The truck driver dropped me off at a primitive town that was pretty close to the south west shore of lake Titicaca. A few miles before we got to the boarder I could see the snowcapped 6000m Andes mountains and the expanse of the Lake Titicaca, which was one of the most exciting times of my life because I have been fascinated with this area since I was in seventh grade. I didn't have the patience to ride my bike to the lake so I took a van to the boarder, and to Copacabana, which is a tourist town just on the Bolivian side of the boarder. I happened to be there during a very strange time because the Campesinos, the poor Indian Antiplano farmers, were protesting about something the government was doing that they didn't like. They were blocking all the roads that led to the capital city of La Paz and to the lake to bring attention to themselves. So as a result of this the tourist town of Copacabana was practically a ghost town. It seemed like there were only like a dozen tourists there, even though the shops and restaurants remained open. I remember a lot of the places there served pizza which I found pleasing. Copacabana is in a beautiful setting nestled between the rolling hills and a small bay. It had an enormous church there that looked like a fortress that had a very nice tree filled plaza in front of it. If I remember the story right, after the Spanish came and defeated the Incans, the last Incan emperor converted to catholicism and moved to Copacabana and had that church constructed and made a famous black Jesus.

After I was in Copacabana for a couple days I rode my bike to the northern edge of the peninsula and paid some kid a couple dollars to row me over to the Island of the Sun. The place where in Indian mythology the tall white bearded god who constructed the ruins at Tihuanacu appeared from. Where the kid dropped me off happened to be the site of an interesting cliff-lake side ruin. I rode the trail over to probably the most interesting setting of a town that I have ever seen. This town, Yumani, kind of reminded me of San Pedro in Guatemala. This kind of town takes you back to the days before cars, where all of the buildings are connected by walking paths. But here I was the only person who seemed to have even a bike. Another cool thing about this town was the majestic view over the great expanse of the lake due to the fact that the island jutted out of the lake like a mountain. The town was on the side of the hill, so you can only go up or down, and all of the buildings there were one story mud huts except for one. When I arrived in Yumani I sat down at a quaint outdoor restaurant and saw the only other two tourists on the whole deserted

tourist island and started chatting with them. They said they heard that the island was usually flooded with tourists so I felt very fortunate to feel kind of like an honored guest in a hidden paradise as I was one of the only tourists there in a place full of people who are used to catering to people like me. They told me about the place they were staying at which was on the top ridge of the island, right at the top of the town where you have views of both sides of the lake, so I went and stayed there. The view was amazing. The next day I rode my bike around the western shore of the island along a wide path through some other small towns. I was the only tourist I saw on the trail the whole day. On the north western end of the island there is a rather large and clearly ancient ruin complex built right up on the lake side. I spent a few minutes exploring around the labyrinths of the rooms and and climbing on the tops of the walls. I remember seeing a large round table that was carved out of rock surrounded by a bunch of seats carved out of rock sitting in a flat

plaza type area and just being flabergasted by the mytical view. After that ruin the trail led back to the southern end of the island right along the top ridge which made for some amazing pictures that I unfortunately somehow lost. I stayed one more night at that hotel, and the next day I took put my bike on the sail boat that the guys I met had rented from Copacabana and we sailed back. The trip back was awsome because the wind was just pushing us at a steady four miles an hour almost all the way, so all we had to do was just sit there and enjoy the view.

I went on a hike with Todd the next day to the top of the hill behind Copacabana and see the northern edge of the lake. Another day I rode around the outskirts of the the town to an old Indian ruin where they had some little aqueducts and a pool inside of an old walled in area. I bumped into an old Indian campesino on my way there and talked to him for a little bit. I asked him about the myth about the god coming from the island and he seemed to know the story but wasn't very interested in it. Then he started telling me about how he was mad at the United States for destroying all of the Coca fields in Bolivia, and I told him I agreed with him. There is also another cool place in Copacabana which you can see in a lot of the photos of it. There is a tall hill on the east side of the bay that has a trail that leads up to the top where there is a little plaza offering an amazing view of the lake.

