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.

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.

Hi from La Paz!
Wow, what a city!
We´ll write more about La Paz shortly, but in the interest of proper chronology this post will be about how we got here.
They say the Altiplano is flat. ¨Plano, solamente plano,” we heard from many helpful Bolivians. And I suppose from an automobile it seems that way. Shucks, the first 25 km from Oruro were like a 30-km-wide 12,000´high pancake, albiet a pancake sprinkled with all types of garbage. The farther we got from the center, the less concentrated was the garbage. Like a landfill dropped from the stratosphere. Then beyond rim of our pancake the road trended slightly but undoubtedly upwards.
We took a short side-trip to a hotspring resort that proved to be well worth the effort. A huge steaming swimming pool was surrounded by private rooms with smaller tubs about 4´deep. It was HOTTTTTT! It would´ve been better to arrive there after a week of difficult touring instead of three days relaxing in Oruro, but hey, hotsprings rock! Our muscles went to jelly.
We opted not to get a room in their hostal in favor of camping in the open desert. We found a great spot but there was an elderly woman sheperding her flock of sheep nearby. We figured we oughta ask her if it was OK, so Elicia went over very politely to have a little chat. She got yelled at in Queqhua (the language of the Inca empire, still in common use here) or possibly Ayamara (a far older language that survived the Inca takeover, of which the Ayamaras are rightfully proud.) We have no idea what she said, but it wasn´t friendly at all. So we went elsewhere and camped next to a dry arroyo.
At around midnight after a few hours of rain we woke up to the sound of deep rushing water. Remember everybody, Never Camp In Arroyos!
The next few days were rather uneventful, and completely lacked any kind of steep hills. But we gained 1,500´of elevation in several long descents followed by slightly longer ascents. The nights got colder. The air got thinner. The traffic increased as we approached the metropolis.
All of a sudden there was a huge white pyramid jutting into the sky on the horizon. It had to be Huyana Potosi, the most photographed mountain in Bolivia. Probably the most-often climbed one too. How can a 6,000 meter peak remain hidden from view until it´s only a day´s ride away? Ain´t this altiplano supposed to be flat?
Soon there were more gleaming white teeth biting way up into the sky. Nevado Illimani, all 6,500 meters of it, somehow snuck up on our right side just across a big big valley. We didn´t grasp how big a valley until we found ourselves riding through the suburban nightmare of El Alto, which occupies the plain above the gorge in which La Paz lives. It took twenty flat straight kilometers of sooty exhaust & heavy traffic for us to reach the descent into La Paz. Then all of a sudden we were on the edge of an enormous cliff-lined gorge that dropped away as far as the eye could see. Every square meter of land that wasn´t absolutely dead-vertical (and some that were) had buildings on it. In the middle , 2,000´below, were skyscrapers. Welcome to La Paz!
There´s more oxygen down there too.
-Andy

When you first see La Paz, your breath, should you have any left, is literally taken away. Arriving from the Altiplano, you first climb to over 13,000 feet. The city/slum of El Alto (literally, the Tall) sprawls for about 10k of crowded, smelly streets. After an incredibly long time on a straight, busy, highway like road, you pass a toll booth, go past the sign that says “No bikes” (just like the other bike tourists told us), and you see the city spread out before you.

The red adobe buildings spill from the top of the deep canyon to the bottom, like a river flowing down. Surrounding the entire valley are the majestic, glaciated peaks of the Cordillera Real, soaring above us at 6000-6500 meters. The city itself sits at less than 12,000 feet, but instead of feeling like there is more oxygen in the air, there is just more pollution.

Once you are on the autopiste (highway), you decend for almost 20k, and about 400 meters. It´s steep and somewhat hair-raising. There is a breakdown lane, but the closer you get to the bottom of the valley, the more mini-busses and pedestrians there are to condend with.

Finally, at the bottom, you are spit out into a crazy mess of busses, minibusses, more minibusses, still more minibusses, taxis, and some minibusses.

The minibusses are the main form of auto on the streets. They employ kids or women to sit and yell out their destinations. They are like busses in that they are constantly pulling in and out of traffic. They seem to stop whenever they feel like it, and turn right from the left hand lane. Everyone drives with their horn, and between the horns, the racket of the yelled destinations, and the whistles of the (somewhat effective) traffic cops, the streets are incredibly noisy.

I will never consider San Francisco to be a particularly hilly city again. Not after this. These are some seriously steep streets.

There are sidewalks, decent enough, but much of the available space, and much of the space in the street as well is taken up by vendors selling everything you could possible think of.

Scissors, electronics, bras, clothing, hats, shoes, toilet paper, vegetables, pre-cooked food (with stools to sit on), bread, water, candy, baby llama fetuses, magic charms, plugs for sinks, and just about everything else.

