Tales from the road: Travels through Bolivia

Lynne Roberts is a college lecturer from St Andrews, Bristol. She's also the author of the 50odd blog, which details her two-year cycle journey around the world with her trip partner Dave (both pictured right).

Recently Lynne made contact with Better By Bike to share details of an amazing journey through Bolivia. Below you'll find an extract...

A ten-day journey from Sucre to the Salar de Uyuni: Sucre to a cemetery somewhere in the mountains, 71 kms, lots of climbing!

The ride from Sucre had been an exhausting one. Apart from the fact we hadn't cycled for almost 3 weeks (we'd been doing Spanish lessons in Sucre), it was stinking hot, and, we were now back at over 3600 metres.

The road had a good surface though (which we thanked our lucky stars for in Bolivia) so good in fact they'd just had a big cycle race on it. We just felt as though we were doing more downhill than up.

Sucre is at 2800m and Potosi 4100m, so we would rather have been climbing than losing altitude, and then it started. The climb lasted 25 kms, but it was steep and we both felt exhausted. We stopped frequently and even had a nap around 1pm when the sun was at its zenith.

The other slight problem was that we were very quickly running out of water. We had filled up the bottles around the 50 km mark but it was so hot we were going through it really quickly.

We stopped off at one little 'finca' (a mud hut) and asked a young man if he could let us have some water. 'Si', he said and pointed to my left. I wandered over to where he was pointing, looking for a tap or a pump, but all I could find was a manky looking pool of greenish water, worse than any pond I've seen in the UK.

'Gracias' I said, but “no thanks” under my breath.

After several more kilometres we came across an elderly couple sitting outside their hut and they were happy to let us have some water.

Mama came back with a bucket of water, we have no idea where she got it from. It was probably collected rain water, but at that point we didn't much care. We chatted for a few minutes, thanked them for their hospitality, and cycled on.

This particular part of Bolivia is very dry and water is a precious commodity, we were very grateful they had shared their water with us.

Despite the dryness of the landscape, this is the start of the rainy season, although luckily for us showers tend to build up during the day and we get the rain later on, or sometimes, just a lightening show.

On this particular afternoon the rain clouds began to gather and there was a lot of thunder and lightening so we decided now was the time to find somewhere to pitch the tent. The terrain was rather flat at this point, with hills in the background, so anywhere we chose would be visible.

Even though we feel perfectly safe in Bolivia, we still liked to tuck ourselves away from prying eyes. I spotted a cemetery surrounded by a wall on all sides, with a small building at the rear, a perfect spot to camp, the wall and the building providing us with a little corner to tuck ourselves into.

We had just pitched the tent and sorted everything out when the first spots of rain hit. We dived into the tent and that's where we stayed till the next day. The wind howled pushing and pulling the tent every which way, and the rain was so loud we couldn't hear each other speak.

The thunder and lightening circled us for about 2 hours and then eventually died away. Mother Nature was letting off steam.

As we left our little camping spot the next morning one of the first things we saw was a car full of people with a live sheep tied to the roof rack. Unfortunately they were moving at speed otherwise that would have made a great photo!

Pictured: Lynne and Dave on the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat.

You'll find this particular blog entry at 'Behind the cemetery, ooh arrr missus' from where you can find more details about Lynne's travels through Bolivia.