While I was there I was spending my nights at one of the hotels where they had some videos that you can rent and watch in their little video room. Watching American movies is one of my favorite things to do when I am traveling because I temporarily transport back to my country. I met another bike tourist there who had ridden his bike from Patagonia. He told me that he saw a lot of other bike tourists there but it was so incredibly windy in one area that you can barely even ride the bike and he saw a lot of bikers just huddled under tree afraid to ride at all. He said it was so windy that he was actually sliding sideways on the dirt road he was riding on. He could have been exaggerating though because he also told me that he was from northern Scotland but he spoke with an American accent and that he had hiked 50 kilometers around Copacabana that day.

When I left Copacabana the Campesino protests were still going on so I had the road all to myself. The road out of Copacabana was was beautiful because it led up to the top of the hill allowing incredible views of the lake. I rode through maybe a half dozen large rock fields that the Campesinos put there in order to deter cars and as I descended down to the town where I had to pay someone to row be across the ismus to the other side of the lake. I saw about 30 campesinos standing on top of the cliff above me watching me. One of them threw a large rock at me but deliberately missed me by about twenty feet. Another one raised a large rock like he was going to through it at me but I waved 'no' at him and they all waved back. On the other side of the lake there were still no cars but the people still had to get to work so everybody was ridding their bikes which was so cool. I just put on Led Zeppelin and peddled away on the giant bike path with all the other bikers. As I was riding down one long strait away I could see all the Bolivian cyclists in front and behind me, and I pulled up next to on old guy and he told me he was riding to work in El Alto, which is the antiplano suburb of La Paz, he said he rode sixty kilometers to work every day and sixty kilometers back. Which surely was an exaggeration but it was still impressive seeing that he was about 60 years old. The Bolivian Campesinos are very athletic.

I was riding alone at one point when I saw a kid on the side of the road having a seizure. He had apparently had the seizure while he was ridding his bike because it was laying beside him and his face was bloody from the crash. He was choking on his tongue because he was laying on his back and he had a backpack on and his head was tilted back; so I ran up to him and turned him on his side and held his head for about thirty seconds until his seizure stopped. I tried to ask him if he was OK about a dozen times but he just looked at me like I was a ghost. I saw some bikers approaching after a couple minutes and I didn't want to have to explain to them what happened because I didn't think the kid was going to be able to talk, so I took off before they arrived, but I looked back and saw they had stopped to check him out.

As I got closer to El Alto the occasional van started to appear, which was loaded to the brim with people and their bicycles to take them into town to work. El Alto was enormous and took my a while to reach the canyon where La Paz was. I was expecting an incredible view because I had heard about it from other tourists. They had told me that it sneaks up on you because you are approaching the mountains and you don't even know that there is a canyon there, and then all of a sudden you are standing on the edge of a deep steep valley and at the bottom of it is a metropolis complete with skyscrapers and neighborhoods built up on the sides of the hills. The view that I had was no less amazing than I expected, it seemed unnatural to me. The ride down was fast, and when I got to the central plaza I noticed how this place was the only pretty much all Indian metropolis in the world.

I stayed in a hotel one day and then I met up with Todd and he showed me his hotel which was much cooler. Spent a few days hanging out with him and a couple Argentinean guys. We got a tour to climb the local 6000 meter peak Potosi. We had two guides for the three of us. They were young Indian guys who were cool. We spent the first night in a mud hut on the roadside at the base of the mountain, and the first day we walked along an aqueduct about thirty feet up a sheer cliff. On the way up they took us ice climbing which was cool, then we hiked up to the base camp at the bottom of a snow field. We got up super early the next day and hiked up, but Todd and one of the Argentineans got altitude sickness and had to turn around, so me and the other Argentinean climbed the mountain. The final climb to the summit was awesome because it was up a 60 degree slope for a couple hundred meters. I would like to climb a mountain like that again because you really feel like your high. The summit was no less intense because it was only about the size of a room and the other side of the mountain was a sheer cliff. The view was amazing because I could see such a varied landscape. To the north were a bunch of six thousand meter peaks, to the north west was the entire expanse of the lake, to the west I could see volcano Sajama in the distance, to the south west I could see the valley of La Paz, to the south was the pass to the jungle, and to the east was the Amazon jungle way way way below us. I was going to develop the photos immediately but I think the helper guy who rode on top of the truck stole my camera so I could never do it. It was ironic because the guys I was with fumed at the owner of the travel agency for making the guy ride on top with the bags, but he was perfectly happy to do so so he could rip us, or me, off.

