PA24: Cycling from Copacabana to La Paz

Raquel’s replacement derailleur hangers were due to arrive in Puno, back on the Perúvian side.

FedEx had done a fantastic job of getting them into the country: Our order had left the shop in Colorado, USA on Tuesday the 28th of October, and had already cleared customs in Lima on Friday the 30th.

And then it all went quiet.

We had been given a scheduled delivery date for the following Wednesday the 5th of November, so we made sure to be ready and waiting in Puno on that date.

Crossing back into Perú was a bit stressful. We had both overstayed our respective Perúvian visas on our last visit, and immigration was suspicious of why we were coming back so soon.

I told my border guard about the drama with the bicycles, and showed him the FedEx receipt, with the destination clearly marked as being in Puno.

Raquel was on the receiving end of similar enquiries from her border officer, but fortunately she was sat next to me, and so we managed to wing it, and received entry for 7 days each.

I don’t think a western country such as my UK, or the USA would have allowed us to wriggle our way back in having just overstayed our previous visas, so hooray, and muchas gracias Perú!

It turned out that the parcel was already in Puno, but the delivery driver had taken one look at the UK phone number on my billing address and refused to call it. He also refused to deliver the parcel without making the call beforehand, and then made no attempt to contact me via my email address that was associated with the order, or update the order status on the online platform, which was still saying that the package was in Lima.

We faffed around a bit on the phone with FedEx Perú for a couple of days, before finally getting the order into our hands, and then high-tailed it back to Bolivia as quickly as we could.

All that faffing around for a tiny piece of metal…

Time to get back on the road ASAP.

One of the weirder forms of conveyance I’ve travelled on, but it seemed to work. Navigated by a bloke with an outboard motor and a long stick.

Amiga de todos los perros. Raquel dishing out some Spanish chorizo to a hoard of hungry street dogs.

There were about 15 dogs in total. They just wait by the roadside until someone takes pity on them and throws some food. Pretty standard thing to see in South America.

Uh oh. I noticed that I had a bit of a wobble in my back wheel. I thought that it was out of true, but it turned out that the tyre was ripping open, causing it to bulge out. Was I going to make it to La Paz under my own power?

I tried my best to gently nurse the bike over the remaining kilometres.

Our surroundings weren’t anything special, but the road condition was good, with only gentle ups and downs.

And then I spotted something unusual by the roadside…

In construction. Apparently this large hull is about 2 or 3 weeks from completion.

The Esteban family are the world’s foremost experts in building traditional reed vessels. I’m afraid I completely forgot this guy’s name, but he is the son of Paulino, who built the boats used by Thor Heyerdahl for his transoceanic experimental archaeological expeditions.

These are the last people keeping this ancient trade alive.

Check out their website: https://www.kontiki.bolivia.bo/

Back to the pedals again…

I’m struggling to find something positive to write about this town. This is a part of the world that exists.

Snow-capped mountains in the background.

Of all the places I’ve been, this is surely one of them.

Nothing particularly stealth. We just plonked the tent down in some grass by the roadside.

Entering the outskirts of El Alto, above La Paz.

Riding into town.

Pretty nifty that you can take your bike on the teleférico in La Paz!

The whole city is connected by an extensive network of cable cars.

A system that gets you where you are going in a mountainous city, regardless of how busy the streets are below. It’s all rather futuristic!

There’s nothing quite like the taste of home…

One of the items on my South American bucket list was the Bolivian ‘Death Road’, or Yungas road. It was once the only way that goods vehicles could access the towns in the Amazon from La Paz, and rapidly became notorious as the most lethal highway on the planet. Thousands of drivers have lost their lives trying to navigate this route.

We decided to visit as part of an organised mountain bike tour.

Raquel was pretty nervous: this was her first time trying mountain biking, and it didn’t exactly help that the trail was called DEATH ROAD.

We started off with an easy paved descent from the mountain pass above La Paz. Somehow one of the riders managed to crash and break his arm.

