Soon we'll be leaving Lake Titicaca, but staying on the high Plato of the Altiplano - we caught up with Salva who left just an hour earlier, but we found him sitting on a bench after the ferry ride from the peninsula (Cocacabana) to the main land - gazing half asleep out onto the incredibly blue high altitude lake. We rode together to the capital but we had to spend one night camping on the soccer field of a University, breaking up the 150km journey from Cocacabana to La Paz. It's always fun to look at another cyclist"s gear and habit cooking and dealing with set up and break down of the tent. ...we had a good time and a good night sharing lots of stories. Salva had been on the road around the world now for eight years, but not once, he said, was he woken up by enthusiastic soccer players at the dawn of the day. This is how our day started and we all stayed put in the tent until the game was over because none of us wanted to go out there and look at all this activity at that hour. Though, James went out to pee and witnessed Salva's bike getting knocked over by the soccer ball, after he set it straight again, he crawled back in the tent, hoping the game would be over soon and we and our things can leave unharmed. You see, we were set up behind one of the goals, but luckily they didn't use that one this morning. Classes must have started and it got quiet again when we prepared our breakfast and soon set out.
Towards La Paz the roads and surroundings got funky and filthy like they often do approaching a big City (La Paz has only a little over one million people- Bolivia -as a whole- only has 9 million inhabitants, by the way...) This time the sky got funky too and the black clouds soon relieved themselves into a royal hail and snow storm. I was too excited about La Paz to bother - we got our foul weather gear on and rode on towards the capital. La Paz "lives" in a hole. We basically got on the edge of the Altiplano and rode about 500m down to the city, but the view, after the storm and at the edge before descending is unforgettable:
There is no other place like this in the world, I believe!
We got to stay in the Casa Ciclista, the cycle community
and had two nice full days to explore the city and run errants before crawling back out of the La Paz hole the same way we got in, back onto the Plato. It takes two full hours to climb out and at the top, the same - so it seemed - hail and snow storm had been waiting for us - unfazed James and I continued on our journey south, heading to the Salt Lakes. Aren't we tough? The sky cleared for a little while...we had gotten a late start saying "good bye" to all the other cyclists, cleaning up and loading our bikes and by the time the day started to die we experienced the sky darkening again, so we rolled into a little village, off the main road, and got taken in by a friendly pastor ( I think he was the pastor of the village, but I am not sure.....he appeared very confident and had that kind of "air" around him - for the lack of a better term.). We got a room with six sacks of USA flour as beds, but it was dry and clean and we slept like babies while the cuys (guinney pigs) in the back yard made their cuy, cuy noises and the storm went wild. I peeked out the door at one point at night when I had to go pee and found the whole night world covered in white fluff - so beautiful and peaceful! The next morning winter had melted and we were back to "normal" - the roads were clear and we headed out towards Oruro staying on the Altiplano at around 3700m.
