I Rode the World's Most Dangerous Highway*

Coroico, Bolivia · January 8
Something was wrong with La Cabra. It heaved and lurched and sputtered, as if starved for fuel. We were three miles from the La Paz city center, en route to the small town of Coroico at the end of the World’s Most Dangerous Highway. The motor knocked and rattled horrifically, and finally gave up the fight. I pulled over. White smoke poured from beneath the fuel tank. Neon-green coolant spilled from the radiator. Joe and Vlad circled back, and we stood aghast as a puddle of coolant spread on the street.

“Shit, dude,” Joe said.

I unscrewed a plastic cover to find a lacerated radiator. A blade on the jury-rigged fan Joe had had made for me in Peru had sheared off and sliced into the delicate aluminum. Worse still, a bracket on the mount that held the fan and its motor in place had broken, too.

It was an inauspicious beginning to what promised to be the greatest adventure of the ride. We were bound for weeks of bashing through Bolivia on rugged dirt roads. Towns were few and small on the unpaved route into the Yungas cordillera, the barren altiplano, and south to the Salar de Uyuni and Laguna Colorada. We could expect a punishing ride with sand and mud and corrugated tracks for hundreds of miles. The big 650cc single would run hot, and a reliable fan was essential.

We sized up our options. We could return to La Paz and hunt for replacement parts, or try to improvise a fix here. To the northeast, a brigade of darkening grey clouds argued in favor of a return to La Paz. By now, though, we had grown weary of the city—Joe in particular. “Eight days there already, and go back? C’mon,” he said. He sighed deeply. We opted for the alternative. Vlad rode off to see if he could find a mechanic in the neighborhood who might help us.

Back in Baja California, the motorbike had suffered a flat just 100 yards from a tire repair shop. Now Vlad returned with the improbable news that a radiator repair shop was just four blocks away, and down a hill at that. I coasted La Cabra down to the ramshackle place. A faded, hand-painted wooden sign was nailed up outside. Taller de Radiadores, it said. A short, heavyset man named Conchina greeted us with a sullen grunt. A soiled floppy beige hat canted atop his jowly head. His thick lips were the color of eggplant, and he nodded mutely as Vlad explained the problem in Spanish.

“Tell him where we’re going—up to Coroico and into the Yungas,” I told Vlad. “Ask him if it’s gonna last.”

Vlad related my concern, and Conchina gave me a look of studied disdain. Fuerte! he exclaimed, pointing to the radiator, and stabbing a thumb into his chest. With no other viable options, I stripped off the motorbike’s seat and gas tank and unbolted the radiator and fan casing and handed them over, and watched as Conchina got to work in his little workshop. He welded the mount back together, pried open with a screwdriver the collapsed interstices in the aluminum grid over the radiator, plugged the lacerations with a metallic gel, and cauterized the wounds with his blowtorch and water. Great plumes of white steam sizzled up from his metal bench. He didn’t wear safety goggles, and he didn’t say a word.

As Conchina worked, I took the opportunity to check the spark plug on the now-skeletal motorbike. It was oily, and after more than 10,000 miles, due for a change. I got out a replacement and my Clymer repair manual to check the gap specification. Joe asked, “What, you need the gap? Xxxxxx.” I shook my head in appreciation. I had four Bolivia maps and a GPS and a Lonely Planet guide and had studied the routes that lay ahead. Joe knew KLR’s the spark plug clearance by memory, and virtually everything else about the motorbike. We would make a good team.

Two hours after the ordeal began, I had La Cabra buttoned up and ready to roll. Conchina asked for about $3 US. I gave him $5. The fan itself could not be welded back together—the aluminum was too thin, and Conchina didn’t have the specialized equipment required for welding aluminum. We decided to roll the dice with a four-blade fan, and set off just before 2 p.m. towards the darkened horizon. It began to rain, then poured, and as we climbed in altitude, a light snow fell. At speed in the near-freezing temperatures, the fan had no reason to engage, and we rode fast on the 40-mile paved stretch from La Paz to a small outpost called Cotapata.

* * *

The tortuous 38-mile dirt stretch to Coroico began a short ways beyond a large statue of Christ that towers atop a hill. Here, motorists stop for prayer and supplication to the Christian God, the Pachamama earth mother, whatever deity might aid in a safe passage. Besides the World’s Most Dangerous Highway, it is called the Death Road, the Road of Death, El Camino de la Muerte. Between 200 and 300 people are said to lose their lives each year on this stretch, which descends from about 12,000 feet to 5,000 feet in Coroico, through the dense jungles and tropical lowlands and jagged V-shaped valleys of the Yungas towards the Amazon basin.

Along with Ruta 40 in Argentina, which cuts through the Patagonian outback to Ushuaia, the World’s Most Dangerous Highway looms large in adventure motorcycling lore. It is one of the premier destinations on the planet for an overland ride. I removed my earplugs to better listen for anomalous sounds from the fan casing, and we were off.

The sights that made this road notorious unfolded swiftly as we rounded hairpin corners. The single track ahead was carved into near-vertical slopes. To the left, vertiginous cliffs plunged hundreds of yards into a river valley. To the right, cliffs vaulted skyward and were concealed by cloud. The road was narrow—no wider than 12 feet in spots, I estimated—and guardrails were a nicety that the Bolivians could ill afford. The rule here is for motorists to proceed British-style, on the left, to better enable the driver to see how close his front tire is to the precipice. I could see in the hardened mud tire tracks mere inches from the edge. In 1983, I had read, more than 100 people were killed when a bus tumbled over a cliff. It was said to have been Bolivia’s worst vehicle accident.

Pay attention, I told myself, and, remembering my brush with disaster back in Honduras: Here comes the school bus. Here comes the school bus.

Three miles in, we stopped to wait as two large trucks executed the delicate back-and-forth maneuvers required for one to pass on a narrow stretch. Tires were inches from the precipice. There was no margin for error. “Pretty freaking cool, huh?” Vlad said. We could only shake our heads. “How’s the fan?” I told him it seemed OK. At our low speeds, the fan had engaged, but seemed to be spinning quietly and evenly.

Ahead, the sky was blue with handfuls of innocuous clouds. It hadn’t rained here. That meant no mud and no fog, and two less perils that we would face. We rode past small waterfalls and through large mud puddles and around fallen rocks and past dozens of crosses and descansas that marked sites of death. A bus passed me at alarming speed from the opposite direction, and I recalled tales of Bolivian truck-driving machismo. Pay attention. I beeped to greet a group of adventurers geared up on mountain bicycles and started to calculate that we would make Coroico a little after 6 p.m.

I told myself at first I wasn’t hearing it, but I was—an unsettling little rattle from the vicinity of the fan. I sped around Joe and pulled into an abandoned quarry and removed the plastic cover to have a look. A crack had metastasized at the intersection of one of the fan blades and the hub. Joe fiddled with it. I fiddled with it. Vlad made out with Patricia. Joe turned my motor on, and in an instant a blade sliced once again into the bubble-gummed radiator. Coolant spurted violently, as if from a ruptured artery.

“Ah, FUCK!” I said, and turned away in disgust.

* * *

A new road was under construction between Cotapata and Coroico. It was due to open in a year or two, or whenever the Bolivians got around to finishing it. It would be two lanes and paved and have guardrails. The World’s Most Dangerous Highway would be no more. Bicyclists might continue to ride it for some years, the thinking was, but inevitably the jungle would reclaim its territory, and swallow what man had so audaciously engineered.

I sat in the rear of a beat-up beige Toyota pick-up with my stricken motorcycle, bouncing along towards Coroico, and watched the World’s Most Dangerous Highway uncurl into history. (Hence the asterisk to this entry—I rode the W.M.D.H. ... in the back up a pickup). I occupied myself with nostalgic contemplation—the end of adventure, I mused—rather than riddle over the dilemma of my failed fan. The places on earth once remote to western civilization—the Amazon and Africa and Antarctica and the Arctic—had been explored and exploited, and now, they were being paved. One couldn’t quarrel with the modern Yungas road, I suppose, because guardrails save lives, but I found myself wistful nonetheless. Behind the Toyota rode Joe and Vlad and Patricia, posing for action photos with theatrical waves and thumbs up. I waved to them and, in a sense, to the end of this legendary road.

In the Toyota’s cab were two young men named Miguel and Jose, and an old woman and a young girl. The girl was immersed with a Game Boy. We had hailed their truck and asked for a ride. Like most Bolivians, they were eager to help, and to earn a tip. They were en route to Coroico with a load of ice blocks and bananas in the rear. We moved the goods and cannibalized some wooden planks from the quarry and ran the motorbike up into the Toyota’s rear. The shocks sagged badly under the weight. Before we started off, Joe pointed to the rear wheel. “Dude, that rear tire is just about bald,” he said impishly. I flipped him off and helped myself to a banana.

Adventures on the World’s Most Dangerous Highway might be coming to a close, but my own were just beginning. Once we had struck out on the Yungas road, there was no turning back to La Paz, even though the capital would offer the best opportunity for a solution to the fan dilemma. Joe was confident a replacement could fabricated. So was I. Necessity, we agreed, is one mean mother.

Miguel and Jose deposited us in front of a hotel in the center of Coroico, with about 3,000 inhabitants and a quaint if rough-hewn downtown of a few dozen cobblestone streets. I paid them about $10 US, and the old woman asked for more. The hotel was $7 US a night and had creaky old beds and shared bathrooms and a central courtyard for motorbike parking. We unpacked and wandered off for a Friday night in Coroico. Perched atop the tit of a mountain, the town had a handsome central plaza with a grassy park, and a good selection of restaurants to accommodate tourists and the La Paz residents who would brave the World’s Most Dangerous Highway for a weekend getaway to the country. We settled into plastic chairs at a restaurant called Bamboo and ordered Pacenas and food. In due time, the owner came trotting over to greet the American tourists. He introduced himself as Lando. I asked about a local handyman—a taller—skilled in working with metal.

In fact, the town had two such men, Lando announced in broken English. One was called Chino and the other was Lino. “Who’s better?” I asked. Lando shrugged.

“Excuse me,” Vlad interrupted, looking up from his supper. “What’s the difference between the burrito and the enchilada and the taco?” We had ordered the various items, and each looked identical. Lando shrugged again. “Who knows?” he said, and we all howled with laughter.

Chino was closer to our hotel than Lino, and the next morning after coffee Joe and I hiked six or seven blocks up a dirt-road hill to find him. Chino’s shop was a weather-beaten wooden shack. A sign said promisingly, Taller Metal Mecanica, but the shack was locked. There was no sign of Chino.

We knocked on nearby doors, until one man told us that Chino was unavailable. I looked at the man until he felt obliged to continue. Esta borracho, the man said, a bit apologetically. He’s drunk. It was 11 a.m.

Just across the street, though, was an upstart taller metal mecanica. He was 22 years old and his was Mikhail. He wore a dirty one-piece overall and a jet-black flop of hair hung about his head. He nodded agreeably as we explained the problem in Spanish, showed him the failed fan, and inquired whether he could fabricate a replacement—two, actually, with one as a backup. He thought he could, but the only power tool he had was a drill. A hodgepodge of rusty implements and cans full of old bolts and nails and screws laid scattered about his primitive garage.

Joe and I looked around and brainstormed for an appropriate piece of metal. There was the steel lid to a 55-gallon drum—too heavy, too thick. A piece of sheetmetal—too thin. Mikhail thought up a paint can lid—just about right.

Over the next two days, I stopped in periodically to check on his progress. Lacking power tools, Mikhail used a hacksaw and hammer and chisel to cut the rough shape of fan blades from the paint can lids. Then he used a file to round the edges. He needed a drill bit to make a hole in the center, but the few drill bits he had were scattered about in various cans and boxes. Only after 10 minutes of rooting around did he finally locate an appropriate bit.

I love working with metal. I’d fabricated from flat steel bar and U-clamps a mounting system for a backrest I’d bought on eBay for my big Honda V65 Sabre. With La Cabra, I’d used aluminum bar to hard-mount the Givi top box atop the rear rack. I’d drilled and hammered and bent and Dremeled the metal in my oversize vise with a pair of plastic goggles over my eyes. I found working with metal far more satisfying than wood. Given my experience, I thought I’d have a reasonable sense of whether Mikhail’s fabrications would work. Or not.

The fans were to be complete on Monday morning, but when I stopped in around 11 a.m., Mikhail’s sister told me he was down at the lake. I returned a few hours later, and found Mikhail weaving down the dirt street in front of his house. Like Chino the other morning, he was borracho.

He’d been drinking all morning, and his cerveza breakfast had left him in high spirits. Mira! he exclaimed, holding up the two fans he had made. They were a bit crude, but felt strong. The thickness of a paint can lid was ideal. I was impressed, and praised Mikhail for a job well done. He beamed drunkenly with pride, and admired his handiwork. Fuerte! he said more than a few times. Por moto!

I asked him how much I owed—about $5 US. I couldn’t in good conscience pay so little for an item so crucial to my ride, so I gave him about twice what he asked, along with a tip of a new set of drill bits that I had bought for him at one of Coroico’s two hardware stores.

With the fans complete, the next job was having the metal hub from the original welded to the replacement. Mikhail had no welding equipment, but Chino, up the hill, did. Like the La Paz radiator repairman Conchina, Chino was brusque and brutally efficient. He had a single tooth in the upper front of his mouth and was apparently sober. His wife assisted as he dragged out welding equipment and a bench from his shack and got to work at the edge of the dusty street.

I had the wounded radiator with me as well, and expected that Chino could use his blowtorch to anneal a fix, as Conchina had in La Paz. But he shook his head, and told me he didn’t do radiator repair. Who did in Coroico? I asked. Nadie, he said. Solamente en La Paz.

Nobody. Only in La Paz. Shit!

I made my way to the nearest hardware store to get a second opinion, but it was inexplicably closed on a Monday morning. I hiked five minutes across town to its competitor, and the proprietor corroborated that Coroico had no radiator repairman. But, he said, there is Poxilina. He showed me a tube of a grey paste. I told him I was heading deep into the Yungas, and the radiator would be under constant stress for hundreds of miles. Would this crap hold? He shrugged. Wouldn’t it be better to have the radiator annealed with heat? I asked. It would.

I bought the Poxilina nonetheless. Before paying, I asked to buy some radiator coolant. No hay, I was told. There is none, and the other hardware store doesn’t carry it, either. I was flabbergasted. Coroico lay at the end of a rugged, twisting, often muddy road that could drive engine temperatures to the red line, and yet the town had no radiator repairman, and no radiator coolant.

Back at the hotel courtyard, I showed Joe the Poxilina and bitched. “Why in fuck wouldn’t they have coolant?” I said. “They’ve got plenty else in that store. And this crap…” I looked dubiously at the tube of Poxilina.

“Run out into the Yungas with a bubble-gummed radiator—viva la aventura!” Joe laughed. His opinion was that radiator coolant wasn’t necessary. Water, he claimed, would be just as effective. “Bullshit,” I said. “Then why is radiator coolant a multimillion-dollar industry? You just don’t want to wait a few days for me to take a chicken bus down to La Paz.” The truth is, neither of us knew, and were poking fun at each other’s ignorance.

Radiator in hand, I set off to solicit more opinions on the durability of Poxilina. Chino frowned skeptically, and agreed that a heat-annealed radiator would be stronger. Mikhail and his father, Raul, however, vouched for Poxilina. In fact, Raul said, his own radiator was Poxilina-ed, and it had been fine for years. What the hell. I was manufacturing adventures, and this was just one more. Mikhail anointed the radiator with Poxilina in his workshop. In 12 hours, supposedly, it would be fully cured.

I asked Mikhail how much I owed him. Sheepishly, he muttered, cincuenta bolivianos. That was more than $5 for 15 minutes of work—the same he had charged for hours of toil on the fan-fabrication! I laughed and teased him and gave him what he asked. Hombre muy inteligente, I said, and slapped him on the shoulder. He seemed embarrassed.

En route back to the hotel, I ran into the owner of Bamboo on the street, and complained about the lack of radiator coolant in Coroico. Lando furrowed his brow. Did I check with Carmella at the downtown hardware store? Carmella owned the ferreteria that I had found closed.

“Aaaaah, yes,” Lando said. “They close today, go to La Paz for supplies.” The idea struck me in an instant, and I prevailed on Lando to accompany me the few blocks to the store. We hollered up at open windows, and a man came down to greet us. Yes, Carmella has a cell phone, the man said. He trotted upstairs and returned with the number.

I hustled back to the central plaza and Coroico’s lone telephone call center. Carmella answered her cell phone, and I explained my predicament n Spanish. Could she buy me two liters of radiator coolant in La Paz? I will pay you tomorrow. Propina, I promised.

It was nearly 5 p.m. by the time I got back to the hotel. Joe and Vlad were hanging around the courtyard, and I told them excitedly how I had reached Carmella, and how I’d have two liters of coolant tomorrow. “I got an extra, for when your Peruvian fan blows apart,” I told Joe. “Unless you want to run water—just as effective, y’know.”

I got to work reassembling Mikhail’s fan into its circular casing. Another problem—the blades were slightly too large to fit in the casing. They would need to be filed down. Vlad said, “Dude, down at the plaza there’s a knife-sharpening guy. Run down there. I just saw him.”

Sure enough, down at the plaza was a knife-sharpening guy. It was shocking in its improbability—I’d not seen a knife-sharpening guy before, and nor would I see one again, but at the very moment I needed one, there was Enrino. He’d set up a primitive apparatus consisting of a foot pedal, a spoked tractor wheel, a ragged automobile belt, and a grindstone.

Enrino pumped the pedal, and I ground the fan-blade edges against the spinning stone. Sparks flew satisfyingly, and a small crowd of young boys gathered to watch. Por moto, I said, holding up a fan to the youngsters. Enrino grinned at our progress and told the boys I was Americano, as if a certain celebrity attached to our work. He was a diminutive fellow in his early 50s, cheery and cherubic, a little Latin leprechaun. I had all 10 blades on the two fans tapered to perfection in 15 minutes. The same work with a hand-file would have taken hours.

Enrino extended his hand to shake, and I was struck by the earnestness, the purity, of his face. His smile seemed like sheer joy, as genuine as a child’s. It was humbling. How much do I owe you? I asked. Enrino shrugged. It was up to me. I gave him the same I’d given Mikhail for the Poxilina repair—cincuenta bolivianos, a little more than $5 US. He looked crestfallen. What, it’s not enough? I asked. Then he looked shocked. No, no tengo cambio! he said. I don’t have change!

Es por tuyo, I said, and thought to myself: For you, being the knife-sharpening angel-guy out of nowhere, a couple of blocks away at the one moment among millions of moments when I needed you. I bounced back across the plaza to the hotel, buoyant on my wave of my good fortune.

* * *

Vlad was heading down the paved Pan Americana highway with Patricia the next morning, to the sizable city of Potosi. There she would board a bus for La Paz, and a plane back to Colombia. They had been together more than a month, and now their time together was coming to an end. Vlad was sanguine. “It kinda sucks, but what can I do?” he asked. “I can’t take her into the Yungas.” The three of us had agreed on that. The terrain was too rough, too remote, too uncertain, for two-up riding.

We relaxed in the hotel courtyard. I was dabbing liquid J.B. Weld that I carried in my luggage at the intersection of the fan blades and its hub nucleus. J.B. Weld is a heavy-duty epoxy notable for its strength in metal-repair, and I reasoned it would help fortify Mikhail’s creation at the point of greatest stress. The motorbike’s fuel tank and seat and radiator and my tools were arrayed about the hotel courtyard. Joe suckled on a liter of Pacena and flipped through his Clymer manual.

“Well, you never know—you might even get lucky and meet another girl somewhere,” I needled. Vlad begrudged a smile. As much as he had enjoyed Patricia, her departure would open fresh opportunities for female conquest, and he relished the thought. Joe and I could keep in touch with him via email, to reconnect in Potosi or Uyuni. As I worked on the bike, I spotted something odd on the top of the motorbike’s rear tire.

“Holy shit,” I said. “Look at this!” Seated atop the tire was an enormous bug, nearly as long as my extended hand, from wrist to fingertip. It was gorgeously colorored with an intricate pattern of tan, orange, and black. It had stout black legs and two antennae eight or 10 inches long. It appeared to be something of a beetle. I’d never seen anything like it before.

We marveled at the creature, but there was no point in attempting to dislodge it. We just let him sit. Surely he’d been gone by the morning. (Note: This bug actually took a ride to Oruro! Seven days later, I found him alive, squirreled up under the bike and we prepared to head to Uyuni).

Coroico had been full of highlights large and small. The bug was just one more. I liked this small town. I’d been running around in a whirlwind for days, cobbling together a solution to my fan dilemma, and the efforts had paid off. The accomplishment settled into me like a steak dinner. In the meantime, late one afternoon, I had met a pretty girl in a restaurant. Giovanni was vacationing for the weekend from La Paz with her friends, and we drank beers and made out on a veranda overlooking the densely foliated wilderness of the Yungas. On Sunday, Joe and I had hiked a mile to a resort called Hotel Esmerelda in what would a futile hunt for a broadcast of NFL playoff games. We passed the time playing pool and drinking Pacenas, and met a 40-something English teacher named Siria who brought us to her home around midnight to meet her 22-year-old daughter. We drank more beers while they smoked pot, and stumbled home down a dirt street at 2 a.m.

Now it was time to ride. As promised, Carmella had the coolant waiting for me at her hardware store early Tuesday morning. I stopped at Coroico’s central comedor—a sort of cafeteria/food court—for a steak and egg breakfast that was so delicious, I ordered a second. A little girl of 5 or 6 joined me at my picnic table. She was fascinated by the color photographs in my Lonely Planet guide to South America.

Donde esta? she would ask, pointing wonderingly at a photo. Donde esta?

That’s Buenos Aires, honey. That’s Venezuela … Rio de Janeiro … Ecuador … Colombia … Uruguay. That’s Bolivia! Tu pais! Your country! She giggled.

I found myself studying the photographs anew, analyzing each detail and nuance of sights that I had seen, and places to which I was headed. I had seen these photos before, but now I seemed to be seeing them with fresh eyes—her eyes, the eyes of a child. I looked up. Across the room, seated for his own breakfast, Enrino the knife-sharpening guy was grinning at me.

Songs of the Yungas
Oruro, Bolivia * January 15

Joe and I didn’t need to ride into the Yungas—not really. There was no particular attraction in the serrated jungle valleys that slouched towards the Amazon basin—no historic sights, no singular natural wonders, no towns of any notoriety. A ride over the rugged dirt roads of this largely untamed region would be a four-day detour from the ultimate destination of Ushuaia. The Yungas was among the most remote and untrafficked regions of Bolivia. Not one of the overland riders I’d met had ridden it.

On the other hand, we did need to ride into the Yungas. This was what we had dreamed of. This was the thing we had prepared for, with the many hours of ruggedizing the bikes with bark-busters and bash plates and radiator guards and fork braces and mud flaps and rim locks and heavy-duty shocks and 10.9-grade subframe bolts. Ninety-five percent of the roads in Bolivia are unpaved, the literature had said. This is why we had come.

After 11,000 miles south from San Francisco, mostly on pavement, we craved the challenge of bashing our motorbikes over whatever earthen terrain lay ahead, homemade fans and bubble-gummed radiator be damned. The drama of the thing was delicious. The prospect of the easy way—back to La Paz, and the paved Pan Americana Highway down to Oruro—was practically nauseating.

Joe was ecstatic. “I am sooooo happy you want to ride the Yungas,” he told me before we set off in a light rain from Coroico. “Dude, this is going to be awesome.”

The day was warm and humid and I didn’t bother bundling up in my rain gear. The light rain intensified. I let it soak through to my skin, and delighted in the cool moisture. A low sheepskin of clouds clung to the verdant hilltops. The one-lane track slithered up and down across the hillocked landscape, edging up to vertical drop-offs and slicing a narrow artery through the cloud forest. I rode purposefully, dialing into the wholly different dynamic of dirt riding. Stand on the pegs. Light grip on the bars. Let the bike do the work. 

Despite the rain and a patina of mud—fango, in the Spanish—we started out at a decent clip. Much of the road was hard-packed and rocky. Sections of it, though, were abysmal. I was slowed several times by massive quagmires of mud—seemingly endless stretches of earthen snot and sizable ponds of mocha-colored water.

Ahead of me, Joe rode confidently through the mud. He stood on his pegs and squirted through with apparent ease. I tried the same, and the bike slipped and slid frightfully. I saved myself from a spill several times by jamming a boot into the ground, lurching the motorbike in the opposite direction, and careering wildly until I finally came to a breathless, heart-pounding stop. Shit! I would curse, at both the road conditions and my stupidity in instinctively correcting a potential spill with my boot.

If I did go down the wrong way, the heavy aluminum panniers to the rear could snap my ankle in an instant. That particular peril was widely recognized as one of the trade-offs of hard saddlebags.

Joe was waiting for me on the other side of a football field-sized moat of muck. I tried to plow through, only to have the front tire slip, grab, slide, and leave me at a standstill, struggling to keep the bike upright. FUCK! I hollered. I was frustrated and unnerved. I started up again and inched along, got up some speed, and nearly crashed again. I chose a line to the left, through a corduroy of slick ruts that weren’t quite as porridgey as the road’s center. I got some traction and squirted through—close to the edge of a cliff, I knew, but not that close.

“Fuck dude, you almost went over the edge!” Joe exclaimed. I looked back at the line I had chosen, but it was impossible to tell exactly where I had been. I had a good foot or two to spare, I felt. Joe shook his head emphatically. “Your tire was right over, then it grabbed. It spat dirt right over the edge.” Was he kidding? Seeing things? Exaggerating? Or did my rear tire just dance over the lip of a cliff? I didn’t know, and was too exasperated to care.

I said, “How do ride you mud like that? You see me, I’m slipping and sliding like a sonafbitch. I’ve almost dumped it like five times now.” He shrugged. “It is a little bit slippery,” he allowed.

“Um, a little slippery?” I said. “With 500-some pounds of motorcycle, isn’t that like a little bit pregnant?”

We wondered aloud over what effect weight distribution of our gear might have on maneuverability. Joe’s gear weight was concentrated on the KLR’s pillion, in the big red Ortlieb bag he had bungeed up. Much of my weight hung on the motorbike’s sides, in the aluminum panniers at the rear. Plus, I was packing more stuff, and more weight. We were running different tires, as well. I had Pirelli MT-60s, ostensibly dual sport but better suited for pavement than dirt. The tread on Joe’s tires was slightly more aggressive.

“I dunno, dude,” Joe said. “I just let it ride … but y’know I grew up riding dirt bikes on my grandfather’s farm. We rode mud all the time—out in the woods, around the pastures, all over the place. Very cool.”

Joe’s remark triggered an unpleasant childhood memory. I had begged my father for a mini-bike, and then a dirt bike, but he had refused. The kid around the corner had a mini-bike, and I lusted for one of my own. Too dangerous, Dad said. Standing near the edge of a Yungas cliff, I wondered if a childhood of motorbike-riding would have endowed me with some secret mud-riding skill that now, in my early 40s, seemed elusive.

I sighed. “I didn’t get my first bike until I was 16,” I told Joe. “I told my parents I was getting one, and they said, 'Oh no you’re not!' I said, 'Oh yes I am!' The day I bought it was laundry day. Mom had sheets and blankets drying out in the backyard. So I pushed the bike up the driveway and hid it behind one of the sheets. Then I rang the bell and Mom came to the backdoor and with this theatrical flourish I swept up the sheet, and there was the bike. She goes, 'That’s not yours!'”

He laughed, and then we were quiet. We gazed out at the lush green carpet of jungle in the primeval valley below. Birds and insects chirped, but otherwise the silence was deafening. I smoked. We hadn’t seen a single vehicle since leaving Coroico hours before. Joe said, “You could try letting some air out of your tires.”

I did. Reducing tire pressure to somewhere between 12 and 18 psi broadens the tire’s footprint and improves its purchase on sand or dirt. It helped somewhat in the mud. With practice, I could skate across 10 or 20 yards of fango without feeling a spill was imminent. The bike would correct itself once I hit terra firma. But if the mud was particularly deep, or the stretch long, the bike spun crazily about and I cursed viciously inside my helmet. Finally, I did spill.

It happened on a small, concrete bridge slicked with mud. I turned a corner on a decline at about 25 mph and La Cabra spun wildly to the right. I corrected the spin, but the bike kept twirling on the ice-slick mud—a 360-degree pirouette that slammed me into a guardrail on the bridge, and then, BAM!, down hard at the far end of the bridge. The impact catapulted me off the bike. I lay in the mud for a moment, sensing for damage. The only thing wounded was my pride. I got up and surveyed the scene, my fallen motorbike, and realized: My God, there’s a guardrail on this pissant little bridge!

It was wholly unBolivian. The Bolivians hadn’t bothered to build bridges over many rivers in the Yungas, but on this one little bridge that they had bothered to build, they added the nicety of a guardrail. I looked over the edge. It was a good 50-foot drop to a boulder-strewn riverbed.

Fuck it, I told myself. Take it easy. I had to accept the fact that I was riding some rugged territory without the benefit of extensive dirt-riding experience, and with zero experience in mud. Maybe, I thought, if I throttled aggressively through the mud and spilled a few times, I would gain a better sense of the physical envelope of speed in conditions. My skills might improve with practice and failure. Or maybe not. Maybe I’d bust my collarbone. There was no way to know, and out here in the Yungas was no place to find out.

* * *

Struggling through mud and climbing steep, rock-strewn inclines did more than tune my riding antennae. It pushed the motorbike’s temperature gauge towards the red line. The engine ran hot and hard, and the fan spun almost constantly. The radiator’s effective cooling area—the lamellated aluminum grid through which air passed—had been diminished by the two repair jobs.

I stopped frequently to let the motor cool and check the fan’s integrity and enjoy the dreamy solitude of the Yungas. The fan looked all right. Joe was usually a mile or two ahead, waiting for me with a Prozac-like patience.

It took six hours to run the 62-mile stretch from Coroico to Irupana, a surprisingly charming burg of perhaps 1,000 inhabitants. We percolated around cobblestone streets on the motorbikes and stopped to watch a soccer game in a handsome, tree-lined municipal park. A hint of twilight rouged the horizon. People gathered around, and an urbane-looking man in a large white SUV told us there was one good hotel in town. He asked where we were heading. Deeper into the Yungas, we said.

The road to Coroico is better, he said. The road south would be tough. It’s washed out in places, unpassable, he said. No one goes out there. Hell, I thought, no one comes out here to Irupana! We had seen just one vehicle, in the late afternoon, a pick-up bound towards Coroico.

We found Hotel Anahi, secured rooms at $4 US each, and attended to the top priority—two liters of ice-cold Pacena, consumed lustily on the sidewalk. The day had been exhausting and exhilarating, and I realized I was parched from perspiring heavily in the jungle humidity. Cold beer had seldom tasted so sweet. “Awesome, dude, just awesome,” Joe said, repeatedly. I couldn’t disagree. It had been one of the most rewarding riding days of my life.

As we admired our mud-caked motorbikes, I made the day’s final check on the fan. In the dark with a flashlight, I spotted a slight rend near the intersection of blade and hub. My heart sank, and cursed resignedly. Joe didn’t bother asking why. He knew. “Once it starts, it doesn’t stop,” I said. “Dammit.” My only hope was more J.B. Weld. I dabbed the gooey substance around the afflicted area, and each nexus at the hub. By morning it would be hard and dry.

The morning itself was dry. No rain had fallen overnight, and at 8 a.m. a few blue patches peeked promisingly through the low clouds. The air was moist and velvety. I optimistically imagined that yesterday’s mud had by now hardened. But like the SUV driver, other Irupanans we met advised that our ride would be rough. In the humid Yungas, mud was a chronic condition and would calcify only after many rainless days. Camino muy malo, the hotel proprietor warned. He traced a finger over my map, south towards to Inquisivi and Cochabamba. Hay mucho fango y muchos rios sin puentes. Lots of mud and lots of rivers with no bridges.

The road south indeed was worse. It was narrower and hillier and the swamps of mud were longer and deeper. We set up photos over some crossings, capturing the dramatic V-shaped spray of water from the front wheel as we ripped across smallish rivers and shit-colored ponds in the middle of the road. I continued to struggle in the muddy ruts, gyrating histrionically through a number of near-spills, and on each clear stretch indulged the futile hope that the mud was done.

No mud, this ride would be spectacular, I thought. C’mon c’mon c’mon, that’s it, no mud! No mas fango! Then I would turn a corner and confront 200 yards of hellish, dark brown oatmeal. The word fango began to assume a dark, almost evil connotation in my mind.

By early afternoon, we had banged out 30 miles. We stopped and gnawed on a lunch of sweet mangoes given to us by a pair of young Amyran men we’d met an hour before on the road. The men wore sandals and had a donkey and were on their way home from Irupana, where they had unburdened their beast of hundreds of mangoes for a profit. They had been hiking for two days, and were nearly back to their farm. Arriba, one man said, pointing up a narrow trail into the forested hills.

The Yungas was agriculturally rich with mangos and citrus and coffee and bananas and coca, yet the sheer difficulty of exporting to La Paz and elsewhere seemed to limit much of the commerce to the immediate region. Out here, a donkey was more practical than a pick-up. Subsistence farming was a way of life for these men and others who dwelled in the hills, without electricity, without phones. An interplanetary gulf separated them from the average American, and certainly the citified San Franciscans I knew so well. These men glowed with an earthy radiance, a certain disarming simplicity. I was left to admire them, and wonder who was better off.

“Damn, this is one good mango,” Joe said. “How’s the fan?” I checked it a third time. What I found surprised me not at all. The small rend I’d spotted last night had grown to nearly a quarter-inch. Wordlessly, I nodded Joe over for a look. A young Amyran man on a 350 cc Jawa motorcycle came percolating down the hill.

A town called Circuita was up ahead about five miles, the man said. I unbolted the fan from its motor to prevent a third radiator puncture from a sheared blade, and rode a mile until the temperature gauge was nearly spiked. I waited 15 minutes for the motor to cool, hopscotched ahead, and waited again. Joe stuck resolutely with me. His smirk betrayed that he was loving this … not a schadenfreude delight in my misfortune, but a delight in the bare-knuckled adventure of it all. It was as much his problem as it was mine.
It was nearly 4 p.m. by the time we pulled in to Circuita. It was a tiny, beat-up little town. No more than a few hundred people could live in this earthen grid of broken streets and boarded buildings and busted concrete. A dog with a bad case of canine alopecia limped about, and chickens pecked aimlessly on the dirt street. An old man eyed us phlegmatically. An elaborately painted statue of Christ stood on a grassy knoll above what sufficed as the main intersection. Down the hill was downtown—two forsaken blocks, with an overgrown central park and a half-built church. “Octavio!,” the old man crackled. A young man popped out from the timber door to a cinder-block home.

Octavio was 22. He was short and slightly built and possessed of a Napoleonic zeal. He spoke passable English, and ogled our motorbikes as we explained the fan problem and inquired about a hotel. There was no hotel in Circuita, Octavio said, but there was another adventure motorcyclist in town. “Me!” he declared. “I ride moto!”

He had a Jawa 350, he said, and had ridden it here from La Paz in six hours. Six hours! I scoffed. Not over the Death Road to Coroico, not through the miles of mud that had bedeviled me, and not on a lumbering Czech motorcycle. It was nearly 200 miles, meaning an average speed of more than 33 miles an hour, including rest breaks and refueling. But Octavio was insistent. Six hours! In a year or two, he said, he wanted to ride south through Bolivia and into Chile and Argentina and down to Ushuaia. Just like you.

Octavio was a law student in La Paz, he said, and here in Circuita to visit his grandfather for a couple of weeks. The old man sidled over, and stood mutely as Octavio prattled away. We could sleep on his grandfather’s floor, he said. There was one restaurant in town, down the street. Did we like beer? Pretty girls? Music? We’ll have a party, Octavio promised, beer and pretty girls and music!

In this forlorn tumbleweed of a town, a beer party with pretty girls and music seemed as far-fetched as riding nearly 200 miles in six hours through the Yungas. Maybe we could sleep on his grandfather’s floor, but now we had a motorbike field repair to tend to. The central plaza down the hill looked good, Joe said. I rolled the motorbike down and stripped it, and dabbed J.B. Weld onto the second fan that Mikhail had fabricated.

“We are sooooo in B.F.E.,” Joe said. Bumfuck Egypt, Bumfuck Bolivia—it was the same place, a mythical Mecca in the adventure motorcycling imagination. He swigged on a bottle of warm Pacena from a store up the street and leaned back on the folding Marine Corps stool he carried. “It doesn’t get any better than this—I mean, c’mon! Look at this town! We are soooo off the radar. Dude...”

