We worried about our food supply because we were getting low after four days. We reached a village where a military unit was housed in a walled compound. It was a passport check. They were enthralled that anybody would ride bicycles on a road as grueling as the Camino.
A colonel came out to shake our hands along with a captain who was amazed at the gear on our bikes. Fifteen minutes later, they let us go. The town looked abandoned, with no one in the muddy streets, so we didn't have much hope for finding food. A few blocks later, we looked through the dark doors of a mud house to discover carrots, onions, and potatoes. What a find! The shop keeper had fresh bread and cans of peaches. We cleaned him out.
On the outskirts of town, we rode up to a transportation fiasco. Two large trucks were stuck nose first and five feet deep into the mud of a 150 foot wide river. Dozens of men shoveled dirt, but the trucks sank deeper. To get an idea of how poor they are, we realized that this was the only supply route from Bolivia to the seaport. Yet, they couldn't afford one bridge over a river that was 150 feet wide, and over two feet deep. We portaged our bikes across.
Miles later, we climbed up a canyon. It took four hours and some gut busting leg work. We crossed five more streams. At the top, cathedral shaped boulders offered a dramatic skyline relief, but nothing compared to the huge summit called Mount Sajama west of us. It loomed 21,500 feet into the sky. Deep canyons along the road dropped a thousand feet below us. For two hours, we pedaled as the peak rose higher in front of us. We dodged hundreds of mud puddles, gully washouts, and a few dozen mini-lakes in the road. Onward the Camino stretched, ever reaching out in front of us like a ribbon in the wind, appearing and vanishing with the rolling contour of the land.
Near sunset, a black sky moved across the mountains. Lightning cracked the clouds into flashing sections and thunder rolled down from the alpine heights. It swirled over us and roared into the valley off the eastern face of Mount Sajama. Doug and Bryan ducked into a culvert beside the road. The lightning came closer. We were unprotected.
"We better camp right here," I said, riding up. "Besides, we're gonna' be miserable in the rain. I can't see riding for another hour. Let's call it quits."
"What about being exposed on this flat ground to the lightning?" Bryan asked.
"Once it moves out of the mountains, we don't have that much chance of being struck," I answered. "Although it can strike anywhere it wants."
"Great!" Doug lamented. "Let's get the tents up before the rain hits."
We laid the bikes down in the dirt and pulled our packs off. We pitched the tents as rain swept toward us. Electricity charged the air. We pulled the gear into our tents just as sleet, then hail pounded us. The wind tore at our tents. An hour later, with the last rays of the sun lighting the summits, the storm rolled across the valley.
We awoke to a cold, overcast morning. A gray shroud entombed the mountains. All around us, tundra wilderness.
Climbing into the higher elevations, we followed the meandering road as it slipped between two huge peaks. Behind us, Mount Sajama dominated the sky. Ahead, a row of five 19,000footers made their own bid for the most awesome award. One cone-shaped volcanic peak, Mount Payachatas at 20,000 feet, jutted into a brilliant blue sky. We pedaled through a corridor of giants. Each one stood four miles high.
At one river fording, we decided to take baths in the glacial runoff, which was relatively warm. When I say 'relatively,' that means above freezing. After four days of being scuzzy and disgusting, no matter how cold it was, we took baths. There's nothing quite like bathing in an icy river. It's like filling your bathtub with ice cubes and jumping into it for ten minutes. It lets you know you're alive because every cell in your body is screaming, "COLD PAIN!" It hurts so much that you question why you do things like this to yourself.
We followed the Camino into a wide valley. Llamas grazed in small herds. Traveling on my bike carried me back thousands of years to a place where time didn't exist in clocks or schedules. It was either morning, afternoon, or night. No calendars marked the progression of the year to the few mountain people who lived in thatched roofed mud huts scattered along the valley. Only the weather expressed the time of year. A sense of peace flowed out of the timelessness.
Late in the day, we again stripped the bikes to portage them across another river too deep for our axles. At the Bolivian border, we dismounted and walked into the office for our passport stamp. The man was casual. I used to worry about these guys, with all the stories about border officials, but so far we hadn't had any problems. We walked out and headed over to a small cafe. We ordered rice, tomatoes, potatoes and onions. A half-hour later, the cook filled our orders. The cafe was a shack with a wood burning stove in the rear and a few tables out front. The pope's picture graces the walls in restaurants all over South America, and just as often, a nude girl's photo appears with him. This time, three nudes surrounded the pope.
We made our final assault over the pass at 15,500 feet to the border of Chile. Bigger rocks bedeviled us as we continued climbing up the mountain. We suffered constant jolting and lurching through the rocky minefield.Sometimes we couldn't react fast enough and would take a tumble. Spokes were another worry. Constant pounding could break them, or warp a rim. This road was tough on bike and rider alike. After two more hours of solid climbing, we reached a plateau. Everywhere, broken rock. There was no vegetation or animals except a black condor soaring overhead. Laboring up the incline, we felt the effects of 15,500foot high altitude when we had to stand on the pedals. We gasped for air when our bodies needed extra oxygen, but it wasn't there--not in abundance.
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