23rd Feb – Snakes and Ladders.

Firstly I most confess that I lied yesterday. There will again be no photos today. Todays reason/excuse is that it’s almost midnight and we have been driving for just under 14 hours of some grueling, physically exhausting roads. Actually, I did say “doubly good on the photo front” yesterday, and technically, double zero photos still equals zero photos. phew, got out of that one!

Santa Cruz (Bolivias biggest city) to Sucre (Bolivia’s capital city) today an an easy 490k’s. The problems lay within the details. After yesterdays border crossing hootinanny conundrum and late night arrival, the organisation decided to push timing from 7am to 9:30 this morning to allow more sleep ins (lie ins for the brits). There was 180k’s of dirt road that the Clerk of the Course stated “this road is a car killer, please take your time, this road is beyond anything you have ever seen and it goes for 170k’s.” Well, not as bad as what we have seen in Africa. But it took a serious amount of time to do it, we were the 5th car in to the hotel and we monstered along, as well as help Dan and Rabia change a tire on their Merc the instant they thought it was good t overtake me. No one overtakes me! 😛 I have never been so dusty before in my life! I have dust in every conceivable crack and hole in my entire body. My hair has turned form mildy dirty to a tropical beach.

The snakes and Ladders bit does make sense, sooner or later.

There was a bit of tarmac this morning which was good fun, our first taste of climbing hills in Bolivia and weaving our way through a river valley with roads either side. Very nice indeed. Not sure how I did on times yet overall but I know I placed 1st in class as the Bentley left 4 minutes before us and we met them at the checkered flag 83k’s down the road.

A few people then stopped for lunch at local establishments because it was only 11 o’clock and we have 240k’s to go. Beuaty! No Problems, only need to average 85kph to not be lost in the dark.

In our 170 k’s of gruelling dirt, unformed roads we climbed 7 mountain ranges. Up, down….. along the valley floor…. up, down…… rinse and repeat. going from 5 thousand feet up to 8 thousand feet. Then once it got dark it seemed like all the trucks came out to play. The worst bit was the dust, in the nighttime. I’m not sure how to truly describe how hard the drive was. You cannot grasp the difficulty unless experiencing it.

Tomorrow we race our way (bitumen all the way thank god) to the salt flats at Uyuni.

Catchya then!
James