The Andean foothills’ road soon lost its black top and we were churning up white dust under a deep blue South American sky. It was hot and as we stopped to help repair Bill’s electric radiator fan, Eileen announced that she had mistakenly had a swig of diarrhoea mixture instead of nose bleed mixture in the confusion of our sudden ascent to altitude. I weakened Hero’s SU carbs by three and a half turns and the power was dramatically restored, Bill doing the same to the Chrysler, allowing us both to whirl along the mountain dirt-road at speeds of up to 50mph. It was a long and dusty drive as we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn and on to the border with Bolivia where we found the passage easy but wasted time in the little supporting town trying to change money. Like Sao Paulo, and Argentina, the Bolivians had none of their own currency available though they would accept grudgingly US dollars.
Venturing out of the little town by early evening there started an epic Bolivian journey through a Wagnerian landscape of unmatchable natural beauty and colour. Through canyons rose-red alternating with amber, past oases of verdant green giving settlement to low mud huts under thatched roofs, and across fords of crystal clear icy water, the rough and narrow mountain road, rock strewn, gave us a journey which recreated pioneering motoring at its best.
The majesty of this Bolivian Andean landscape was slowly drained of its colours and soon dusk lost the fight to night. In the swirling mists of dust which Hero’s wheels flung up, Bill and Eileen’s period Chrysler with its barley-sugar headlamps, disappeared and re-emerged as the mountain road both undulated and snaked its way towards the high Andean mountain town of Potosi. There was no anxiety now about over-heating, as the temperature in this desiccated mountain land was plummeting, but there was great concern over fuel as we were in one of the remotest parts that we were likely to find on this rally and Bill’s Chrysler was consuming fuel at twice the rate of Hero’s consumption but fortuitously he was carrying two jerry cans which he would need to see him through.
The town of Potosi, with a little string of weak blue street lamps anounced itself tantalisingly at 2 o’clock in the morning, but such is the way of mountain roads that the next 30minutes, seemingly an eternity, would serve to deny us access as we wound slowly down towards it.
Potosi, a former silver mining town of immense wealth and Spanish Colonial architectural fascination, stands at 13,000ft putting it higher than Lhasa, and like that city its inhabitants wander round the cold cobblestone streets throughout the night keeping their lungs pumping with the aid of that stimulant which Bill and Eileen had found so vital in anaesthetising themselves against the road and their open Chrysler throughout that long night: a wad of coca leaves jammed between jowl and gum and sucked on.
The single-storey terraced hotel, The Liberator, along a cobbled alley looked bleak but received us without fuss or surprise, showing us to a comfortable room up a dry and creaking wooden staircase where we found clean beds and there, despite the thin air we gave up the fight for consciousness and succumbed to our first night in Bolivia – wonderful. Sleeping at altitude can be difficult and the next morning we met others stumbling about for breakfast describing their conditions varying from having iron tourniquets around their head to having been kicked in the stomach by a wild bull, we for our part had taken the good advice from the Argentineans in JuJuy who had told us to eat little or, better, nothing, but drink water until we were used to the lack of oxygen.
With two empty tanks we refuelled Hero and were aghast at the expense of nearly $5 per US gallon but had to consider that it was high grade fuel that had been specially brought up into the mountains for us, and with little ceremony we soon departed this exotic time-warp Spanish city in the drab early light of a cold morning peppered with the odd shower.
Carrying the anxieties of yesterday we setoff climbing higher on what turned out to be a well kept road with only occasional sections that were unmetalled. The sun soon broke through and the road was as perfect as any travelling motorist could wish for winding its way down through valleys and up through mountain passes which were watched over by Andean Indian women shepherds guarding their flocks of llama. They threatened us with a stoning if we attempted to photograph them, but it was all good-natured and they invariably gave us a smile when we desisted. This was one of our great days. We were in the High Andes, in Bolivia and on our way to La Paz with a healthy car and the prospect of some 6,480miles still to accomplish..