Project VELAIA

Opening the tent entrance a sunny morning greets us from outside. A flock of an estimated 40 lamas is standing around eating leaves from the nearby bushes.

We start our daily routine enjoying the warm sunshine that’s warming up the nice spot in front of the chapel. While we’re dallying around a man arrives, walking.

He seems to be totally exhausted. We immediately know something has gone wrong. He’s not the guy from the countryside with woolen clothes, but a city guy with red down jacket and other outdoor equipment which we’ve never seen being used by the altiplano population. He carries a mobile phone and comes up to us, telling a story about him, his wife and 9 year old son getting stuck at a river crossing with their 4WD.

The mobile phone doesn’t work here, of course. No major active mines around and it would not make sense to build a mobile phone infrastructure for the few lama farmers in the area. He had been walking for 1.5 hours already and not being used to that he was totally exhausted.

Now we think what to do. I tell him to write down a message to the back of my diary, addressed to the police or anyone else who could help him in this situation. And I give him the advice to DON’T PANIC, I assure him that we’ve seen several cars a day on the lonely road, so it’d be just a matter of time till somebody would come and help them out.

He still had enough water and there’s water in the creek the car got stuck in … we had passed it the evening before. So I give him a water purification tablet good for 20 liters of water and ensure that we’ll give our best to get his message to the law enforcement officers.

Thereafter we have a short breakfast, then we hit the gravel road. After cycling 20 minutes I spot a truck on a parallel road coming towards our road at maybe 30 km/h. I tell my father on the recumbent that I’ll try to catch it and start a sprint on the bumpy road. The pulse rapidly rises to above 150, the lung cells are trying to suck every oxygen atom out of the thin air on more than 4000 m altitude. A 1.5 liter plastic bottle filled with water falls of the rack, I ignore it, trying to keep up with the truck – Dad will find it and bring it. Now the truck is only 100 m away from me heading to the same crossing I’m heading towards: I start waving my arms, signaling the driver to stop. The lorry doesn’t slow down, I give all I have to reach the crossing before the truck … but miss it by maybe 20 m.

Now a downhill follows, gravel 5 cm deep, my bike starts floating, but I manage to stay on top. I get closer, ride at the left side of the road to give signals which the driver might recognize in the mirror. But either he doesn’t recognize or he doesn’t care. I surcease the truck, my pulse is at 180+ and I have done what I could.

After a minute or two Elmar arrives and we continue through a tiny valley, sometimes wide, sometimes narrow, always looking for settlements which might have phone connection and for phone lines beside the road. No villages for the next 2 hours, no cars, no power lines, nothing except many lamas.

We stop a pick-up loaded with 10 indigenous people, men, women and children. 4 of them are sleeping below blankets at the loading space at the back. I hand them the message, but the driver can’t read. The woman beside the driver tells me to show the message to a man on the back of the pickup, but he doesn’t understand the written words either – maybe Fernando, the father of the stuck family, should have written a bit clearer?

They continue without helping us with “our”problem. 2 minutes later we arrive in a small village, there are big antennas in the center but nobody’s opening at the corresponding buildings. I stop another 4×4 packed with people, but they somehow mistrust me in my strange outfit on the strange vehicle. We go to the post office, closed. Finally a truck arrives going the same direction as we go: towards the bigger town Colchane.

This is the first friendly and helpful driver we meet. He can read and after a short time copies the message from my diary to some paper he has and tells us that he’ll tell the police in Colchane about it.

Relief. Not a 100% for sure. But we’re convinced that the driver will stop at the next police station to tell the policia about the misadventure that had happened to his compatriot. Time for us to slow down a bit, so we start cooking lunch at the entrance of the brown adobe village. There’s water available from a tap only 100 m away where an old marked woman answers with a short and shy “Si” to my question for water.

We cook for an hour, always being on the lookout for a white and green police car passing. But nothing. Slowly doubt settles down in our minds. Colchane can’t be that far … maybe the driver has forgotten what we had told him? Half an hour after leaving the village, in fact only 1 minute from the next village, a police car with three police officers shows up in front of us. I signal them to stop and show them the message Fernando had put into my diary. The driver nods and leaves us behind in a cloud of dust only seconds later.

Then something unexpected happens: 40 minutes later the police car passes us again from behind. They can’t be that fast, I think. Another minute later a red 4×4 shows up to my left and slows down. It’s Fernando with his wife and son. He asks us whether we want to come for comida, he invites us. We say yes and make an appointment to show up at a restaurant in Colchane.

Fernando’s really happy but probably pretty tired. His son, 9 years old and better in English than he, has altitude sickness and starts crying for no reason while we’re at lunch. For them it’s time to leave the high plateau, probably not a good idea to come up here that fast. Had they only cycled … their bodies could have got used to the altitude slowly.

We thank him for lunch and only minutes later after the hasta luego they’re gone.

On the border they put in the necessary exit stamps into the passports, then we continue (back) to Bolivia. We have tailwinds blowing from west when we cross the nobody land between the two border checkpoints. Additionally the winds are blowing thousands of plastic bags and paper from Chile to Bolivia and almost every bush is coated into a jacket of plastic or paper. What an environmental mess.