March 18, 2000
Day 148 To Pulacayo
Our plan today is to use the morning to get organized for the four or five day trip to Potosi and then leave just after lunch to ride the 22 km’s to Pulacayo, a mining ghost town on the road to Potosi.
We start with having breakfast at a restaurant. Pancake and omelet! Nice thing about these “tourist-centers” is that they serve all kinds of “muzungu food”(our term for backpackers and tourists, since cycling in Africa. Muzungu is Swahili for white person). We say our good bye’s to Maria and Jesper, they are catching the morning bus to Potosi.
Our errands include changing some more dollars for Bolivianos and buying groceries. Changing money seems a bit of a problem at first because no one has enough Bolivianos. Patrick succeeds in changing $50 at the hotel and later another $100 at an internet kiosk. For food we need bread, eggs, butter, noodles, vegetables and some fruit. We find most of it at the market and rest at some small stores that all seem to sell the same.
Its about eleven when we have finished boiling the eggs and packed up our bikes. Patrick discovers he lost his sunglasses, so we head back for the Tonito Office to see whether they found them. No luck. He even rides to the garage where Walter is washing the salt off his car and search the vehicle, but no luck. Must have fallen from the car somewhere…..
After all this it’s late enough for lunch. We have some sandwiches and Patrick buys a three dollar pair of shades to help on the ride to Potosi. A dusty track heads out of town towards a big z on the mountain side. We know we have to gain about 300 meters altitude for Pulacayo so here we go. It’s pretty steep, most of it too steep for us to ride. As we climb higher the Salaar de Uyuni becomes visible to the west. After passing a saddle the road drops a bit and climbs on higher. Again walking. Good we did this stretch a half day trip, it would have worn us out had it been a full day.
We round one more curve and get a wonderful view of the ghost town. It’s huge! Strewn across a colorful mountain side are rows upon rows of houses. Large industrial buildings in the center. In the seventies there used to live and work 22,000 people here, now barely 200. We pass a military checkpoint and descend into town towards the church. A group of kids meets us there and guide / help us to hotel “el rancho”. They must be taking short-cuts because we have to pass a narrow gate, stairs and follow a railroad track. El Rancho has 100 rooms according to LP and must occupy several buildings. We get led to an old building where a friendly woman greets us. While we, with the help of a t least five kids, haul the bikes up the stairs to the front door, she makes up a room for us.
It’s pretty dingy, sagging beds and not all that clean, but it’s home for the night. The banos are dirty, Patrick takes a quick cold shower anyway, before we venture about the town. It’s a strange, stern kind like, kind of place. All these abandoned buildings. At the train cemetery, we meet back up with Juan Carlos, one of the boys that helped us to the hotel. He explains the town to us, as far as Patrick's Spanish stretches that is. There sits a train that was robbed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And here is the first steam engine in Bolivia. We take a short tour with him, pass by a store where we by some pop and beer. He seems to want to keep going, but the 3900 meter altitude is wearing us out.
Back to the Hotel, we get a light bulb for our room. Juan Carlos sits on my shoulders to screw it in. We pay him a few Bolivianos for his tour. We eat a fixed meal at the hotel at seven thirty that is not bad. At half past eight we roll our sleeping bags out one of the beds and call it a day.
Today's ride: 23 km (14 miles)
Total: 4,756 km (2,953 miles)
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 1 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |