Last Postcard from Bolivia

Apologies to my regulars for not updating last week. Truth was, there was so much happening and I had other stuff to be doing with meagre internet resources from the field that I had to prioritise. Now I'm in Maine, USA, on a small break before getting back to the grindstone, and I've managed to put together a few extracts from my diary of the last week of the Land Rover G4 Challenge.

May 13

Sucre itself was in many respects similar in ethos to what Vientiane had been to Laos, only this time the style of the colonial architectural overhang was Spanish instead of French. It was also more modern than Vientiane had been.

And I suppose if I had just one abiding memory of the place for the two days I spent there, it was the youngsters in the park on the morning, all coming up and asking if I wanted a shoe shine. Even when I pointed out that I was wearing sandals which couldn't be shined, they remained persistent until I just walked away each time. That said, I did see many people having their footwear buffed, and Sucre must have the shiniest shoes in the world.


May 14

A sobering afternoon. We lost a Range Rover Sport over the side. It rolled three or four times before being stopped by a less steep piece of ground.

There was one Land Rover PR and two journalists in it. Fortunately they were strapped in and the airbags all blew, so they suffered nothing more than shock. But just a couple of metres further and they'd have continued to roll all the way to the bottom.

Gary stopped his car and went back to check them out, but was happy that they were OK enough to wait for the medical Defenders to come back for them.

Taking out the broken car will be a fairly major operation.

It just goes to show that this isn't any joyride. Some of the drops as we climbed today were very steep indeed, and the 'road' surface wasn't the best, even though this is a 'main' road of sorts. I can tell you that when I was driving, before the accident, I was taking it all very carefully.

Then, just to emphasise the lesson, two kilometres further on we stopped again because a small truck had just gone over the edge, and fortunately came to rest about fifty metres down. Again Gary started to head down with the medical kit, but was called back by a bus driver who had also stopped, who said that the men from the truck were in his bus and were OK.



All that said, the drives have been stupendous and I haven't seen such a variety of landscapes anywhere else I've been. We passed through 4,200 metres at one stage today. In the clear sun -- and it really IS clear up here -- it is hot enough for tee-shirt and shorts, even though the air temperature is actually only around 14degC; but once the sun went down, it cooled rapidly and I'm now sitting in the passenger seat of our Discovery, in four layers of clothing, three of them thermal gear. Tonight I expect it will go down to -5/6degC. Fortunately I've already checked out the sleeping bag in the one cold night we had last week, and it works like a dream.




May 15

Well, after yesterday's day of drama, today has really been something else of an experience.

We're camped on a corner of the Salar de Uyuni, with the sun just set and some extraordinary lighting spreading across this salt plain, the largest of its kind in the world.

At a height of 3,660 metres, this place at this time of the year only had an air temperature of 3/4degC even under a cloudless sky and bright strong sun. But if you were in the sun, you felt very warm, even if a chill wind on the shadow side was promising skin chapping.

The Salar is a truly amazing place. Once a salt ocean, it must have got trapped up here in some geological upheaval, and evaporated off to pure salt. I'm told that in places it is up to 30 metres deep of the crystalline stuff.



We drove out onto the salar proper, and after about half an hour came to a solitary building in the salt. Made of salt. It is a hotel, in the same way as the Ice Hotel in nordic countries.



It was a scruffy place, as my pictures will later show. But it is a REAL hotel, and tourists do come there to spend the night, on a visit to the salar.

The salar is just like a white sea, with many islands sticking out of it just like from a sea of water. You can drive on any part of it, from island to island or simply across it. The sensation is quite weird, and it is definitely a place where you need to have good sunglasses, otherwise you'll get the equivalent of snow-blindness very quickly.



At least tonight we got to camp in time to have tents up and food organised before dark, which is a big improvement on last night. It doesn't take long for darkness to be complete, and the temperature plummets. I know we actually hit -10degC last night, so I expect it to be even colder here tonight.

I don't yet know what tomorrow brings, except that the competitions are based here on the salar. We still have to hit the 4,600 metre mark, I think on Thursday or Friday.

Which brings me to altitude sickness. So far I've been lucky, and have not been affected. But quite a few people have been hit, to varying degrees. Two of the competitors went down, one collapsing at the wheel of his car, which ended up in the ditch. His support driver, Christel, jumped from her car and found him slumped over the wheel. She dragged him back to her car, where the oxygen is kept, and treated him before the ambulance car came and took him to town. I gather he's OK tonight and is likely to be back in competition tomorrow.

And that's about it for now. As far as I'm concerned, my sleeping bag beckons.


May 17

Last night's camp was probably the coldest so far, down to minus 11/12degC. And this morning, getting up at six so we could have everything packed and ready to go on the dot of seven, the fingertips quickly numbed.

We're on the Alto Plano, the high plateau of Bolivia. It is essentially high mountain desert, at around 4,000 metres, with nothing to see for miles except sand and rocks and small scrubby plants.



And llamas, of course. Ever since we started hitting 3,500 metres, these tall-necked, long-legged 'sheep' have been around in big numbers.

And there are villages too, in the most unlikely places. You just have to wonder how they make a living. Individual homes in the wildness, too, they are little more than hovels, with rough adobe mud walls, maybe sometimes rough bricks made from the same material. And they are lived in, because you'll see people heading to or from them occasionally, usually a woman who looks old, maybe with a young child in tow.

Often too, there are whole villages abandoned, and my mind went back to images from Ireland post-Famine times. This must have been what it was like.



And then you are surprised, when you get to some of the villages up here where electricity hasn't come, the houses have solar panels for generating electricity. They have so much sunshine in the day, and charge car batteries, and in the nights they have light. Maybe not much else, because the panels are quite small.

It is a vast country, but only has a population of eight million. And of those, some one-and-a-half million live in the three key cities, La Paz, Santa Cruz and Sucre. So if one wants isolation, this is the place.

I think I'll be glad to see the back of these little orange tents.

Tomorrow we go by where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid met their end, after fleeing down here to live when America got too hot. But they made the mistake of continuing their robbing trade in Bolivia, and were eventually given their comeuppance by the local army.


May 19

As I looked down off a Bolivian dirt road to the drop hundreds of metres below, uncannily appropriate, a line from a song by U2 was blaring from the Discovery's sound system, 'you want to be somewhere else'.

They kept the truly frightening roads until last, and it was on our journey to the final destination of Tarija, with our penultimate night spent camped in a valley directly under where big Volvo trucks struggled through the night several hundred metres above, that was for this writer the truly terrifying part of the whole thing.

Heights, especially unguarded ones like this, scare me almost to death. And I knew before I set out with the Land Rover G4 Challenge 2006 that there would be times when I'd be terrified.

But I wouldn't have missed it. The 'ultimate adventure' which had already taken me through Thailand and Laos, to Rio in Brazil, and now had me 4,600 metres up in the thin air of the Bolvian Andes.



I had tried not to count the number of little crosses and faded wreaths along the way which noted where locals had lost control, terminally. Including a couple of larger ones where the road had crumbled from under buses ...

Only one more day to go.


Brian