Yep. I said baby llama fetuses. See, when you want good luck, and you aren´t the richest Boliviano on the block, but you need some blessing for your new building, you buy a dried baby llama fetus as a gift to Pachamama, and bury it under your building. They look kinda like shrivelled up birds, and are available in all sizes.

We were told by many, many bike tourists that we shouldn´t miss La Paz, that it is beautiful, and an amazing city. They were right. It is an incredible place, not just because we had middle eastern food and espresso to eat.

However, I am ready to get back on the road.

Hi! It occurs to me that we didn´t write about our Salar adventure at all!
Well, it was great! We rode right across that thing. But as we hope that our friends at WEND Magazine are still interested in us submitting an article about that particular experience, we´ll leave you all in suspense about that part for now.
We got some AWESOME photos too!
-Andy

OK, there´s a lot of dogs on this continent. I´ve always gotten along pretty well with dogs, so I can´t help taking an interest in their lives here. In Argentina and Chile they lead noticably different lives from their northern companions. And in Bolivia…well I´ll get to Bolivia in a second.
Disclaimer: I won´t write anything really graphic or overtly upsetting, but I will allude to the fact that dogs live shorter lives than people.
Argentina had lots of puppies. So many that you´d think a huge pet-store delivery truck was left open in every town. At least half the canines we saw were puppies. Hmmm… What does this say about a dog´s life in Argentina? Seemingly that it ain´t that long. That´s observation number one: we haven´t see hardly any obviously old dogs. Same in Chile. Lots of puppies. But there aren´t any more canine road kill than anywhere I´ve ridden before. South American dogs understand pedestrian safety exceptionally well. They look both ways, no joke! In Chiloe we saw dogs taking the ferry across the harbor, smelling around the beach a bit, and then taking it back to town.
Dogs lead more independent lives here, it seems. They roam the land, un-neutered and free. They get to make puppies whenever nature calls. They often howl all night long. I once rode down an alley and got barked at by one dog, which alerted the next dog down the alley to start barking at me. By the time I got to our campground on a hill above town I could hear that I had gotten about a hundred dogs to raise the alarm, letting that half of town know that something wierd was racing through the collective territory. The local humans hardly seem to notice. I presume that most dogs have a home where they get fed somewhat regularly, but most of them look rather skinny. People just pay alot less attention to them than I´m used to. What happens to old dogs? Do they go off, hide themselves, and die in peace? Do they have fights to the death? Do their owners keep them inside and care for them until they pass away? I have no idea. All I know is their lives are free, instinctive, exciting, and shorter.
As a strong believer in training your pet properly, I would´ve expected that the dogs here would be very poorly behaved. We opted not to get $600 rabies vaccinations before coming here (fyi, you can get them in La Paz for one US dollar) so we really don´t want to get bitten. But it´s just not a problem. Every once in a while we´ll get barked at & chased past a property, but most dogs just sit there quietly and watch us go by. Some don´t even look up. Once in Alabama I got chased by a yappy little canine for three miles. I´d say 95% of the dogs in the southeastern US will put up at least a token chase of a cyclist. But not here.
Bolivia has the same situation going on, but even more so. Lots of the dogs here are totally on their own. They roam alone, sometimes in the wide-open desert, searching for food or other things. In the towns & cities there´s no shortage of trash piles to rummage through, so they don´t even spread it all around. They calmly nose around without even enlarging the pile. None of that “OH BOY, I can´t HELP myself, I just Have to make a MESS of all this Sweet Smelling GARBAGE I found!” They are, by and large, very well behaved. They know their place in human society and don´t seem to confuse it with their place in dog society. They watch you eat from a distance but rarely beg, and when you tell them to leave they do! (Except for this one guy in Oruro who came into our restraunt, snaked past all the tables smiling widely, got chased out by the waiter, came back later, got chased out, came back… excelent physical comedy!) I don´t think it´s be appropriate to give your dog zero training in the States; too confusing. They usually end up bad dogs that way. But in Bolivia they get excellent training from the school of hard knocks, and it all seems to work out pretty well. Not counting the mortality rate, that is. But then again human life expectancy isn´t unusually high here either. Quality of life is still high in both cases.
I gotta mention the real working dogs though. They herd sheep, llamas, cows, alpacas, and sometimes try to herd passing bike tourists. They´re small, loud, and fit. It says alot about the average sheep´s intelligence that an animal one tenth it´s size can make it run in a panic. I like the working dogs. No nonsense there.
OK, thanks for reading! We´re in the La Paz area for another week or so, so pictures & more posts will be coming soon.
-Andy