Exhaustion can be one of the most deceptive elements of motorcycle travel. Sometimes you just need a good night`s rest but sometimes what you are feeling is the backlash of months of poor sleep, altitude aclimatisation, mental stress and anguish at having just lost that f…ing bolt, and the adaption to cultures that are completely foreign and offer no respite.

Bolivia is exhaustion.

Reflecting on my south side exit from the country, it is difficult to begin the story as problems multiply on each other like those exponent tables in school. I have made many mistakes in the following account and present it here aware that some of them are embarassing and some of them were dangerous. But as a wise motorcyclist once said, `when in doubt, gas it,` an attitude which I think has kept me sane or at least gotten me to the next village.

I left La Paz a day after Chuck. I had been waiting around to pick up some parts from a riding buddy Josh who was making a fly-by-night stop in the USA having blown up his engine (shudder) and found it cheaper to source parts and buy a return fare to Miami than import to Bolivia. Unfortunately the demon of US corporate inefficiency meant the DHL didn`t arrive and the return flight was delayed. What could I do? I could only hit the road again.

It was crisp on the altiplano as I rode down to Oruru. Around me buildings stood in various states of disrepair but people themselves were sparse. Many towns in the wilderness stand abandoned, where entire villages deprived of any economy are swept into the megalith that is La Paz. I may not be able to compare my trip to Che Guevara`s epic sweep of the continent but I have learned well a principal tenet of marxist ideology that is true here – land is liberty. The poverty of the continent which burns on every street corner is the poverty of people without a home, whether by war in Colombia or extortion in Honduras. In Bolivia, the land has a strange sheen in that although plentiful, it yields very little and primary goods fetch a pathetic return at market. As such, the `Bolivian Dream` draws many peasants into its highland slums like El Alto, falling off the sides of gorges.

Bolivia`s wilderness feels like the wild west - life is visceral, cheap, and focused primarily on survival. I stop at one grouping of buildings on the road; a proud church is surrounded by mud brick houses lacking roofing or entire walls. I see no sign of habitation (well no people at least) and peeking through the cracks in the door a golden virgen looks out while the floor of the church is scattered with lumber for construction and a couple of ladders. It feels like looking into someone`s bedroom, the one treasure these people have, wherever they are. A dog roams the tussock grass and all is still, while in contrast loaded trucks roll along the tarmac just 20 metres from here.

I return to my bike and manage to overbalance the side stand tipping the bike on it`s side. Ordinarily not a problem, with the side stand I need to lift the fully loaded bike without using two wheels to bear the weight. I bear the bulk of the bike on my knees and gradually lift over 200kg onto the rear wheel and the side stand, around the axis of the side stand and then like a scrum up onto the front tire. At 3800 metres. After a minute I catch my breathe, listen to my heart rate, move on.

The road to Uyuni is famous for being `a little rough`. The unknown quantity is what `a little rough` really means – the Bolivian standard or a new level of bogs, potholes and sand. In reality it is somewhere in the middle. When the paved road ends, 160 km of graded dirt road begins, obliging heavy traffic to tear steady `washboard` divots into the road. This is par for the course except where the road is under repair. Evidently Bolivian road building is a delicate affair and they oblige traffic to detour off the graded section with detours heading for kilometres into the desert then abrubtly turning 180 degrees and returning to the main track. Ploughing a road through the desert churns the sand (sand- this is the remnants of an ancient sea after all), creating hazards up to a foot deep. I am glad for the off-road tire on the front of the bike. It holds my line straight and generally true.

I make it to Uyuni for sunset, a spectacular warm glow over my right-hand shoulder with the salt lake vaguely visible in the distance. And then, like switching on a fridge, the light is gone and the temperature drops. I find myself a bed for the night and while searching I bump into some Brazilian motorcyclists I had seen in Cusco. They ran into trouble and are heading for home, having just spent a few hours on the salt lake and turned around. We share some beer and I secretly wish for bed as the night wears on. I have their contact details and hope to touch base in Brazil.

In Uyuni on a Sunday I need to decide – do I enter the largest salt lake in the world by myself or do I wait for more motorcyclists to turn up. I meet Carlos, from Medellin Colombia who is trying to set up an operation paragliding on the salt flats, surely an adrenaline rush! He invites me out to the famous salt hotel. Although normally outside my miserly budget, Carlos assures me he can get me a discount. Well then, decision made! I rush to finish some preparation on the bike, trying to protect the electrical circuits from the salt. `Carlos, you don`t have a car?` `No, I will just go on your bike`.

Hmmm, readers of my blog will have noticed a trend here. Things go wrong when you carry unplanned passengers! Well, we were moving out to the salt flats entrance, 30 minutes from Uyuni and picked up a nail in the rear tire. I didn`t realise it was a nail of course, I just felt the rear of the bike swing wide abruptly and I tried to correct for the weight of my gear and two fatties. I was glad to keep upright and amazed to pick up a 4 inch nail in such isolation, which promptly shredded my tube. Changing a rear tire is always an interesting experience, changing a rear tire in the dark when it is around the freezing point is not one I wish to experience. It has subsequently been gently suggested to me my technique probably lacked a thing or two. Well, to be honest, I made a complete hash of the job and instead of having any way out of it, or a wiser pair of eyes looking over my shoulder, I gradually had a group of excitable monkeys gather looking at the tire in wide eyed disbelief. Eventually someone brought out a ridiculous truck tire iron and popped the tire over the rim. This act, one I let happen while tired, cold, and well pretty desperate not to abandon my bike in the Bolivian night, damaged the plies of the tire. What I thought was a tire not sitting properly on the bead was actually a serious risk of a blow-out. The things we learn with hindsight.

Tire now on and my last spare tube in the chamber, Carlos and I hopped on the bike. `Well what do we do now Carlos, I don`t have a GPS to find this hotel?`. `No, no it`s very easy, Only 15 minutes.` Well I definitely didn`t like this but my alternative was returning to Uyuni. `Are you sure you know the way?` Well a story can be long or short but our ride in the dark on the salt lake was beautiful, mysterious, but a complete waste of time. Carlos had no idea how to find the hotel by moonlight. `But it is so simple in the day`. I wasn`t in the mood to explain that our land visibility by moonlight was not going to find a hotel that had no electricity and hence no lights to guide us! Now we had to get off the salt flats and I needed to navigate back having blindly taken someone else`s advice. This was yet again a situation where in retrospect my intuition was screaming `don`t do it! Don`t listen to them,` yet I didn`t pay attention and now I was in real strife. Camping on the salt flats was not an option I wanted to consider and I was already cold.

Once on the salt lake, you can not simply drive off until you rejoin road. At the extremities of the salt, deep mud blocks the path of intrepid motorcycles awaiting to inflict even more problems. Thankfully, I knew this, having done a little more research on the salt flats than Carlos. I remembered this when I felt my traction becoming a little sticky and had to jam on the brakes. We traversed along the lake south until we found the exit road we had entered from and made the road. Thankfully Carlos was able to get in touch with the owner of the salt lake who lives in the small entry town of Colchani and lined us up a couch each for the night. After the freezing night air, a blanket and a thermos of instant coffee felt like simple paradise.

Posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 7:38 pm in Josh's Journal.
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