After that last form letter, it was over a year before I wrote another one. I kind of lost motivation. I think I was smoking too much weed. But I did get a newfound motivation to write rhymes, and in the course of a few days I read my rhyming dictionary and finished a rhyme I was working on for about six months and a ballad, limerick, and the like. My time in La Paz was kind of a vacation within a vacation. I did a lot of hanging out and partying. I hung out with an Israeli guy and his Israeli friends who where all hanging out in the same hotel. They virtually took over a bar with a beautiful view of the city, and all had their meals in an Israeli restaurant. There were a couple of American college girls staying in the place for a while who were studying in Santiago and were talking about how nice of a place it was to live.

The day after my New York friend left I bumped into an English girl who was in the group I went with up Mount Chimborozo in Ecuador. She had been having a nice trip, she was dating a journalist and hung out with the newly elected president of Peru during the independence festivities in Cuzco. She was hanging out with some French engineering students. We got really drunk one night in their room and I blacked out. Later I ran into them on the street and they said I puked out of their hotel room window.

I also came up with the (weed induced) idea of making a shell-sled to drag with the help of a dog to the South Pole and back. It's a pretty cool idea. It's a collapsible sled, that during the day is a sled and at night is a tent. It is to save the hassle of putting up a tent in a blizzard.

One day I rode my bike up to the highest ski resort in the world at like 5100 meters, and hiked up to the hill in the background at 5400 meters.

Another day I did the bike ride down to Coroico at 2100 meters. From the city of La Paz, I rode up to a pass at about 5000 meters before the descent into the jungle. It was an amazing ride. In the first part of the descent the road was surrounded by huge snow-capped jagged peaks. I was riding almost too fast because the air resistance was so low. Then the pavement became dirt and the descent down the jungle canyons started. For most of the way the road was on the edge of almost sheer cliffs, which was pretty freaky because it was such a narrow road, that the trucks and buses had to take turns stopping to let each other by at parts; and there was never a side rail. I had heard through the grape vine through a lot of different sources, both Israeli and non Israeli, that a couple months beforehand a young Israeli girl rode her bike off the road and died. I wanted to ride my bike back up to La Paz, but when I got up at four the next morning my bike had a flat and I lost my motivation. The next day I didn't have the motivation and took the bus.

Coroico is a beautiful town perched quaintly on the edge of one of the ridges that leads down to the river; with

beautiful views of the huge mountains that surround La Paz to the west, a big river way down below to the north, jungle plains to the east, and jungle hills to the south. Being that it is perched on a jungle mountain ridge, the streets were very steep, even the central plaza.

One day I rode my bike towards Illimani, the 6400 meter mountain to the south of La Paz, to climb it; but my bike rack broke under the weight of my pack.

A couple days later I bumped into one of my Argentinean friends who was in La Paz buying stuff for his place in Copacabana, and we met up in a bar that night. At the bar after he left, I met some Columbian artisan's and went to a disco with them. After the disco I went to a whore house with one of them and his friend who happened to live in the same hotel as me. We were hanging out with their friend who said he was the manager of the place. We weren't there to bang any whores, but to do cocaine. I felt like it might have been better to be there for the prostitutes though, because they were just sitting there looking bored. Hopefully it was just a slow night.

After that I was kind of losing motivation to hang out in La Paz, so I just left one night at midnight because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do it during the day. The next day I had ridden for about 10 miles and had decided I was bored of bike touring. I think mainly because I didn't have enough good music and had sold all my weed to my Argentinean friend. So I started looking at the surrounding artisan houses and wondering if any of those farmer people would be interested in buying my bike. I rode up to one house and asked for water and asked a boy if he knew anyone who wanted to buy my bike. He took me to his neighbor-relative who was interested. I said I wanted 30 bucks for everything. I let him bargain me down to 15 bucks (which he paid me in change), but on the condition that he give me room and board for six days. I didn't go for that though, because the conditions they were living in was way too boring for me to stand. They had three buildings: The main building where they all lived was I think three rooms, then there was another building of two rooms, one of which I stayed in for one night, which was dirt floored. The other building was an outhouse-sized pile of unevenly-piled adobe bricks with huge gaps in it where the bricks didn't line up evenly. The land they lived in was a barren landscape of dry half-dead grass, with a small stream running through the town center about two hundred yards away. When I say "town," I mean about five families by the roadside and the stream. I saw a large pile of sticks in front of their house and asked what that was for and they said it was the fire wood for their stove. By the sticks was a pile of small rocks; that was the material for their up-coming second house. That night they made me sheep-gut soup and a dry-doeish concoction, and while I was waiting for it I discovered I was not only the guest of honor, but the nights entertainment. The man of the house, and his three or four sons came in, not all at the same time, to ask me all kinds of questions; like how much I make and if I am married and have any kids and why not. They seemed to think everything I said was hilarious, which amused me enough, especially when I noticed his daughters peeking at me through the windows. I sang them a few of the songs I wrote when I was in La Paz, which they loved, and the next day when I announced I was leaving, they all tried to make me stay. I got on the bus with my huge backpack and headed south.