A half-block away, a loudspeaker barked. I jumped, startled. Llamada por Estrella Cintavo, a voice intoned. Llamada por Estrella Cintavo. Circuita had just one telephone, it turned out, and incoming calls were announced on a municipal loudspeaker. Later, we would learn that electricity had been installed here just last year.

“Definitely, bub,” I said. “This is the capital of B.F.E.”

A crowd gathered as I wrenched on the motorbike. They stood a distance away, eyeing us and conversing, some in Amyran, some in Spanish. Up and down the street, doors opened and people wandered towards the plaza. “Jesus,” Joe said. “It’s like a couple of Harrier jets just landed in town.” From a crowd of dozens, a pair of men stepped up and introduced themselves. They were middle-aged with neatly groomed salt and pepper hair and wore collared shirts. One was called Ephraim. I asked him if he was the mayor—el jefe—and he laughed. There was no mayor of Circuita, Ephraim said, nor any government or firefighters or police.

He pointed at a building across the street. Policia Nacional Circuita was painted on the side, but the structure was abandoned. A padlock hung on the imposing wooden door, and graffiti was sprayed on its unpainted foundation. The lone first-floor window was shuttered. Until a year or so ago, Ephraim said, the federal police kept an officer here, but no more. He shrugged. La Paz had forgotten Circuita, it seemed.

More men stepped up, and someone suggested that the abandoned police station would make good lodging for the stranded Americans and their motorbikes. The men conversed and nodded approvingly. Joe loved the idea. The bikes would be safe indoors, he reasoned, and we wouldn’t have to listen to Octavio all night. A man went trotting off, and returned five minutes later with the key to the padlocked front door. Once I had my motorbike buttoned back up, we powered the bikes over a concrete step and into a dusty, dirt-floor hallway.

Darkness had fallen. We made our way to the town’s lone restaurant, starving. One dish—carne something—was one the menu. The taciturn waitress presented us each with a slab of brownish-grey meat and spoonfuls of rice and beans. A grainy black-and-white TV crackled with reports of rioting back in El Alto. We chewed meditatively on the leathery flesh and guzzled warm Pacena.

“Dude, this tastes like donkey meat,” Joe said. I had to wonder. We hadn’t seen a single cow out here in the Yungas, but we had seen a fair population of donkeys.

Octavio found us outside the restaurant and beseeched us to his grandfather’s house. He had beer and pretty girls, he said, and the promised party and music could soon get under way. With nothing better to do, we followed him up the hill.

An hour later, Joe was dancing gleefully with a beer in one hand and a pretty girl on the other around on the concrete floor of the primitive living room in Octavio’s grandfather’s house. Music, song, laughter, and animated conversation filled the room. With a flamenco flourish and an Olympic-sized grin, Joe twirled a paper napkin around his head and at his dance partner, the 21-year-old Esmerelda. A teen-ager named Edson strummed on a guitar, and a crowd of about 15 young people sang and clapped in chorus. The most unlikely of parties was in full swing.

“These are songs of the Yungas,” Octavio said, as Edson began strumming another selection. “You hear? This is a love song, about a man who loves a woman, but he lives in the Yungas, and she is far away.” There were many songs of the Yungas, Octavio said, bittersweet ballads of love and hope and isolation and deprivation and the bountiful earth.

I sat on a wooden bench next to an angelically pretty girl. Janhira was 22 years old, with chestnut brown shoulder-length hair and smooth, tawny skin. She and Esmerelda were sisters and lived in La Paz. They were in Circuita to visit their aunt and spoke good English. Janhira smiled at me demurely, and asked about America. Her hand brushed against mine. They all asked about America, about California, about jobs and girlfriends and schools and the president, Boosh. We asked about the Yungas, what it was like to live in such a remote area, how they had gotten along without electricity until last year, and whether they were happy.

“It is good here,” Edson offered in Spanish. “People are happy. A simple life. Someday, though, I want to go to America.” He looked to the others in the room, and they nodded eagerly. Edson wore a red, white, and blue soccer shirt and looked purposefully at Joe, and then me. He said, “This song is for you.”

I could barely believe what young Edson began to strum his wooden guitar. It was the dramatic introductory licks to “Hotel California” by the Eagles, one of my favorite songs. It was surreal. I leaned back and let the atmospheric melody fill the room. Everyone seemed to know the words, in Spanish, by heart, and began to sing. Joe and I looked at each other, shaking our heads in amazement, and laughed and sang along and marinated ourselves in a moment as unlikely as it was unforgettable.

* * *

Sometime after 1 a.m., I thanked Octavio and the others for the incredible hospitality and weaved the two blocks back to the police station. Janhira accompanied me, and outside the wooden door I took her hand and kissed her, briefly and indecisively. I was as exhausted as I was drunk, and acutely self-conscious of the grime and perspiration that had accumulated on me after three days without a shower. She smiled demurely and walked off to her grandmother’s house.

We had made short work of the liters of warm Pacena Octavio had on hand. Joe and I financed a second run for more beer and a couple of bottles of locally distilled moonshine. Now I found myself all on fours on the clammy dirt floor of an abandoned police station, fumbling for a flashlight and my sleeping bag. Joe had stayed behind at the party, clutching a moonshine bottle and drunkenly urging Octavio to look him up if and when he made it to San Francisco.

I managed to remove my contacts without incident and crawled into my sleeping bag when I heard a roar outside. It was a bus—a large, semi-modern bus that had rather incredibly managed to negotiate the awful road here at night. I opened the police station door and watched as a few people disembarked. One passenger strode purposefully towards me. He stopped a foot or two from me.

Quien eres? Porque aqui? he barked. Who are you? Why are you here? He did not seem happy. In fact, he was downright hostile. I explained that I was an American and that my motorbike had broken down. I pointed to the bikes parked in the hallway. Some men told us we could sleep in the old police station, I said, and unlocked the door for us. And who, sir, are you?

Soy policia federale! he exclaimed. He declared that I was trespassing on federal property and would need to vacate the premises immediately. Outside, it began to rain.

I had to laugh. Circuita, for being an unassuming little habitation in the middle of the Yungas jungle, was paying out a jackpot of misadventures. I asked the officer his name, and extended my hand to shake. He was called Rene. He was about 35 and short and wore a colorful soccer T-shirt and carried a single black bag. His scowl deepened.

I asked when the federal police had last visited Circuita, and indeed, Rene said, it had been a year or more. I retrieved my flashlight and led him to the motorbike, explaining how my friend and I had fixed a radiator problem and would be leaving tomorrow morning. After a while, Rene softened. He made a show of removing his soccer shirt and putting on a Policia hat and neatly pressed uniform top he’d brought in his bag, a rather pointless exercise at 1:45 in the morning. We could spend the night, he allowed, but would need to leave first thing in the morning.

Rene awoke us at 6:30 a.m. He had slept in a little bedroom down the hall, which earlier had been locked. Joe groaned, turned over on the floor, looked at Rene, looked at me, and croaked, “Who the fuck is this?”

“Police,” I said. “He showed up around 1:30 in the morning, off a bus from La Paz. Tour of duty, I guess. Believe it? This place was supposed to be abandoned.” We begged Rene for more sleep. My amigo estuvo muy borracho anoche, I told Rene, motioning to Joe. Rene pursed his lips in disdain and slammed the door, only to awaken us for good two hours later.

