawling their way up the 7-km climb to the frontier.
As we neared the top these two similar-sized white volanoes reared up to the north. They looked almost exactly like the pictures of mountains that I often drew in crayon when I was in second grade. Even more than Oregon´s Middle & South Sister do. To the south another volcano showed off it´s activity with a thin, constant jet of steam. And then we reached the border, at 15,350´. Nothing but volcanos and signs warning us in four languages to stay on the road because there´s land-mines everywhere else. Apparently there´s been some border disputes in the last century. I wonder, do the vicuñas ever set them off?
Chilean customs is 5 km further, next to one of the highest lakes in the world. Flamingos, goose-sized long-legged black ducks, and about five other entirely unfamiliar kinds of waterfowl reside in the shallows. Vicuñas abounded. The most perfect of the volcanos rules the scene like a cold, impartial, impossibly large diety. I tried to swim there but the water refused to get any deeper than my knees by the time I was far enough out for my toes started to go numb. Darn, swimming at 15,000 would have been neat!
It was, all-in-all, the most etherial place I´ve ever been. The colors were wierd. But I was a little out-of-it from breathing so hard.
Moving on, we had to camp without loosing any of our altitude. Sleeping at 15,100´. My personal record. Ouch! I´m surprised we slept at all. Thank you Ibuprofen. Good óle Vitamin I to the rescue.
That night it got down to 9 degrees. No, not centigrade. 9 degrees F. Another personal record. Double ouch!
Our food situation was rather weak too. Customs wouldn´t allow us to carry any fruits, veggies, spices, or meats into Chile and there was no town or store. Quinoa, bullion, powdered milk, & canned tuna got really old really fast, but at least we had plenty of it.
The next day we only got down to 12,000´. We went down some, then across a flat basin, then climbed again. I had the sense we were near the edge of it all, but it took awhile for the real descending to begin. Finally we dropped into a canyon and followed the icy creek for awhile as the walls grew to our sides. Then we emerged on a plateau of sorts and could just tell from the color of the sky below us that the ends of the earth lay down there. Sweet! A gorgeous alpine descent lasting 10 km reinforced the notion. But THEN we had to climb another thousand feet. No fair!
The road continued to snake across rather than down the mountainside until the next morning. Then we lost another 2,000´ before finding ouselves riding across an extremely dry desert for a couple hours. The cordillera rose like a wall behind us. We managed to buy a few vegetables at the only town on the whole road, and got 30 lbs. of water at the only creek.
We lost another thousand feet and entered an area that looks alot like southern Arizona, minus all the vegetation. Then we left the planet Earth and rode through a Martian valley. I mean, except for the blue sky it looked like Mars. ZERO vegetation. I´ve never seen a drier, more dead place. Isn´t there an ocean nearby? What gives?
The next few hours were an exercise in wearing out brake pads. The valley got drier and warmer, became a canyon, and just kept going down. We lost 5,000´in that canyon. I had two tubes fail at the valves from using too much front brake. (Yes Brett, that´s my diagnosis!) The air got soupy. The only life was the rather large Candelabra Cacti, which get their water exclusively from the fog that rises from the sea. It never rains there. Ever.
The canyon finally ended and we crossed a plateau of stark stark desert. Then a vivid memory of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina popped into my head. Wierd. Oh no, that´s why! ¨Hey, do you smell that?¨
“Is that the ocean?”
“Yeah!”
We were still over a mile above sea level though.
Soon a canyon around a mile deep opened up below us. It´s walls were entirely covered with sand. They look exactly like mile-high sand dunes. It must blow all the way in from the coast. The floor of the valley was green irrigated fields with a river snaking down the middle. The road down was a ribbon of pavement that seemed to belong in Egypt. We spent the night next to the river, still 40 km from the coast, breathing.
I love me some oxygen!
So now we´re wrapping up a few days in Arica, where we ate good food and caught some waves on our thermarests. From here we´re bussing it to Valparaiso, since we´ve gotta fly home in a couple weeks.
Pictures will be posted soon, promise!
Hasta,
-Andy

La Isla-A beautiful, magical place.

The island is about 2 hours away from Copacabana by boat, and it´s incredibly easy to arrange transportation too and from the island. There are about 2500 full-time residents, and they survive by agriculture, fishing, and these days, tourism.

There are no cars on the island. There are no roads. There are very well used and somewhat maintained trails, and burros and llamas seem to be the primary movers of goods.

We got to play in an ancient city and touch the stone that features prominently in the Inca creation myth. The sun and the moon came from the lake, you see, and the lake is called Lago Titicaca, or Titikarka, because “ti” means puma, or cat, and “karka” means rock, and the famous rock with the face of the puma is next to the face of god, which is next to the nooks where the sun and moon were found. Surely that makes total sense. It was all gorgeous.

The hike from the north end of the island to the south involved climbing over peaks as high as 13,350′, and although on a trail, was still a tough hike. I´m so very glad we left the bikes in Copacabana! As we were leaving, we saw three european bike tourists unloading their bikes on the dock at the south end of the isla.

Now, we had just run to catch our boat, and somewhat misjudged just how far above the dock we were. We ran down, and down, and down, and down, and down, and down, and down some more. My heart broke for their backs, as there was Absolutely No Way to ride anywhere until you got to the top of the island. They had to haul their bikes up an incredibly long, steep set of stairs. Long hike at least 2k, 500 feet sort of long. Bummer.

Anyway, I am so glad to have seen it, and we will post pictures as soon as we can.

Hi! We´re now in Copacabana, a ridiculously pretty town occupying a short peninsula on Lake Titicaca. This isn´t the Copacabana that the song was written about. That´s in Brazil. But that town was named after this one. The Incas founded this town (though people were already here before them) and they claimed that the sun was born on the nearby Isla Del Sol, which we´ll be checking out tomorrow along with a whole bunch of other tourists of European descent. We´re most definately on the gringo trail again. But it sure is a pretty place, so we´re staying for a few days.
We´re also just about finished with the Altiplano leg of the trip. To be perfectly honest, we´re tired of the Altiplano. Elicia´s tired of constantly feeling like puking. We´re both tired of everything being so physically demanding. I´m tired of being stared at by some adults, laughed at by most teenagers, and feeling like such an alien. Which I am, I know. No surprises there. I mean, we wanted to see other cultures; that´s why we´re here. But we do NOT belong here, and everyone knows it. I have the sense of having overstayed my welcome. In the countryside and off the tourist paths people aren´t so used to visitors, and usually that means they are more welcoming. Their curiosity made me feel happy to be there. Around La Paz & Titicaca, on the other hand, they´re used to seeing white people sightseeing. We contribute nothing to the cultural exchange. Except money, of course. That´s reality. But it´s tiring and rather depressing after awhile. I don´t much like to read it when other travelers weblog about these feelings, so, um, sorry about that! But it seems common after awhile in this region.
The exception is when we´re on the road between towns, when we´ve been getting the usual friendly waves & passing inquiries. I much prefer to see Bolivia that way.
Only it´s so HARD at 13,000´! I love to ride my bike, even (or especially) when it´s difficult. But altitude does wierd things to my awareness. I´m only about 85% here. I can appreciate about 85% of the views, the food, and the riding. I can achieve about 85% happiness or satisfaction. And those numbers go down as my heart-rate goes up. Sometimes the walls of awareness literally close in, my peripheral vision starts to blacken, and I have to shift into an even lower gear. My upper-level brain functions (like decision-making & calculating kilometers & such) are all there, because we´ve aclimatized by now. But those of you who know me will understand that I´m not gonna be happy with just 85% of the available fun for too long. So it´s a paradox : being in town with other tourists is getting old, but riding isn´t as enjoyable as it used to be because of the thin air. I´m sure our memories of the Altiplano will sparkle, and we´ll probably be back up here before too long. For now, though, we´re looking forward to the next thing.
It´s worth mentioning that my attitude went through a dramatic shift when I got sick on the road here. I don´t know what contaminated food or water got me, because we´ve filtered every drop and peeled every vegetable. But somehow I picked up a bug, and it messed up my digestive system something awful. Fortunately we brought powerful broad-spectrum antibiotics with us from home. Elicia seems to have picked up something too, but it hasn´t hit her as hard. I woke up feeling sick in the desert, and after crawling along for 50 km we found a relatively clean hostel (that had neither hot water NOR any water pressure) on the shore of the lake. I developed a serious fever and began to have shocking chills despite wearing everything and being underneath three alpaca blankets. So I took the first horse-pill and began to anihilate pretty much everything in my digestive track, good and bad alike. By morning I felt ok, although rather weak. I tell you, being sick at this altitude…it´s a little scary. I´m feeling about 85% now.
So I hope I ain´t sounding too depressed! Reaching Lake Titicaca is the last thing we planned to do in South America, and now that we´ve made it I feel as satisfied as can be. (85%) And on that note, the ride here was gorgeous! The road has been re-paved fairly recently, it´s far wider than necessary for the light traffic it carries, and it snakes along steep terraced hillsides a thousand feet above the blue, Mediterranian-looking lake for 50 km. I swear, it looked just like pictures I´ve seen of the coast of Greece or Italy. We actually spent a night on one of those un-used agricultural terraces, perhaps built by the Incas. Our view was spectacular even though we were almost invisible from the road. The lake is amazing. It´s kinda incongruous to have a huge lake at this altitude. And after all this desert it´s really uplifting to see so much water again. I do intend to swim in it, but not until it gets sunny again.
We´re still deciding how we´re gonna get to Chile from here, but it´ll definately involve a bus or two.
And the computers here don’t seem to agree with my camera, so I’m sorry there’s no new pictures yet.
Anyways, thanks for reading!
-Andy

