26th/27th – Rest well welcomed

We left La PAz yesterday morning with anticipation that the 370km day and a border crossing would turn into complete hell and yet another late night into our temporary home. But the beautiful drive out of Bolivia whizzed by given it felt like all we did was go up and down hills. It turns out that any time of the day in La Paz has hectic crazy traffic, but you all know that doesn’t bother me, I make my own lanes and just power on through. Still dint-less…. touch wood. It is pretty funny hearing stories from other competitors at the end of the day as to who got pulled over by the cops and had to pay some kind of fine. Whether it was Steve Hyde racing along in his merc or Paddy and Scott in Stanely plodding along under the speed limit the fine was all for the same speed and everyone ended up paying various amounts of money, ranging from 20 local monies all the way to 200 locals. From 10-100 dollars or thereabouts. In comparison to all the other border crossings I have done, yesterday’s Bolivian -> Peru was almost seamless. From pulling up to exit Bolivia and leaving Peru entry side was about an hour and 5 minutes. Leaving us with only 150k’s to go and it was only lunch time. How brilliant!

The funnest and most awesome part of yesterday was 200meter ferry we had to cross to get across a narrow peninsular of Lake Titicaca. I was expecting a rope or wire barge that just went back and forward all day, but no, it was a 2 car barge (made entirely of planks of wood) thats propulsion was with a 25 horsepower yamaha outboard motor and steering was a man with a big stick of wood. The price also ranged from between 20 local monies per car to 60 per car, depending on how much the barge captain thought the cars were shiny enough to afford it.

We were shacked up in Puno for two nights and a rest day on the western edge of Lake Titicaca (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Titicaca). It was a stunning up and down drive as we hugged the coast line for a solid 90k’s passing through little villages doing their own thing. Todays day off was merely an opportunity to spend more hours fixing their cars, or getting the rally mechanics fixing cars for them. We found a few broken spokes on our wheels so I stripped them and replaced a few spokes while Dad had to venture into town and borrow a metal lathe to machine a part which had fallen off our steering arm system somewhere. Nothing terminal or overly challenging but still took most of the day to get things back on track. Still a whole lot less work than what some other cars have undergone. I have seen engine heads lying next to cars, suspension pulled apart and all the like.

Beard news on the beard front is good. I will well and truly look homeless by the time we get to Ushuaia. It is only Paddy (car 12) and myself left unshaven but he is looking to clip or trim tonight. Weeeaaakkkk! I’ll hold it together!

I managed to squeeze in a little touristy stuff today as well, with a boat cruise onto the Lake to see the floating villages. They are villages (approx 2500 people live on the floating islands) that are made of reeds all strapped together and literally float. Got out there, walked on them, saw how they were made, come back. Tick. Done that now. It was mildly interesting. The funniest part was the boat running out of fuel on the 600meter journey out there, which wasted careful car fixing time. Afterwards the boat guy said to us “Look, sorry about that, we didn’t think to check the fuel level.”

Another first for me today was learning how to fly fish. Chris Evans from the Model A brought his rod and I dabbled in a bit off the jetty at the back of the hotel. “You’re a natural, James” he said. It was good fun.

Tomorrow we plod our way north to Cusco for another 2 nights (another lovely sleep in :D) and go for a squirt up to Machu Picchu.