“Ohhhhhhh man,” Joe moaned. “I got soooo drunk last night. That friggin’ moonshine killed me.” He looked wan. Rene hovered about impatiently, then busied himself hanging the Bolivian flag and a framed photo of the president on the wall. I worked on getting my contacts in, and Rene watched with a quizzical look. What are you doing? he asked. I tried to explain, but Rene looked confused. He had never seen contact lenses before.
Outside, a steady drizzle had turned the dirt street into a slick of mud. I lit a cigarette and watched rivulets of water course down the hill. The town was enveloped in a thick, rainy fog, and so was my head from last night’s excess of drink. It boded ill for the day’s ride.

Before we could leave, Rene announced that he would need to file an official report. We presented passports and motorbike documentation and fielded his labored questions. What kind of motorbike? he asked. I watched as he inventively spelled my reply: Kohasaqui. Finally, he said, there would be a charge for our lodging—20 bolivianos per man.

Es propina por tuyo, tu familia, si? I teased him. He looked at me with a military gravity. I gave him the money, shook his hand, and ceremoniously thanked him for his outstanding service on behalf of the good people of Bolivia. Joe just laughed.

* * *

You’ve got to love the little children. In town after town in Bolivia and elsewhere, they would rush over to the motorbikes and gape and giggle and poke at equipment and tug on pantlegs, jumping around like jumping beans and beaming with joyful smiles. It was heartwarming, and never failed to buoy my mood and remind me of an ideal that I had cultivated throughout the ride—to be myself as a child.

So it was in Inquisivi, and its many delightful children. The ride here from Circuita was the most demanding and aggravating leg in the Yungas, at least for me. The steady rain overnight and throughout the day had turned bad mud into a horrific diarrhea—mile after cruel mile of dreaded fango. Out here, a bad stretch was not a road, but a mocking, malevolent entity unto itself, each with its own particular landmines of criss-crossed ruts and gaping maws of muck. In a bad stretch, the only thing that mattered was the 10 or 20 feet in front of me, then the 10 or 20 feet beyond that, ad nauseam, until I was ready to scream, which finally I did.

Starting out in the Yungas three days earlier, the mud had seemed like an amusing novelty that spiced up the ride. But as conditions worsened, I came to loathe the fango with unbridled contempt. I struggled and cursed and despaired and pressed on, and rejoiced to the heavens when I came upon a clean stretch of dirt. By the time I finally reached Inqusivi, six hours and 50-some miles from Circuita, I was physically and mentally exhausted and seething with frustration.

Joe was waiting in Inqusivi’s small central plaza. It was a tiny but handsome town, with cobblestone streets and neatly painted signs. The plaza was damp and puddled, but now the rain had stopped. “Sonofafucking bitch, that was the most nerve-wracking ride of my life!” I told him. I exhaled deeply. “Damn! I don’t know how you do it, through mud like that. I was slipping and sliding all over the place, got stuck a couple times. Sorry it took me so long. And the temp gauge kept spiking, so I’m stopping to let it cool down.”

He regarded me. “The fan seems fine, though,” I offered. “I checked it a few times and it’s intact.”

Two little boys approached us. They were eight or nine years old, and giggling. Hola muchachos! I announced, and they bounced over with a puppy-like eagerness. I found myself giggling, too, suddenly and helplessly, as if at the preposterousness of the ordeal I had just endured. Two adults emerged from a restaurant, and told us that Alojamiento Nora, the town’s lone hotel, was around the corner. One of the little boys, called Freddy, told us to follow him.

A room would be 75 cents US. As we unloaded our bikes in the hotel’s courtyard, the group of kids grew. When was the last time that a pair of motorcyclists had stopped here for the night, to entertain and amuse them? Months, I supposed, maybe years. It was as if the circus had come to town, and these 10 little boys and four little girls ran around in circles and laughed and jostled playfully with each other to compete for our attention. I put my helmet on little Freddy, and they all squealed with delight. I removed my soaking wet riding boots and let him stand in them and took pictures. Again they squealed when I showed the photos on the camera’s LCD screen. A couple of kids clasped their hands over their mouths and bolted away, shrieking now with hilarity, as if they had just caught their mother sitting on the toilet.

Such pure joy and innocence in these angelic little faces, I thought. They were heartbreakingly cute, and, I was happy to see, amply nourished and decently attired. The grief that had blackened my mood just an hour before was forgotten, and so was the hangover that had dogged me all day. I had the sense that growing up here in this remote jungle village, worlds away from western civilization and McDonald’s and video games, these children more fully reflected the primal human personality. It was good.

Again I inspected the fan. It had survived the abuse of spinning constantly with no visible effect. I topped off the bike’s oil and took my first shower in four days. Later, Joe and I got ready to head out for supper and beers. Little Freddy, along with his friend, had stuck with us while the other children dispersed. I told him that Freddy was my nombre media. My middle name. Marcos Federico, si? And my father’s name, too. We walked up the hill to the plaza and little Freddy took my hand, as naturally as one would a big brother or an uncle.

The restaurant didn’t sell beer. A Pacena sign hung on the wall, but no beer was for sale. Beer, hotels, gasoline, cigarettes, the hot sauce called aji, a varied menu, and other things could be hard to find in the Yungas. No hay, we were told time and again. There isn’t any. I began to call it The Land of No Hay. We sat on a plaza bench at dark with liters of warm Pacena from a store, and shared a big chocolate bar with Freddy and his friend. A blast of noise shattered the silence.

Llamada por Jorge Arequipa, the municipal loudspeaker barked. Llamada por Jorge Arequipa. Like Circuita, Inquisivi had but one telephone.

The road split at Inquisivi, running southeast to Cochabamba or southwest to Oruro. To Cochabamba would be 150 miles of dirt and its inevitable mutant, mud. The route was rumored to be in wretched condition. The alternative would be 60 miles of dirt until the pavement resumed, and 80 miles to Oruro. We could make it in one day if we got an early start. We did.

Inquisivi sat atop a jungled mesa at 8,863 feet. The road climbed from here, up corkscrew switchbacks carved up one side of a mountain, then down the other, up and down over countless peaks. The rain held through the night, and the steep inclines and descents provided good run-off. The dirt was firm and tractive. Without mud to bedevil me, I rode hard and practiced my cornering technique on the uphill switchbacks. Stand up, steer with pressure from the foot, choose a line, steady throttle, then VROOM! Hard up the straightaway. It was great fun.

Agricultural checkerboards began to appear. Up past 10,000 feet in the Yungas, farming seemed to thrive. Now and then I would motor past small cinder block and adobe and thatch dwellings. Goats and sheep grazed about outside. I spotted an old man outside his shack-like home, and pulled over 100 yards beyond. I dismounted and waved. He waved back, and began to approach.

His name was Arturo. He addressed me in Amryan, but spoke enough Spanish for a conversation. He was a gentle, dignified old soul, with a ruddy and richly lined face the color of an old eraser. He was born here and had lived on this same plot of earth for 67 years. He grew coffee and vegetables and other crops out here, he said, gesturing to the land.

Coca? I asked. He nodded and shrugged, and turned his attention to my motorbike and inquired about my ride. Three of Arturo’s grandchildren ambled over and giggled sheepishly. He giggled as well, tousling his granddaughter’s hair. In this wizened old man, it struck me, the joyful innocence of childhood had barely diminished over a lifetime. I looked at Arturo and at the green cradle of earth beyond until he said “Quime,” and pointed to the southwest.

Hay gasolina? I asked. There was, Arturo said, up ahead five miles in Quime. We hadn’t found gasoline since Coroico, about 150 miles back, and were running low. Once again Joe was waiting patiently in Quime’s plaza as I pulled up from my leisurely tour. The gas station consisted of a few 55-gallon drums of fuel in a man’s barn. We poured gas into small metal pitchers, and through a funnel until our tanks were full, and negotiated hairpins on a steep ascent out of town.

