There was that time I travelled solo through Bolivia. I made most of the distances by local night buses, and that night, I had caught a bus heading to a small town, which would we my starting point for a four days trip through the famous Salar de Uyuni. As always in Bolivia, a night on the bus meant a night with little sleep, as many of the roads in Bolivia are rubbish. I had gotten used to this, and found that I can manage to block out most of the noise a get a bit of sleep just by using the headphones from my iPod as ear plugs. This is what I did, once I had made myself "comfortable" on the bus seat, and covered myself completely in the pocho I had picked up in Ecuador earlier on the trip.

I woke up many times during the night, which is to be expected when the road you are going by ought not to be classified as a road at all. Travel Bolivian style! The final time I woke up, it was light though. And the bus was empty. And locked. Without a living soul in sight neither inside nor outside the bus. Wups...

Apparently when we had reached our destination, everyone had got up and left, and no one had seen it fit to tap my shoulder and let me know we had arrived. I quite wonder how I slept through it. I got up and gathered my stuff, then went to the front door of the bus to tap on the window. No answer. I then tried to be as noisy as possible, hoping someone would hear me. To my relief the bus driver turned out to be sleeping in a small enclosed room somewhere else in the bus (since he came out of friggin nowhere) and let me out the bus.

I spent the next hour or so wandering around a seemingly deserted town with my 25 kilo backpack (I know, "travel light" is like a mantra for backpackers, but this was my first long trip and I clearly hadn't leart the art yet, okay?). I was looking for a hostel, having booked nothing ahead, but when you arrive at bollocks a'clock in the morning, people who aren't crazy seem to not have decided to wake up yet. In this case, that category included the entire town. I had no idea where to go, and with my 25 kilo backpack and minus degrees, wearing flipflops didn't help much either. I seriously considered just paying for a real hotel (alarm: big budget-traveller-no-no!). Eventually I found a "hostel" though. Or at really cheap hotel or something. Well, it had a bed and didn't break my budget.

So that's what you get for being strong, determined, and not backing down; you save 20 dollars on accommodation. Yay. Such victory. Go me...hmmm...

There was that time I went on a three days trip through the salt flats in Bolivia. I was travelling alone, so I joined a few other girls and we got a car and then took off. We started off playing around at an abandoned train cemetary in the middle of nowhere, and then perceided towards the best destination of the trip: the Desert of Goofy Photo Shoots. Or so it should be called. But in real life the name was the Salar de Uyuni.

Drinking to Mama and Pathce Earth before departure

There was that time in Bolivia when I decided that it was just the thing to take a mountain bike trip down Death Road (yes, it says "road", not "row" - my travel itineraries are not that morbid, after all). Death Road was also know as "the world's most dangerous road" which is basically due to the fact that around 300 people lose their lives on this 46 km course every year (although I hear the numbers have gone down a bit since some genius decided that it was probably time they build a higway nearby to cover the same distance). The many deaths on Death Road has to do mainly with the - ehm - let's say "insufficient" width and poor condition of the road (which is really more of a trail than an actual road), and so when people decide to drive big trucks up and down it...not the best of ideas. This also means that even when you go down it on a bike, you can sometime get into trouble if you go to fast (or too slow) since there are quite a lot of sudden turns along the road. Balance, people, that's what it's all about (it also helps to keep your eyes on the road and not get caught up looking at pretty butterflies flying by). At the time when I went down the road on mountain bike, it had been three weeks since a person had last died doing it on a bike (the irony of if was that her boyfriend had refused to go down the road with her because he was scared off by the death statistics - quite a sad story).

We started out by going to the starting point of the road by truck at an altitude of 5000 metres. While getting out our bikes, I suddently felt really bad and leaned against my bike for a while. I didn't feel out of breath, but since it was probably due to the high altitude, I started chewing coca leaves as fast as possible, as I had found they really helped lessen the effect of the altitude for me. I felt better within minutes and then felt ready to get on the bike. Before taking off we all took a sip of a bottle of almost pure alchohol as this was tradition and considered to bring good luck. Then the rest of the bottle was sacrifices to Mama and Patcha Earth (because Bolivia).

The view going down the road was stunning, although we were repeatedly distracted from it by the sights of crosses and tomb stones placed alongside the road, marking some of the places where people had lost their lives. Some of the sections were steep enough to gain high speed without working for it at all (although this meant we had to be very aware of suddent turns!). Parts of the road was in terrible condition, but this showed us just how awesome our bikes were, as they practivally flew over rocks and branches effortlessly. 

By the time we got down to the bottom of the road, the altitude was so low we could really feel the heat and humidity. We spent the afternoon at an animals reserve before heading back up the road by  - you guessed it - truck! Not surprisingly this was a hole lot scarrier than going down the road by bike!