Around about 1989 I was the proud owner of a Specialized Hard Rock, my very first mountain bike. And my dad had a two-foot-high stack of cycling magazines for me to paw through to learn about the wonderful world of grown-up cycling. Mostly ¨Bicycle Guide¨, the best all-around magazine ever, until someone bought them up & ruined it. Anyway, there was a short article in BG about this epic mountain bike descent in the Andes, which dropped something crazy like 10,000´continuously. They said it was a dirt road, not singletrack. But it ran along big sheer cliffs, under waterfalls, without guard-rails. There was a little picture that I still remember to this day. Ever since then I´ve know that there are things to be done by bicycle that defy my domestic-based concepts of scale. Moving from Maryland to Oregon, where climbs and descents suddenly became miles long instead of minutes, broadened my experiences immensely. But I always knew there was this big descent in the Andes.
Well, now we did it! It´s gotten quite famous since 1989. La Paz has dozens of tour companies offering similar rides down it, some better-run than others. One company requires full-face helmets. No thank you. Another uses really cheap bikes. We choose to go with the most highly-regarded company (Gravity-Assisted Mountain Bikes) and paid $55 each for the trip. That included a nice Kona hard-tail with hydraulic disc brakes, helmets, gloves, face-mask, safety-vest, shuttle service, and food. They were quite professional and we had a blast, but the best thing about them was the place we finished. It´s a private property along the river at the bottom of the valley in the jungle. We got showers & all-you-can-eat pasta lunch there. But in the last few years the owners have turned the place into an animal sanctuary. They take in neglected or abused pets that simply don´t belong in apartments in La Paz and let them live out their days in the jungle. Spider monkeys, Squirrel monkeys, two other kinds of monkeys, macaws, parrots, boa constrictors, cute raccoon-like animals, turtles, geese, ducks, and an occelot so far. And they have cabins for us to stay in too! So we stayed a couple nights. We needed the thick soupy oxygen, for one thing. But we also thought playing with monkeys for a few days might be kinda fun, y´know?
My favorites were the three spider monkeys. They kinda liked me too. How nice! I usually ended up with a little monkey-piss on me when they climbed on me, but just a little. And the sight of macaws flying overhead was pretty special. An amazon yellowhead parrot (almost just like Dock,the one I spent my youth being scared of) flew through the dining hut, stole a piece of our butter without even landing, and perched on the nearby chair. I went & took the butter back, picked him up on my hand, & sorta tossed him back into the trees. I felt quite brave!
So we spent three days doing that, hanging out with the volunteers, checking out the nearby waterfalls, and breathing the thick air. There were bananas growing all over. It was a great relaxing interlude.
I remain blown away by the ride there. ¨The World´s Most Dangerous Road¨ isn´t as dangerous anymore, because they built another road and most of the traffic takes that one now. But you could easily find yourself flying off a 3,000´cliff if you don´t pay attention. Nothing like going around a downhill corner when out of the corner of your eye you see the grass part at the road´s edge and just beyond you see the valley´s bottom a few kilometers away, almost straight down. And it just went on and on and on! From 15,500´to 4,300´! Getting warmer all the way, and greener, and more wet. Sure, it was a basically beginner mountain-bike ride. But we loved it!
My sense of scale now has a new dimension.
Anyways, we´re striving to get out of La Paz today before our lungs get any more soot in them. We´ve got less than a month left, and kinda a long way to go. This had been a heck of a week though!
Thanks for reading, and next time we write we´ll be in Copa, Copacabana.
Hasta luego,
-Andy