The bus and most of the passengers seemed to be ancient, and they looked at me like I was an alien, which wasn't anything new to me, but I did feel strange to be bus bound. At the next small town there was a junction and I had to make a bus change. There I was mount Sajama, the biggest mountain in Bolivia, 6500 meters. It is a beautiful perfect cone mountain. I wanted to climb this mountain with those French kids, but the snotty ones didn't want me to come because they thought I was too much of a wasteoid. While we were waiting on the side of the road I thought it would be amusing to whip out all my money and count it before paying a shoe shiner boy. I had about five hundred dollars in small bills, because in my delusion in La Paz, I thought I would need it for my many months journey biking and climbing through the Bolivian outback. Little did I know how low on motivation I would turn out to be. I thought it would be funny going through a two-inch thick stack of money in front of all those people, but none of the Bolivians seemed to notice, but I did see a couple of Frenchies roll their eyes out of the corner of my eye. If you think this is dangerous, you don't know the peaceful nature of the Andean Indians.

The next town I got to was (?) a large town in the altiplanian wasteland, but it had some nice volcano-looking hills around. I only stayed there a few hours while I waited for my connection bus to take me to Potosi. While I was there I went to a restaurant and saw a telenovela, I don't know from what country. There was a hot girl who was overacting with her boyfriend problems and was being comforted by her fat friend. I remember thinking it was kind of lame the fat chick was put so bluntly on the sidelines. I tell you nobody makes TV like the good 'ol USA; music and movies too for that matter.

The bus ride to Potosi was nice, I could see the huge Salar de Yunui to the right for a large part of it. Then we got on an almost four wheel drive dirt road going over the almost 5,000 meter tundra to Potosi. Potosi is an interesting place. It is commonly known as the highest city in the world at 3800 meters, but according to my altitude watch, it is exactly as high as El Alto, the altiplano part of La Paz, which is bigger than Potosi. Potosi was founded in 1585 after the Spanish struck silver in the nearby 'Cerro Rico,' or 'Rich Hill'. It became the biggest city in South America, and was the richest for about 200 years. It is built up on the side of a hill, so all the roads were either up or down, including the central plaza. It was pretty apparent that Bolivians were poor by looking at this place. The infrastructure was underdeveloped, and it just seemed quiet overall and there weren't many tourists. I did the famous mine tour with four German kids from Munich (where most traveling Germans seem to come from). Our guide was a cheery young former miner whose English was quite good. The information he gave us was in conflict with what I read in my Lonely Planet book. In the book it says that the miners die an average of ten years after first setting foot in the mines of silicone poisoning, but the guide said they live an average of 60 years. He let us into large caverns for a couple hundred meters, and then we climbed down angled wooden beams another five or six layers; then got on our hands and knees and shimmied even farther down until we got into a steaming-hot room that was lined with this glowing, dripping, fluorescent-looking rock sap stuff. This was the silicone, the stuff that causes the room to be so hot, and give the miners the lung diseases that eventually kill them. He offered to lead us down even farther down a hole barely big enough to fit in that looked vertical, but we were with a 55 year old dude who didn't want to go. Not long after a gruff-looking group of miners hurried out with big cloths filled with rocks slung over their backs. One of them was about fifty years old, and he was next to a kid about thirteen. Our guide cheerily said the kid was the old dudes son. We shimmied back out of through the tunnel and another group came up behind us. This tunnel was barely big enough to go single file, but these miners were passing us like we were standing still, and they weren't being very courteous about it either. They passed us by whacking us on our heals and physically pushing us out of the way. They looked like they were in a race. Our guide said these miners make something like a hundred bucks a month which is more than doctors in Potosi make. But they make their money according to how much silver they mine.

