Bolivia in the Rain and Hail

An International border line is drawn in the middle of Lake Titicaca. The western half of the lake is Peru and the eastern half is Bolivia. There is the small town of Copacabana facing Lake Titicaca where lots of tourists visit. The street gently going downhill from the church to the lake is the only busy street with cozy restaurants nestling to each other. I heard it had been a quiet town till five years ago. But Copacabana has also lots of hotels now for the increased population of tourists. The cheapest hotels charge only less than US$2. My hotel is facing the beach that tourists gather and from the large windows of the hotel room a lot of people enjoying themselves on the beach and small boats resting in the tiny cove come into view. The room is spacious with three beds and really comfortable. The hotel may be the best in the town. The charge of the room is as low as $4.7 a night including breakfast, though. In addition to this inexpensive, but comfortable hotel, in this town a bottle of liquor made from muscat is sold for $2.7 and a pack of European cigarettes for 25cents. These facts kept me staying for a week with Christmas in between. The town also has three or four cybercafes. However, they charge a lot. The charge per hour is about $1.4 over here, although it was 45 to 55 cents in Peru. It is good that the town has good restaurants, hotels and cybercafes, but curiously enough there is only one bank that has only one window and there is no gas station. The town probably couldn't catch up with the tourism that came suddenly. On the contrary, the town is safe and the people are not contaminated by tourism. The faces of those people became closer to those of pure indigenous people than in Peru. There are not a few people who have a face similar to an Asian like me. Probably because of this, I was taken to be an attendant by foreign tourists several times at the hotel and some restaurants. I have never had this kind of experience since I was taken to be a Sherpa by both local people and Japanese tourists in Nepal long time ago.

It was the worst day when I headed to La Paz from Copacabana. I felt a little sick due to a hangover when I got up that morning. When I pulled the bike out of the hotel, the engine stopped at the exit of the parking. The gasoline in a 10-liter plastic container that I bought from a nearby shop must have been of poor quality. The road next to the parking ascends. The engine stopped again when I tried to make a right turn. And, the bike leaned. I couldn't support the heavy bike and let it fall down. Soon after the riding, I felt sick and threw up several times by the side of the road. Although the sky was clear when I left the hotel, the dark clouds covered the sky ahead after one-hour trip. I had to ride in the heavy rain without a rain suit. When it rained in the Andes, it was as cold as in the midwinter of Japan. To make matters worse, it began to hail. The pellets of hail hit me on the face like bullets. A full-face helmet is required in this region. Unfortunately I left the detachable chin guard in Bogota, because I had never used it in North and Central America. The road came to a dead end and I found myself in a small park in a town before La Paz. I couldn't keep going although I saw a large road in front of me. It was still raining. I tried to ride through the side streets in order to take that road. Soon later I came a side street full of mud and I had to turn the heavy bike around. It was a hard job. La Paz is located on the bottom of the valley, 400m down from 4,000m-high high plain. The sole road leads to the center of the city. So it's easy and you never lose your way. But the one-way system in the downtown is very complicated and you have to make a long detour to go back even a half block. I arrived, with an effort, at the hotel that I had found in the guidebook, but the hotel didn't have a parking. I went to the next hotel, but the result was the same. There are an amazingly large number of policemen on the streets in La Paz. I asked one of them if there was a hotel with a parking. The police officer told me to go to the tourist police. The tourist police told me that there are few hotels with a parking in La Paz. However, they gave me the address of a cheap hotel. I arrived at the hotel after getting lost. But the hotel didn't have a parking although there was a public parking in the neighborhood. I didn't want to carry the heavy luggage in the rain from the parking to the hotel. So I started to ride without any certain idea. Soon later I saw a hotel seemed to be expensive. It was a four-star hotel, but I asked the charge, thinking it would never be my place. They told me $70 a night. They let me know of a less expensive hotel, instead. The hotel had three stars and the charge was $35, but they offered me a discount charge of $25. I gave up and decided to stay there as I had already been looking for a hotel in the rain for four and a half hours. Because of the high charge of the hotel, I had an idea to leave La Paz next day. When I pulled the bike into the garage of the hotel, I felt myself worn out of fatigue. I could hardly speak. I asked the attendants to carry my luggage of the bike to the room for the first time in hotels. As soon as I entered the hotel room, I lay down on the bed and kept sleeping for seventeen hours and a half. As a result I had to pay $50 for two nights. On the second day, the very last day of the year, I could hardly eat anything and threw up only gastric juice in the bathroom. And, it was raining in La Paz.