I wanted to spend some time in the jungle. I suppose, in the back of my head, I had fantasies about monkeys and parrots and waterfalls, but having spent a bit of time in Costa Rica, I remembered that much of the jungle is bugs, bug bites, big scary bugs, and sketchy reptiles.

When we decided to ride the World´s Most Dangerous Road, we also decided to spend three days in Corioco. Corioco isn´t the deepest jungle, nor is it in the heart of the coca growing region, nor does it have a malarial risk. Seems like a good place. When we finished the ride, we were escorted to a facility that seemed to have little cabañas, lots of trees, and were given a)free beer, and b)a lecture on how to interact (or not) with the animals.

That´s when I realized that we were someplace very, very special.

For the record, the rules were that the animals could touch you, but you weren´t to touch them. This got fuzzy when you needed to shoo them away from your food, or when, after a couple of days, we started shooing them away from the new tourist´s food and even putting them away in thier cages. It eventually dissolved altogether for us when Andy removed some boa constrictor food (live kittens, sorry folks) from the boa cage, and returned them to their mother. And we got hugs from the monkeys when we left.

La Senda Verde is several things at once. It is a business, existing to provide end-of-ride services for all of Gravity´s bike rides. It does this very, very well. A pool, hot, clean showers, shampoo, soap, and towels, and of course free beer are all provided. In addition, the fabulous chef and his crew cook up a gigantic pasta buffet for the hungry tourists.

La Senda Verde is also an animal rescue shelter. Don Marcello and his wife Doña Vicky began to take in animals some time ago, and it has expanded to 14 monkeys, an ocelot, a south american bear (not on the premises!), a boa, 2 cohati (kind of like raccoons with really long noses), 2 tortoises, and an aviary of parrots, macaws, and other exotic birds. Not to mention 2 golden retreivers and a slew of house cats. They get calls every week asking them to take in more animals, and planning on expanding their efforts significantly in the next few months. A crew of extremely hard-working volunteers feed, water, walk, and love the animals, along with a dedicated team of locals. It´s clear that while no one is a vet, or an exotic animal rescue specialist, every person there is devoted to the animals.

And the animals, for their part, seem very happy. Because they were pets, they are mostly very social.

In one morning, I got cuddled by three different kind of monkeys, walked over by the cohati (an adult and a tiny baby), and held two macaws. And that was before breakfast. We decided to stay another night after that.

