Going The Distance

The bike is back. How we have missed it. Nothing compares to the freedom of your own transport: being able to move, to explore, to move on. We have missed the bike more than either of us could possibly have thought that we would. To be on a road trip and not able to cover ground caused us some of the lowest lows of the entire trip so far.

For my part, our month of killing time in Bolivia has expedited my desire to go home. I was chatting to another traveller who has been on the move for 10 months. She said that at 8 months, she just felt tired, and all the people she has spoken to agree that 8 months mark the critical threshold. For my part, it has been 6 months: we left the UK on June 21st 2009, and at around Christmas, I started to feel a strong desire for the routine of my life back in the UK. It’s not that life on the road doesn’t still hold moments which take my breath away, experiences which I will never replicate, views which I hope to burn into my mind so that I can recall them in my darker moments packed into an overcrowded London Underground tube train on the way to work – yes, all those elements are still part of the thrill of the journey – but now, I wake up tired. I sigh much more (not really a sigher in normal life). It takes a lot more to shake my soul out of its low-level travel coma.

I think one of the reasons this gets me down is that I am in no doubt about how lucky I am; how I’ll never have the chance to do this again; and how boring real life is. Why is the grass greener at this point, when the grass of the altiplano is some of the greenest I have ever seen? Reason versus emotion on this one. My rational head says, “wow, Bolivia!”, my soul says, “Are we there yet? I want to watch some telly in my flat and have drinks with my mates”. What an ungrateful fiend I am.

As you may have sensed through our combined ramblings on this blog, Bolivia has been really really hard. It’s a poor country – we had been warned of that, and to be honest, that’s far from being the issue. It’s the attitude. A “no can do” attitude permeates the entire country. People are ready to say no long before they consider saying yes. We have got “no”s from waiters, from gas station attendants, from hotel staff, from people at the side of the road… Don’t get me wrong, ‘no’ in itself is fine, I realise there are times where the restaurant serving breakfast is not going to have milk, or the petrol stations are not going to have any petrol (usual), but the blank and totally unapologetic faces across the entire country really chip away at one’s desire to be here after a while. Food always takes 45 minutes or more to arrive, no one can ever give directions, children never smile when we wave or say hello. It’s sucking my will to live. Sorry Bolivia but I’m craving Argentina. Not for the civilisation of the experience, but for the civilisation of the people.

That said we have met some exceptional people here in Bolivia, the hotel where we stayed in La Paz, the Hotel Osira, has been an amazingly positive experience. They went out of their way to help us to get the package, in a way which we really have rarely seen in this country. As we left, we hugged them goodbye, and headed up to El Alto, with me and all the luggage (“the weight”) in a taxi, and Mike easing the long-dormant bike out of hibernation and back onto the hills of La Paz. We made it to El Alto, the sprawling and poorer suburbs of La Paz (if you’re rich, you live low. La Paz is a bowl and El Alto sits on the lip of the bowl and beyond onto the Altiplano).

In El Alto, we met two bikers at one of the few petrol stations with petrol. Sergio, an Argentinian, and Alexandre, a Brazilian. Despite our warnings that we, with all our weight and our recently-out-of-retirement clutch, would not probably be going as fast as their regular motorbikes, they said they’d be happy to travel with us. So we set off towards Potosi, about an 8 hour drive away. It was 2pm so we knew we’d be unlikely to make it, but aim high and all that.

Annoyingly, we lose our tank bag, filled with biking (and life) necessaries like flourescent jackets, headtorches, survival candles, brand new bike goggles. Grrr. Fell off the back of the bike when we forgot to replace it after filling up the tank. That’s what happens when you forget the routines of life on the road and go soft on public transport for a month.

Our new friends proved to be great travelling companions. Great company and we kept up with them nicely. Gratifyingly too, we happily laughed away in Spanish, our one shared language, and both Mike and I had a real sense of how far our Spanish has come on this trip. This was friendship entirely uncompromised by language – smutty jokes, the usual biker banter, route planning – all without dumbing down. It was great.

We made it to Challapata – through rain and hail, and witnessing a storm on the horizon which was spectacular to watch -  it’s a small and very basic town on the main route south. More “no”s as we try to find a place to stay (“we only have a room with 5 beds and a room with 3 beds and you have to pay for every bed”), we finally settle back with beers under a basic striplight before bedding down in a very basic place with exposed electrics, brickwork and an unclosing communal loo door downstairs by all the cars and bikes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 8:21 am and is filed under Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.