At midnight twelve on the last day of the year, I heard a number of the sounds from fireworks in the bed. Then I remembered the new year had come. I woke up at eight the following morning. Fortunately the condition of my stomach was slightly better. I was able to smoke although I couldn't on the previous day. Luckily it was not raining. I headed to Oruro, 220km south of La Paz. It began to rain soon after I left La Paz. I rode in the heavy rain and hail as several days before. In Oruro, fortunately the hotel that I had planed to stay had a parking. It was also a three-star hotel, but had an inexpensive room with a shared bath for $6.4. The hotel had a bright, spacious restaurant with a glass roof and, in addition, even a room where the Internet is available. I decided to stay in the hotel for a night and go to Uyuni, 8-hour train trip to the southwest, in order to see the salt desert, leaving the bike and the luggage in the hotel. The rainy season has come in this district. It is absolutely impossible to ride on the muddy road, while my poor riding skill and my cruiser-type bike don't allow me the trip on the unpaved road even in the dry season.

The Andes branch into two ranges east and west at Lake Titicaca and form a huge high plain in the shape of upright oval in the south of the Lake. Chile and Argentina lie on the south of the ellipsoid. Uyuni stands on the foot of the East Andes in the south of that altiplano. There is the salt pan of Uyuni as large as a sea in the west of Uyuni. The salt pan doesn't have water during nine months of a year, and is a salt desert. However, as the rainy season has started, water now covers most parts of the salt pan. But there are some parts without water and those places are really salt deserts. The salt forms a pattern of pentagons or hexagons of 50cm to 1m in size, like that of a turtleback, and the white field of salt extends far away to the horizon. Even in the places with water, the maximum water stage is about 10cm. The TOYOTA Land Cruiser that was loaded with the tourist of us goes in the shallow lake. Besides the two drivers, or cooks at the same time, the passengers are two Israeli women, an Israeli man, a French man, a German man and I. The passengers are all in the twenties except me. It was a rainy day when I arrived at Uyuni, but that day fortunately the weather cleared up. The water covering the salt pan clearly reflected the blue sky and the white clouds just like a mirror. A snow-capped mountain in the distance was also beautifully reflected. Our vehicle traveling on the mirror seemed to be going on the surface of a lake. Meanwhile, the border between the sky and the water grew vaguer. Only the blue sky and the clouds extended in front of us. I felt as if we were flying on a plane high in the sky. The Land Cruiser was floating on an endless space of fantasy. It was rather better for us to visit there in the rainy season than in the dry season when only the salt field is visible.

The Land Cruiser carrying us went further down to south near the Chilean border in the West Andes. There was a green lake and a volcano with an elevation of 5,916m towered on the other side of the lake. The volcano stands on the border and the other side of it is Chile. In the east of the volcano there is another mountain. Argentina is behind the mountain. A small building of the Bolivian border office solitarily stands on the mountain foot of the volcano. Our Land Cruiser unloaded our travel companions, the French Julien and the German Geronimo at the border. They headed to San Pedro de Atacam in Chile, 30km away from that nowhere in the mountain. There is another hot spring near the town. I can't enter Chile now, for I left my bike and luggage in Oruro in the far north. A paved road crossing the West Andes into Chile is far back in the north. I will go back to the north and keep riding to Arica, the city in Chile on the border of Peru and then come back to the hot spring on the other side of the volcano towering before my very eyes, after making a long detour. Even if I could go out of Bolivia without the bike for a short time, the procedure at the border would be, I am afraid, difficult when I really leave the country next time. A border is always a headache.

The charge was $1.2. The supper they served to me was dried beef, fried egg with potato chips. I don't like potato chips and usually don't eat much. But the potato of the supper was really sweat and delicious. So I ate all. I hear the Andes is the home of potatoes. The potato must have been the authentic one. When I went out after supper at dusk, I saw the whole mountain of Sajama, which had been mostly covered with clouds and had revealed only its lower part. This village Lagunas has an elevation of 4,300ｍ. Although the mountain Sajama is 6,542ｍ high, the difference of the height is slightly more than 1,200m. I thought it would be easy to climb up the mountain. I asked one of the villagers if anyone had already climbed it. He answered me that lots of people had climbed. He added that five foreign climbers had been dead. When I come to think of it, this mountain is higher than Mt. McKinley, the highest peak of North America with an elevation of 6,194ｍ. There are other white mountains over 6,000ｍ seen in the west of the village of Lagunas. The Chilean border is there and the Bolivian border is only 10km away from this village.