James Stephenson

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.

Ok, how does this sound? Tonight I blog for the previous 2 days, tomorrow we have a 300k day with a border crossing (no one knows how long that will take) and then the day after we have a rest day. So, either tomorrow afternoon I upload a bunch of pictures, or the rest day I will catch up. Awesome, I’m glad you have accepted.

24th Sucre to Uyuni. Up at 6, on the road at 7. Just enough sleep. Put it this way, the 5 hours sleep that we got was a wholllleee lot more than some others. Small timed section and then a beautiful tarmac road for the remaining few hundred k’s to Uyuni – town of the famous Bolivian Salt Flats. It was a road that curved and winded through the spectacular landscape, It was a road I would have loved to drive my Golf R32 flat out using every inch of the unused tarmac. Penny had her highest climb today at a solid 13,000 feet. And I will tell you what, at that altitude all cars lose so much power. On the dead flat stretches we can barely climb to 100 kmh and at sea level we race our way to 110 up a slight uphill. As well as the cars having a bit of struggle in the spacey air, people have a harder time as well. Simple tasks are just the little bit more difficult. Carrying bags up a few flights of stairs left me somewhat a bit puffing. Need to get fitter when I get home.

Salt flats! now, I have never seen any kind of salt falts before and I went to the best I could have – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni eat your heart out on wiki. Pretty cool stuff. We even got in early enough in the afternoon (second car in) and did a tour over the flat. I couldn’t believe just how flat it was. Extraordinary.

Bolivia in a nutshell is……. geographically amazing. But still very much a third world country. Somewhat like Africa almost. Government is horribly corrupt and has holes all through any form of organization.

A few policemen waved their radar guns at as as we blasted past in a flash of silver and red but made no attempt to flag us down or chase us (I would have shaken the tail anyway!) for a ‘contribution to his pocket’.

The early evening brought a strange occurrence to the desolate locale of Uyuni with a huge storm cell making its way across the flats bearing down on the fragile town. It was pretty cool watching a lightning show with the sunset in the distance on the silhouetted horizon. The interesting thing was that the storm wasn’t that large or menacing but it still had so much hail. I think the fact we were already at 13,000 feet and 10 degrees C the storm didn’t need to be monstrous to be cold enough for hail. Penny is fine, she is a monster.

25th. The locals of Uyuni at dinner last night informed us that the 120k’s of dirt road scheduled for this morning takes them 6hours in a landcruiser, and the 350km tarmac detour was a better option. Organisazion made the call for us to backtrack yesterdays roads for a few hours and turn off to La Paz. Making today 780 k’s. 12 hours, 10 minutes and the bell boy outside the Raddison Hotel almost had a bowel movement as dad yelled “LEFT HERE JAMES” and thundering downshifts and vibrating exhaust missed his trolley by a meter or so (heaps of room). 14,200 feet is now the highest Penny has gone, still gutless and has less gusto as I plant the Go Pedal to over/undertake a slower moving truck. Still such a STUNNING drive.

Imagine driving in the southern hemisphere at the end of summer, freezing your tits off, and having permanent snow capping the surrounding mountains. Very surreal. We even saw more Llamas than people today. The sturdy four legged animals are just munching along on grass like nothing in the world bothers them. I still haven’t made up my mind if baby llamas are cute or not either. Google images them!

La Paz is hectic. Our entrance to the city had about 12k’s of the second densest traffic I have experienced (second to Cairo peak hour) and I can honestly say I was in my element. Traffic in Penny is just so fun. Being big, menacing, and goes blub blub blub faster than anyone could imagine. The only way I can describe some of the maneuvers I do to cut across 3-4 lanes of bumper to bumper horning tooting traffic is: threading the needle. I did better than Cairo when I hit a bus. Today I hit nada! Winning. I’m sure a few other cars in my path had a few ‘sphincter tightening’ moments.

I know I have left out copious amounts of interesting facts and stories from Bolivia. however, my gullet is full and my bed beckons me. Tomorrow into Peru and Lake Titicaca.

In less happy news, 5 cars are now deemed terminal and pulled out. 🙁 Updates on who and why tomorrow.

From La Paz, a strange and hectic city.

James

Shout out to my amigos at home. Another 4-5 weeks until I home. Don’t miss me too much.

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

First up and a warning, no photo’s today. I will make up with a doubly good effort tomorrow night to continue to please my subscribers. The reason is that it is 11pm and the internet at this abode away from home leaves something to be desired. Lets just say that I could probably learn binary code, make a morse code transmitter, learn morse code, and actually send out this update before this internet would sufficiently load WordPress enough to write anything.

We passed into the very southern edge of the Amazon basin today and cross the border from Carumba, Brazil and stopped at Santa Cruz, Bolivia tonight. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_basin) . We are thousands and thousands of kilometers from the sea and still only 800 feet from sea level. I thought Australia was flat in places, but by Odin’s beard this place is flat.

A good word to describe today was, interesting. We packed up and moseyed (moe-zeed, past tense of mosey – to walk slowly) the 7km’s to the Brazilian/Bolivian border by 7:30am ready in line to start at 8am when they open. Well, guess what? They are South American and they do things in South American time, they opened at about 8:20. 2 hours later most of us had managed to exit Brazil and enter no-mans-land and work out what to do on the Bolivian side. The thing was, we needed our passports stamped, then a photo copy of our stamped passports to get stamped with an original, then take them with car rego copies (which had to be stamped) to another bloke to inspect the car. In all we needed to enter our persons in Bolivia as well as our cars.

Though there is a problem. There are 2 employees doing stamps and passport checks, and 80 of us wanting to get through, as well as the regular 2-4 hundred regular migrants coming through. Crux of the story is as follows; long lines meandering alongside the road waiting to enter a shack, and a Spanish siesta lunch break from 12:00 to 2:00pm which no bride could stop. Jorge Lemberg and navigator thought they could do the sneaky sneaky and climb in through a window in passport shack to jump the queue, no deal! they got caught and sent to the back like naughty primary school kiddies.

I got my passport stamped pre-lunch, however dad was not so lucky. Our instructions were, “one the OWNER of the vehicle has passport stamped you must take rego copies to customs clearance, the OWNER has to have matching names on passport and rego copies.” Herein is where the problem lay, it was 1pm, dad was still an hour from lunch ending and an hour in queue, then to only start in another queue, it was silly hot, and still had 650km’s to do for the day. So I pretended to be MAx and take all papers to customs to get clear our car. And it worked, nothing dodgy was noticed. I hear by declare my self a winner.

Dad got his stamped and we pulled out maybe 5th or 6th car at 2:35pm. Arriving in Santa Crux at about 9:45pm, very early in the pack. We can seriously knock over the miles when you sit down and drive, none of this diddle-dallying hootinanny bizzo. Poor fellas that are still driving in the night, avoiding things such as stray grazing cows and people. I have large bouncing ones so I had no problems overtaking trucks and locals on flat sections when I could see a long way in the distance.

There is a bit of me on the internet in this clip from H&H Rallies : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y5uOUGl8mc

No animal attacks today.

I would tell you about some beautiful local Brazilian girls that came up and wanted pictures of me and the car and them (Secretly hoping it was more of me and they didnt care about the car 😉 hahahhahah!), but I will keep that stories for personal chats!

Thanks guys, chat tomorrow
James