I watched as the GPS clicked up past 12,000 feet. The lush greenery of the Yungas thinned out to low brush and small copses of dimunitive trees. The air grew perceptibly cooler and drier, though the low and overcast sky hinted of rain. Shorn of vegetation at this altitude, the hills were naked and rocky and rugged. Needle-thin waterfalls plunged down vertical cliffs to my right and left, while the road ahead meandered up gentle grades. The change in terrain in this ecotone was abrupt and dramatic, and I realized with gratification the place we had reached—the altiplano.

I had dreamed for nearly two years of riding a motorbike across this great plateaued landscape that crowned Bolivia. The altiplano loomed large in my imagination as a distant and dreamy Shangri-La with with that ineffable top of the world feeling that I found so bewitching. I had even named a fantasy baseball team Altiplano Drifters. Yet despite a practically hermeneutic study of maps and my Lonely Planet guide, I had found nothing to suggest that the altiplano would begin just south of Quime. Suddenly, I was where I wanted to be.

I motored blissfully along. Joe was standing on the side of the road ahead with two Amyran shepherds. The women were dressed in tan shawls and tattered brown bowler hats and full-length dresses, badly soiled. They sat on a pair of rocks. A handful of goats and sheep grazed in a pasture below. The younger one smiled, revealing a badly diseased front tooth.

“These ladies would like to sleep with us this afternoon,” Joe deadpanned.

He caught me for a second, and then I laughed. I squatted next to the older woman and offered her a cigarette. A knot of greasy grey hair tumbled from her hat. She was redolent with a hircine odor. The younger woman accepted a cigarette as well, and I lit both ladies up. Mother and daughter, it appeared. We sat and smoked and smiled, and I asked if those were their goats and sheep in the pasture.

“They don’t speak any Spanish,” Joe said. The ladies smiled benignly.

“This is the altiplano, bub,” I told him. “Pretty freaking cool, huh? I’ve been dreaming about this for forever. It’s like Tibet up here.”

“Well, let’s get riding,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for your ass all day.” He didn’t seem to care. I thanked him for his patience, told him about the farmer Arturo, and showed him pictures I had taken. Joe was riding about 10 mph faster than I was, and stopped for far fewer photos. His waits could be long.

We made five miles before happening upon two men with a stricken motorcycle. They had removed the rear tire from the Jawa 350 and had patched a puncture, but they had no air pump. I retrieved the sleek $30 Blackburn bicycle pump that I had squirreled away in the bottom of a pannier and handed it to Joe. “You oughta pump up the tire for them,” I said. “Repay some of this Bolivian hospitality.” He rolled his eyes and handed the pump over to the grateful men.

“If does feel good to help someone out,” he allowed. “God knows we’ve gotten enough help along the road.”

We climbed higher still, to an undulant, treeless steppe that extended as far as the eye could see. It was magnificently barren. I choked back tears of awe and rode—just rode. Only a motorbike, I thought, could elicit such profound gratification. We motored past llama herds grazing implacably on patches of mossy grass, and nameless settlements of a primitive of adobe and thatch dwellings. I watched in fascination as the GPS hit 15,000 feet, to peak at 15,601. At these heights, the motorbike began to gasp for air and sputtered begrudgingly up the inclines. The temperature plummeted to 40 F.

High atop this vastness, a one-donkey town called Caxata had a grungy restaurant among its few ramshackle buildings. We stopped to warm ourselves with bowls of soup. Outside, the sky turned leaden with latent violence. Charcoal-grey clouds settled as intimately as a blanket atop the empty land. The low and darkening sky began to sprinkle, and then rain, and then poured down in bullets. Great cracks of thunder boomed like a cannon, startling in their potency and proximity. We geared up and rode off as the rain turned to hail that rat-a-tat-tatted harmlessly on my helmet.

Thirty miles away was the crossroads with the paved Pan Americana highway. The dirt road sloped gently from the heights of Caxata, and the hail and rain eased, until behind me I could hear but a faint chuckle of thunder. Road conditions improved, and I picked up the pace. Fifteen miles to go. Nine miles to go, and I could race down the macadam to what passed for a luxury hotel in the largish city of Oruro. I watched as the odometer ticked up, and the motorbike sputtered and died.

I stood perplexed on the side of the road. Joe was far ahead and out of sight. It felt like a fuel delivery problem, but that made little sense. Fuel systems rarely failed so abruptly, and this had felt as if the bike had run out of gas. Not possible, I thought. I had filled up in Quime just 40 miles earlier. Nevertheless, I unlocked the fuel cap and peered inside with a flashlight

What the fart! My gas level was near the bottom. How could I have burned through about five gallons of fuel in just 40 miles? The altitude? Nah, doesn’t happen. I couldn’t imagine. I turned the petcock to the reserve position, fired up, and rode on.

Five miles later, the bike failed again. I deposited two liters of fuel from the emergency jerrican I had bolted up to the rear of the left pannier, and made another mile or two before the bike failed atop a crest. Far below I could see the Pan Americana and the little crossroads settlement of Belen. I had banked a little intelligence during my pre-trip research about how laying an out-of-gas KLR on its left would cause what little fuel was left in the irregularly shaped tank to settle on the petcock side, and gave it a try. It worked. I made a half-mile on a straightaway before the bike failed again, but from there I could just coast downhill into Belen.

Now Joe did look a bit annoyed. He’d been waiting about 45 minutes. “I ran out of gas!” I said. “Seven or eight miles from here. I dunno, we just fueled up in Quime—that would mean getting less than 10 miles a gallon.”

It made no sense to him, either. He squatted to inspect the petcock, and almost instantly found the problem—a small crack in a rubber fuel hose. Evidently I’d been leaking fuel, though we found no moisture beneath the petcock. My problem was easily enough remedied with a section of spare rubber hose I had stashed in my luggage. But now Joe had a problem of his own.

“Look at this,” he said grimly. On the rim of his front wheel was a sizable crack. It was bad news. That crack could rupture suddenly and cause a catastrophic rim failure and a nasty crash. The front wheel had taken a pounding with all his bashing through the Yungas, we figured.

“It’s amazing I even found it,” Joe said. “I was just sitting out here waiting for your ass to show up and happened to see it.”

It was true. His bike was caked with Yungas mud, and yet he had managed to spot the crack while sitting outside a restaurant. If the bike had been parked another way, he would have missed it. If I hadn’t run out of gas, he would have been none the wiser until, maybe, the front rim blew apart at 60 mph. I needled him, “Well, you owe me one. You should be thanking me for running out of gas. I probably saved your life.”

I fueled up from another 55-gallon drum of gasoline, the only available in Belen, at the usurious price of nearly $6 US a gallon. I didn’t care. Four days of bashing through the Yungas was the most demanding and rewarding adventure ride I’d ever experienced, and I was exultant. I was happy, too, to be back on pavement and bound for Oruro, just 1½ hour away.

The Pan Americana was fast and smooth. Oncoming cars and trucks buzzed past. They seemed alien and malicious, mechanized beasts from a science fiction movie. Over four days in the Yungas, I realized, the number of four-wheeled vehicles we had encountered on the road amounted to a grand total of three.

Comments

[Kim G]

Hi Mark,

How exciting! You've finally posted more from your adventure in South America. Even though I know you did the ride a while back, am still dying to hear more. Please keep posting your adventures. And I want to buy the book when it's out.

Regards,

Kim G
Boston, MA