The week of doing very, VERY stupid things.
Trip Start
Jan 10, 2005
1
8
12
Trip End
May 21, 2005
La Paz,
Bolivia
Thursday, March 17, 2005
When we last wrote we'd just entered Bolivia and had quickly learnt that the next few weeks here would involve heavy consumption of immodium. I never knew it was possible to make 12 visits to the loo before breakfast but it is my friends.
It's been an interesting 10 days. There have been loads of road blocks across Bolivia including all routes to La Paz. The blockades have been set up by the poor Aymara population living in the highlands who are angry about fuel prices, restrictions on coca production and just about everything else really. We spent a few days in Potosi (the highest city in the world - 4100 m) and then tried to head to Sucre (Bolivia's official capital) to get a flight to La Paz. During this time the Bolivian President decided to resign as he was quite pissed off that his country had ground to a complete halt and everything went a bit crazy
01. And the winner is ......
. Then Congress refused to accept his resignation, the President decided to give it another go, people started marching against the blockades and a lot of them were cleared. We still ended up driving right into one on the way to Sucre. Now what you´re supposed to do when you run into a blockade is clearly described in our Guide Book, I quote " keep your head down and get out of the area, and don't try running the blockade unless you really have to...blockade-running buses sometimes get stoned or torched". So what did we do? Well first we decided it would be a good idea to start removing some of the rocks blocking the road, then we decided to get closer and take some nice photos, lastly we thought it would be a great idea to casually walk through the blockade whilst our driver took a sneaky short cut through the near-dry river. Very, very silly behaviour but thankfully the locals were so bemused that no stones or Molotov´s were thrown.We finally reached La Paz (some 6 or 7 days later than planned) and to celebrate promptly tried to get ourselves injured/killed once more. There is a road from La Paz to Coroico (in the Amazon Basin) which is officially the world's most dangerous road. It starts at an altitude of 4700m and drops to 1300m over just 64 km. The road is carved out of the mountain with drops off the side of over 1300m - and there are no barriers. Each year an average of 26 vehicles veer off the road plunging 100 or so people to their deaths
02. The World's Most Dangerous Road
. So obviously we decided that biking down this road would be very good fun and not at all stupid considering I've only been on a bike 20 or so times! Anyway the ride was amazing, terrifying, at times ridiculous (there are waterfalls that land directly on to the road, usually exactly on a hairpin bend and you also have to bike through 2 rivers, also running right through the road). We survived uninjured but a bloke in our group managed to fly over his handle bars and lost the majority of his teeth - ouch! Later that day we learnt that 7 people have died doing the bike ride over the last few years.Well, now we're on to "stupid things we've been doing number 3 ". This beats all past silliness even beating the time when I tried to ride a motorbike in Goa - when I didn't even know how to ride a push bike - and promptly drove it into a brick wall in front of the owner, or the time I sailed a boat into a tree, or the time I decided I needed to buy a pair of shoes in Oxford Street the day after drinking 24 shots of gin and then fainted in the shop and the manager had to call an ambulance.
What possessed us to try and climb a 6100 metre mountain I will never really know, but before I knew it we were at the base of Huayna Potosi setting up camp at 4780 m.
Huayna Potosi is one of the few 6000+ summits you can climb without any previous mountaineering experience
03. WMDR
. The two main technical bits are firstly, a 70 metre ice wall which is about 70 degrees and then right before the summit a 250 metre ice wall ranging from 60 - 80 degrees - not easy at that sort of altitude.Day 1 was for acclimatization. We walked up to the Old Glacier, got used to the gear (harness, ropes, crampons, ice axes) and practiced some ice climbing.
Day 2 we hiked up to the High Camp (5100m) which was meant to take only 2 hours. It took me just over 3, breathing was not really happening for me and every 10 minutes or so I was reduced to an emphysematous 90 year old. High Camp was basically a huge mass of rocks by the side of the glacier. The plan was to set up our tents on the ever so comfy terrain, have dinner at 5pm, go to sleep at 6 pm, wake up at 11.30 PM for breakfast (!), and start climbing at 12 am in the dark. The reasons for starting at night are that when the sun comes up the snow goes all mushy and you're more likely to slip, slide, cause an avalanche or fall into a crevasse. Secondly, the glare and heat from the sun and snow can become unbearable.
Sleeping at 6 pm was difficult. Firstly it was still light, secondly we were pitched on bloody huge rocks, thirdly I was pooing my pants with utter fear
04. WMDR
! We got up at 11.30, put on all our gear and started making our way through the dark with our head torches on , roped together. It was about minus 10 and pretty soon Dan was 2 % less happy. We couldn't really see where we were going but we could definitely feel it was all up, up, up. We got to the first ice wall and instantly realised climbing these things was much easier when you could actually see them. Anyway we started going up, Jose (our excellent guide) first, then me, then Dan. About 10 metres up I suddenly felt the rope go taught and heard a bit of a yelp. I looked down and saw Dan "Hillary" Davies hanging 15 foot down on the end of the rope in mid air. When I asked him "What exactly are you doing Dan?" he just started thrashing around with his ice axe.We made it up Wall 1 eventually and continued our slow trudge up to the summit. Jose kept saying something like "with patience an ant can eat an elephant", Dan was not in the mood for the Zen-like chat and every few minutes you'd hear "who's bloody idea was this" or "I want to get off this f*ing mountain now".
By about 7.30 (yes, that's 7 hours from when we started) we reached the second ice wall. It took us around an hour and a half to climb. I'd manage about 5 metres each time before having to stop for a complete breathing break down ( not easy when you're on a near vertical face). Finally we got to the top. We were so buggered it was really hard to get our heads around it. We only spent around 10 minutes at the top before having to come back down (the summit is a narrow ridge of about 2 metres so not a good place for a spot of tea). Going back down was really, really hard. Dan and I had been absolutely broken by the climb and poor Jose had to use every technique in the book to get us home (including at one point physically pulling me down the mountain on my arse)! We got back to base camp at 5 pm (17 hours later) where Dan looked at me and said " never a-f*ing-gain Seema". We've even decided to post all our extreme weather gear back home so there's no way we can try to do something as crazy as that again!
Anyway we've spent the past 2 days trying to get over the whole ordeal. Our faces are wind-blasted pulps, we've got big dents in our legs from where our crampon boots dug into our skin and everything hurts. We going off to relax by Lake Titicaca. Enjoy the photos and find out who won the caption comp. See ya.