When we got back into the main tunnel we were passed-up by another few groups of miners pushing little rail buckets filled with about a thousand pounds of silver ore. These guys didn't even bother to yell to get our attention, they just smashed their cart into our legs to force us out of the way. When we got outside, our guide took his T-shirt off and carried it off about a hundred yards and put it on a stick of dynamite to show us the kind of explosives the miners use. After about thirty seconds the T-shirt just disappeared into thin air, followed about second later by a deafening thunder which carried out like a computer generated echo as it bounced off all the other hills around and faded away. I remember thinking the entire city must have heard that dynamite go off.

The next day I did the tour in the mint that used to make the money for the entire Spanish new world empire. That museum was a real wake up call to the horrors of slavery. Eight million slaves have died in Potosi since it's founding, and none of the black slaves they imported or their descendants lived to tell the tell; according to the guide it was because black people can't take the cold. She showed us the place where the slaves stood for hours on end pressing the coins; we knew exactly where they stood because of the indention's their feet carved into the wood floor.

After Potosi I went to Yunui, the only real town that lined the great Salar de Yunui, the largest salt flat in the world. On the bus there I was talking to a friendly Bolivian guy who said some interesting stuff, but I don't remember what it was. When I got off the bus and grabbed by stuff, I saw a thin 16 year old Bolivian girl with huge tits walk buy with her friends, and then I walked across the street and looked to my left and saw an intense-looking bearded white man talking to a Chinese dude. I continued down along the central paseo and walked by a group of shit-faced dudes from Ireland, America, and Australia. They were amped and asked me why the hell I had a bike helmet strapped to my backpack, and then asked me to drink with them; so I sat down. Not long after a pretty blond German girl walked up to me and said she noticed my helmet and said her boyfriend was looking for someone to replace her on a tandem bike ride across the Altiplano to Chile. So I walked over and talked to the bearded man who was Sebastian. A 20 year old German dude who organized full sponsorship from a bunch of different bike-parts and mountain-gear companies for his "come with me" tour. His plan was to bike from La Paz to the southern tip of South America with about 12 different partners taking turns helping him ride his new tandem bike. He even had a website www.gobybike.com, and had already done a bike tour through Central Europe and Scandinavia, and two years beforehand had ridden his mountain bike with another German dude from his hometown to Beijing, China, the last day for 40 hours straight because he wanted to see his dad before he went back to Germany. He had just met a Swiss-German kid named Dan who had also just ridden his bike across the salar, and had ridden around Europe and Iceland.

Those guys wanted to leave the next day for the trip, but I hadn't seen the salar yet and wanted to do the one day tour, so they waited for me. The next day I did the tour in an old Toyota Land Cruiser, which is about the only car you see in the Bolivian antiplano. Because of the corrosivity of the salt, the tires have to be replaced every four months, but that didn't deter a constant flow of eighteen wheelers from going across it; not on a road, but a series of tracks that continually take turns being the choicest one depending on which one is the smoothest at any given moment. The first place we stopped on the tour was the edge of the salar, where the workers unload the trucks that collect the salt onto huge piles to later be shoveled onto larger trucks and taken off to be sold. I walked up to the shovelers and was about to take a photo but they looked at me scornfully and told me they wanted like five bucks to get their photo taken, so I walked back and took a photo from the distance. I would have said 'fuck you' and taken the photo anyway, but Indians all over the Americas are religiously apprehensive about getting their pictures taken; something about compromising their soul.

Then we drove in about an hour to a hotel that is made entirely out of salt. The walls, the floor, even the furniture is made out of salt. The people there were nice and didn't make us pay to take photos of it. Then we continued in about another hour and got to the Isla de Pascua, an island in the middle of the salar, littered with giant cactuses. The island had a really cool feel too it. The salt on the edge of it was broken up by all the tourist traffic, and resembled a nice beach that went on forever. I climbed to the top of the hill and looked around to the edges. It was definitely one of the most spectacular views I have ever experienced. The edges of the salar were way off in the distance, barely definable. And I could see snow-capped peaks in every direction, which made me want to climb them. I could see more Toyota Land Cruisers coming in, which looked like tiny specks. I spent the rest of the time there throwing rocks at cactuses with some of the drunk guys I met the day before. I heard one of them wasn't allowed on the train they took part of the way there because he was too drunk.

