Heading into the mountains again.We decided to leave the edge of the Salar....can't be that bad because we are staying on the Altiplano and we fluctuate between 3600m and 4200m. The landscape is unusual and "lunalike" - the natural colors are mind blowing. There are 200km between Challapata and Potosi. we managed to cycle them in two days....well, actually three because we met up with a canadian couple (Glenn and Ali - we had seen them in Cusco and Puno as well) and spend the night 20km before town in the school yard of a little village.
The area we rode through for two days seemed more remote than anything else we had been riding through on this entire trip. If there was a village it appeared abandoned. There were big signs that UNICEF had sponsored money to build basketball courts and schools, but most of those seemed abandoned and run down even though they were build (according to the signs) just this last year in 2012.
While riding, some rough looking men and women had jumped out of the brush to beg for "plata" every so often. One time I stopped and took a good look at one pretty harsh looking human. His teeth were rotten out of his mouth, his skin was black and thick - he and the rags he was wearing hadn't seen water for washing in month or more, so it seemed. He was speaking indigenous language -either Quechua or Aymara or maybe even something else. I gave him some cookies and candy instead of money and he wasn't too happy about it. His gnarly hands were reaching out for me and I had the urge to cycle away as fast as I could, but I didn't. I greeted him and looked at him for a moment longer and then I rode on...feeling sad and confused about what to do? A woman -earlier on- had offered to sell us her ragged clothes, starting to pull them off her body. She spoke a little Spanish and she mentioned that her clothes were made out of fine hand woven materials. We were greeting her friendly and rode on leaving her toothless smiling face behind..I looked in my back mirror until I couldn't see her anymore. Why can some remote office in New York or Los Angeles make decisions about building useless basketball courts in the middle of nowhere and not know that these people are rotting away on the side of the road? The old problem with bureaucracy: losing touch with what you actually are trying to work for and making decisions not based on reality!
The beauty of the landscape was somewhat soothing, but, what a harsh environment to live in! Some people (the Urus, the oldest inhabitants of the Altiplano) 2500 years BC had come across the Pacific and settled here to live, surrounded by infertile grounds in hugely fluctuating temperatures in the driest air which gives you a nose bleed every two ours and makes your skin wrinkle up........ WHY?
We cycled on and came across another village which appeared more lively in the middle of the day and the desert with a sizable fruit market and people calling out to us to stop. I don't know why, but we didn't - though we could have benefitted from some nice oranges.... but we kept going while waving and greeting and watching the road.....I saw at the corner of my eye a guy hugging a llama - he had his arm around it's neck and the next thing I saw, looking straight at him now, he had a knife and cut the poor things throat right then and there. The llama didn't struggle much - the man lowered the body to the ground and held its head and cut throat over the edge of a mound of dirt and the blood was running down towards the street. Matter of fact, this is the daily or weekly activity of the people here to survive. I am the one being out of touch......