So, that was La Senda Verde. We spent most of our time cuddling with critters, or watching the squirrel monkeys play, or just enjoying the gorgeous surroundings. Andy´s lap became a battlefield for three squirrel monkeys and the red howler. I learned how to carry a huge, beautiful bird.

I am almost 100% sure that we will be back to spend some of our own time as volunteers for La Senda Verde.

By the way, the only way to get there is to be invited, with Gravity. Another reason they are a decent company!

*Zoobomb-riding (bombing) little bikes downhill from the Portland zoo

The World´s Most Dangerous Road, from La Cumbre (elevation 4700 meters) to Yolosa, (1,100 meters) was determined to be the most dangerous road by some international organization some years ago because of the rather incredible number of deaths on it.

Good road for a couple of bikers to ride, no? However, the international community demanded that Bolivia build a new road, a safer road, and the old road has turned into…
A Mountain Bike Park.

I am not kidding.

Our plan was to perhaps ride it by ourselves instead of taking one of the many, many tours that were offered, but we learned that it was illegal to do it on your own as someone was unfortunately killed there a couple of weeks ago. So we researched several companies, and picked one that we thought we´d like to check out for perhaps possible future employment.

Now, it doesn´t get more gringo trail than this. The company, Gravity Assisted, didn´t even pretend to communicate with clients in Spanish. The guides were one gringo plus one Boliviano. The clientele was entirely gringo. But, the bikes were top notch and instead of ending at the same hotel every other company ended the tour at, they had a special facility (of which we will write extensively about in a future post) built for the end of the ride. In addition, the office staff was incredibly helpful, and they were able to store our bikes and gear in their workshop. Having a safe place in La Paz for bike storage was worth just about anything, and leaving it in a bike shop with bike people seemed like an excellent idea.

So at 7:30 am we met the other 12 gringos, loaded up on a bus, and drove up and up and up to La Cumbre. Our guide was a bit wary of us at first-we know that the people who think they know what they are doing on a bike are often the biggest pains in the rear-so we tried to stay really chill. I was very impressed with the guides and the logistics, I have to say. They took a very disparate group and managed to make everyone feel safe and still have a great ride.

The Beginning-27k of swoopy curves on a paved road. Two drug checks that amounted to nothing more than us paying a few bolivianos for the upkeep of the road (biker tax). Insane views of mountains above the clouds.

When we hit dirt road, we started to feel the air change. It got noticably thicker, for one. Thicker, wetter, and warmer. We started shedding layers rather quickly. The road got significantly more difficult-steeper, and the sheer drops got unimaginably huge.

On the road, the normal rules of driving on the right don´t apply. Instead, downhill traffic rides/drives on the left, or the outside, and uphill traffic drives on the inside/right. This means that downhill traffic has to yield, and they have the best view of the drop that is sometimes less than a meter off of their left tire.
So, we rode on the right.

The ride was incredible. Most of it was downhill, with the exception of a few kilometers. (It seemed that our tour group was the only one that gave riders the option to ride this section. We did, of course, until my chain broke. Then Andy pushed me for about 2k, until the bus caught up with us. The other guide rapidly replaced my chain, and because these were good people, assumed that we would continue riding up the hill.)

And, then at the end, after almost 60k of decending, and over 10,000 feet were lost, we ended up at La Senda Verde.

It was hella fun.

Another of the rescued pets at La Senda. The macaws and parrots were extraordinary. And they stole your bread too.

La Senda Verde rescues animals. Most were pets, and never, ever should have been. This young ocelot, the smallest member of the big cats (tigers, lions), was found in La Paz as a kitten. The owners couldn´t figure out why she did nothing during the day and tore everything up all night long. She´s a nocturnal predator. And fierce. Not a kitty cat at all. Now, she has an enclosure, food, and the good folks at La Senda Verde do the best they can for her. Unfortunately, even if she could be rehabilitated to be returned to the wild, it´s illegal to release a caged animal in Bolivia.
At least she´s not in an apartment.