That night back in Yunui I went to the local movie theater, and saw a cheesily entertaining American 80's made for TV movie about a woman doing some kind of revenge thing against an evil army renegade with the help of a couple Indians who told her he had, "seen her in his visions about a white woman who would return and avenge the angry nature spirits of the land".

That night I hung out with Sebastian and got my bike shoes stolen out of my hotel room, which pissed me off because I wanted to attach my pedals to his bike for more power; little did I know we would not need it on the rough terrain that was to follow.

We rode on the gravel road out of town and past the massive train graveyard the next day, we were kind of huffing it to catch Dan who left the day beforehand, which felt good to be getting exercise again. We had way more gear on that bike that I ever thought you could pack. We had my 30 pound backpack that had everything you could possibly need to hike and live in snowcapped mountains, plus all of his bike gear and the camping gear that he brought which was for two people. So we had gear for three people. The bike must have weighed at least a hundred kilos. Not too many kilometers out of town the gravel road became sandy in spots and we had to push the bike a lot. We rode a few hours into the night and camped next to a river that we were going to have to wade through the next day.

The next day we rode about twelve kilometers until we noticed my crampons fell off the bike, so I rode back to the campsite, but someone had already grabbed them. That afternoon we arrived at a town and the locals said they met our friend who was waiting for us on a hill outside of town. Sebastian got Dan and brought him back and we hung out for a bit purifying water and entertaining the huge crowd of kids that had gathered around to watch us. We later on got used to having huge crowds of curious kids surround us at every town we arrived at, and started to enjoy different ways to entertain them. They are so easy to entertain. All you have to do is make monkey sounds or dance around like your having an epileptic seizure, and everyone would burst out laughing. Maybe everyone would burst out laughing too back home, but way out here with these strange Bolivian village folk, there was absolutely no embarrassment factor.

The first night with the three of us together, we camped out about a half mile away from a small town in the middle of nowhere and made a huge fire with all the dead branches. The town had a nice thatch roofed church. In that town we met a group of about 30 Italians who shipped their own four-wheel-drive vehicles over from Italy and where driving them as a club all around South America. They had old people lounging in chairs, young people, wives, and people on motorcycles.

The next day we rode over some hills and into a large valley where we camped. As we were packing up our stuff we saw the caravan of Italians cruise by. About an hour after we started riding we saw an adobe house with some kids playing outside, and about an hour later we arrived in another town. This town was interesting. It was pretty big, but in the middle of nowhere. It had dirt roads all over, and all the houses where adobe and thatched roofed. There was only one place open in the whole town where we could get water and buy food; and the only food they had was rice. A crowd gathered to watch us here to, but they weren't as outgoing, and Sebastian thought they were unfriendly.

From here we could see a snow-capped condor looking six thousand meter mountain to the west. In Bolivia and Peru a lot of mountains are called Condorini, because the Condor is a national animal, and a lot of mountains look like a flying condor, with a head mountain in the middle, flanked by two slightly lower mountains on either side. Not long after we rode out of town we started to climb, which was cool because I was finally getting some exercise. Until then most of the riding was really easy because we had to take it easy not to pinch the tire under all the weight we had. The road became pretty much four wheel drive, and the landscape became very pretty with the valley behind us and nice rock formations all around.

We camped out in a nook in the rock formations away from all the wind, and stayed up until about two next to a full-on bonfire. The next morning we were having some trouble with flats and decided we wanted to make a little more headway so we flagged down a truck to take us to where they were going. The first truck we flagged down picked us up, it had two guys and a girl. I got in the front with them and Sebastian and Dan got in the back with the bikes. They said the girl was the wife of one of the guys and was just there to keep them company for the ride. There were a lot of huge trucks outfitted to rough roads passing by that where filled with a certain type of cactus. It was empty when they picked us up because they were heading up to collect their load of cactuses. They had gotten up at about five o'clock and said it was a three hour drive to the place where they collected their load. They said it would take three hours to fill the truck, and then go back that night. They showed me where they were headed, the top of a mountain that looked about 5 thousand meters high. The kind of cactus they were looking for was all over the place, I can't remember what they used it for. I heard it took like a hundred years for them to grow, but these trucks were coming in like a steady train to collect them. I didn't have the heart to ask them how much money they made. It was kind of a pity we took the ride, because the part they took us was the best part in the whole trip to ride; the road was a smooth two track with a steady curving climbing. I tried talking to them but I could tell they weren't very outgoing. When they dropped us off at the base of the condor-looking mountain they stood there waiting for a donation, so we gave them a couple dollars and they seemed happy. They said there was a shelter way up at the base of the mountain, so we started to ride up there on another road that lead there, but Dan and Sebastian were tired and pitched a tent while I ran up a couple kilometers looking for the shelter which turned out to be way up there, so I went back.