After this warm up we all piled back onto the bus and drove down to the start of the death road.

Lovely scenery. I’ve really missed seeing green!

To be honest, it’s virtually identical to the cloud forests that we have back in Ecuador. I think that it would have been nicer to do this route independently, instead of as part of a huge group of other bikers.

We made it back to La Paz unscathed. Raquel gave the whole mountain biking experience a firm thumbs up, and we made our way over to a cosy Airbnb to recuperate for a day or so.

The next day I received a message in our ‘Travelling in Bolivia’ WhatsApp group that a New Zealand based motorsports team was trying to set several land speed records out on the salt flats of Salar de Uyuni, but they had overrun their original deadline and were now short on staff to marshal the track. They needed English speakers on the radios.

I was on the overnight bus to Uyuni that very evening, and arrived just in time to catch the morning shuttle out to the team’s base on the salt flats.

The nationwide fuel crisis was still going on at this point, and it turned out that our gas station at Colchani was completely dry. A few minutes later one of the work vehicles ran itself empty. They were forced to siphon fuel out of the firetruck in order to get up and running again. This was just a taster of the endless frustrations that this team has had to deal with while operating in Bolivia over the last 60 days or so.

Empty space. The Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat on the planet.

4 cars in various stages of preparation in the middle of the complex. They are all powered by internal combustion. 4 cars, 4 potential land speed records.

Wairua 1, a 2 litre streamliner. Going for a 380 mph (608 kph) land speed record.

Cookie, a Nissan Coupe V8, chasing a 220 mph (352 kph) record.

Cookie has a long history in the Bonneville Salt Flats USA. Different engines, different classes. This car has already accumulated several land speed records.

CMR is made up of a team of volunteers from New Zealand. They are led by 79 year old Reg Cook, who is both the primary benefactor, and the driver. He’s quite a personality, and he must have something special to bring so many of his countrymen all the way over to the other side of the world, at their own expense, to race cars.

My job: sitting on a plastic chair with a radio to report whether there was any passing traffic near the course. We had marshalls at 2 mile intervals. If I stood on top of the chair I could just about make out the next station in the distance. Flat earthers take note!

I spy with my little eye something beginning with S…

Issigonis, a 1959 mini. Aiming to set a new land speed record for ‘the world’s fastest mini’. As a brit this was the car that I was most invested in.

Fixing the streamlined nose onto the front of the mini.

Killing time on the salt flats. An awful lot of waiting around and then sudden bursts of action defined the whole experience.

The rest of the marshalls were recruited from a Bolivian motorsports group ‘Adecruz’. It turned out that I was one of only 3 people on site who could speak both Spanish and English, so I spent a lot of time helping out with translation.

Gil (right) proposed to Kendy on the salt flats. They’ve been together for 25 years. Felicidades!!

I had volunteered my services for the 3 days that the FIA were present at the track, which was the crucial period of time during which CMR could hope to record official land speed records.

Raquel had been patiently waiting for me back in La Paz, and while I would have liked to have stayed on to see how the rest of the story played out, it was time for us to get back to the bikes.

The beast awakens… Wairua 2 fired up for the first time at the end of my 3 day stay. She is an 8 litre turbocharged monster, aiming to achieve 550 mph (880 kph), and gain the outright land speed record for a car powered by internal combustion. Unfortunately, this was at the end of the last day that the FIA would be on site, and so there was no chance of gaining an official world record this time around.

Apparently the FIA can write off speed records if they are announced on social media or on other platforms in an improper manner prior to being officially published by the organisation. I don’t want to in any way jeopardise the achievements of this fantastic group of people, so if you want to know their results, you are going to have to find out for yourself!

Here is their official website: https://cmrchallenges.co.nz/

Their Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/share/17kXKy5Fvm/

They are planning to release a documentary film shortly, just as soon as they have sifted through and edited all of the terabites of film captured on site.

I caught the night bus back to La Paz that evening. We still had a long way to pedal…