The next morning at four or so Dan and I got up and hiked up while Sebastian stayed behind to watch the stuff. When the sun rose we were at about 5000 meters. It was a beautiful sunrise, slowly lighting up all of the salt plains and mountains. It was about then when we hit the steep part of the mountain and we climbed up the rocks next to the snow field because we didn't have crampons. We summited the 6000 meter peak at about eleven. It was a beautiful view. We could see the mountains just over to the west that formed the border with Chile, and the mountains in the South that were the border with Argentina, we saw a salt flat just to the south, and we even saw the great Salar de Yunui (?) kilometers to the north-east. We descended on a different ridge than the one we climbed up, with was a bad idea because we didn't have crampons and Dan didn't have an ice ax. We got to a place where we couldn't descend on the ridge so we had to go on the ice field which was about 60 degrees and more than a thousand meters down. If it had been me without the ice axe, I would have climbed to the top again and gone down the ridge, but Dan wasn't too scared so we opted for me to hack out foot holds for him while I was under him to catch him in case he slipped. When we got past the sketchy part, I took the backpack and slid on my ass to the base of the glacier and fell asleep until Dan caught up to me.

The next day we encountered another house where we could buy crackers and bread. From here it was (?) kilometers to Laguna Colorado, which was next place we could get water, so we stocked up. The guy who managed this place was very friendly. We rode for another couple hours and camped out at another lake, the first of a series of lakes before we were to start a steady climb that would lead us to a flat 5,000 meter desert. This lake had a high concentration of salt like all the lakes around there, but it had flamingos living in it. In the morning when we got close to take a picture, they all flew to the other side in a huge pink mass. On the other side of the lake were a couple of 6,000 meter peaks that were the boarder of Chile.

That morning we saw a lot of tourist trucks stop to see the famous flamingo lake. We saw some Chileans drive up in their own truck and get approached by a Bolivian ranger who turned them around. At this point Dan commented that that was because the Bolivians and Chileans don't like each other because of their historical boarder disputes. He said those mountains we were looking at on the other side of the lake were littered with land mines. He said me met a bike tourist who was riding on a road near the boarder and saw a Lama get blown away by one. I don't know how true that comment was, but it made me feel lucky about meeting those guys, because I was planning on hiking all over those mountains. As we were climbing up a hill away from the lake we dropped Dan, which is what we always did because we had extra power with two riders, and we passed a Land Cruiser. We waited for Dan at the top of the hill and he said one of the people in the truck was my German friend Marcus who recognized me. Realistically speaking, about 80% of the people we met in the Bolivian antiplano were Germans or Swiss-Germans. It was really strange.

After the lakes ended we started climbing up a valley that must have been about ten kilometers wide. We camped at about the top of the 5,000 meter "pass", if you could call it that because it was just a big sand dune, it was too sandy to ride, so we pushed for about an hour until the sun started to set and we saw a rock, the only rock for miles, to camp under. We felt lucky because it was getting really windy. The next morning we climbed about another hundred meters to the top of the pass and had our first descent for days. We were running low on bread so Sebastian and Dan flagged down some more tourist Land Cruisers for more food. At this point asking for food and water from the tourists was comical because we had asked so many times, it was beginning to be like a regular routine. If we got hungry instead of going in our bags, we just flagged down a truck and were given as much of whatever we wanted. It was so funny we had to try to keep from laughing when we asked for the food. Sebastian tried to get me to ask for it, but I always feel guilty asking for give-outs unless I am really desperate, so I let him take care of it.

Sebastian is really guilt free, when he wants something he asks, and the interesting thing is he gets. He had the perfect personality to organize a fully sponsored trip like this. More power to him is my attitude, I hoped one day I could one day ask like he does. So the trip was going really well, we didn't have to worry about food or water, and we were milking the wild quiet energy of that 5,000 meter desert. After descending we got to another large plain and started another steady climb for the whole day until we got back up over 5,000 meters, even higher than we were before. Because we were so high and we were in a flat desert with no mountains near by, it was getting to be ridiculously windy, but eerily quiet. Probably the strangest place I have ever been. The sun started to set, but we wanted to camp at the famous tree rock, and Dan's GPS told us it was only a couple kilometers away, so we continued in the direction the GPS told us. We had to trust the GPS because their was no one road. It was like the Salar de Yunui, just dozens of parallel tracks leading in the same general direction, and we knew the wouldn't all lead to the rock tree because some of the tours skip it. We didn't see anything in the direction the GPS told us, but we trusted it, and sure enough, the obscure bumps in the distance turned out to be the formation where the rock tree was. It was a beautiful camp sight, with large rocks everywhere, plenty to break the gale force winds and give us a peaceful campsite.

This night we all slept in my two man tent, which was very cramped. It snowed again that night, and we woke up to a couple on inches of snow. We climbed to the top of the rock tree and took some pictures, and then took off into so much wind at our backs that we barely had to pedal even though we were on a bike that had about 400 pounds and we were climbing. When we turned the wind was at our sides and we had to keep it at like a 30 degree angle to keep it balanced. The wind must have been going more than 70 miles an hour. We arrived at Laguna Colorado that evening, where we could buy some food and replenish our water. We camped at the side of the lake and decided to have a rest day. In the morning I took off to climb the 6,000 meter volcano that was next to the lake, but I made the mistake of running in my boots and got a bloody blister and had to go back. At this point Dan and Sebastian were starting to get on my nerves because they were talking to each other in German all the time; and I hate feeling like the odd man out, so I got really grumpy. Also, we found a new rip in the last rear tire we had and I told Sebastian I didn't think the bike would make it to Chile with me. So those guys went on a hike, and when they came back they asked me to leave. The next day they left late and I reserved the last seat in the last Land Cruiser to the boarder with Chile.

That night I sat around watching all the tourists eating their meals, and the hosts of the place felt sorry for me so they let me eat the left-over in the pots, which was more than enough to stuff me. While I was eating I overheard some tourists that were coming from the other direction talking about how they met a couple guys on bikes who asked them for bread, which gave me a chuckle.

One of the Bolivians that lived there told me that some terrorists killed some people in New York. I remember wondering why he would tell me that. It seemed odd. How could a Bolivian living hundreds of kilometers from the nearest town know, or even care about a couple terrorists killing a few people in New York? The driver of the truck I found said his group that was filled with Irish people (which was odd being that all the tourists there were German), was going to leave at five thirty in the morning, so I set my alarm clock for five, and double checked it and triple checked so it was activated. But it never went off, and I naturally woke up at six and freaked out thinking I missed my only chance of getting out of there that day, so I grabbed my clock and it was on and set for five, which baffled me. I franticly got dressed and ran out to the place they slept and luckily they hadn't left yet. So I went back and packed my stuff, but my clock had magically disappeared.

After Lake Colorado there was another big climb, but steep, that curved around to the other side of the mountain where I saw Dan and Sebastian's camp sight. They hadn't gotten up yet. In the truck I asked one of the Irish girls if she knew anything about the terrorist attack in New York, and she said some Arabian guys flew a couple planes into the world trade building and they completely collapsed. She said it like it was no big deal, and none of them were talking about it, so I didn't know whether to believe her or not, but I remember being anxious to get to town and find out if it was true.

Just about at the top of the 5,000 meter pass we stopped at a geyser that blew up like old faithful every minute or so. A couple hundred meters farther was a large area of small pools of bubbling mud. This was the highest we went on the trip, from there we descended to some hot springs that were on the edge of a green lake and soaked for about a half hour. Then we climbed into the land cruiser and were one of the first in the entourage of about twenty land cruisers to leave. Our driver got into a race with one of the other land cruisers. They were taking different tracks and hoping it was the quickest at the time. We won. Then we went to another lake that was so salty it has huge salt foam waving up against the shore. This lake was at about 5,000 meters too, and at the base of a 5,900 meter mountain called Lincanbur which didn't look very big from where we were. It was so cold and windy up there most of the people didn't even want to get out of the cars. Then we climbed some more until the boarder with Chile where we got into another van. We descended down a dirt road for a little bit, and then it turned to a nice paved road that descended down to the town of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile.