We got up early (for us!) and had complimentary breakfast in the hotel,\u00a0 which was a pretty nice place, with lots of foreign guests on their way to the salt flats.\u00a0 I repaired the left hand-guard that was damaged in yesterday’s fall, and replaced the clutch lever, and installed new rear brake pads on my bike.\u00a0 The clutch on my machine seems to have taken a real beating these last few days, and is engaging much further out than it was before.\u00a0 this part of Bolivia has really taken its toll on these bikes! I hope there is enough clutch left to finish the trip.<\/p>\n
We find the road out of town, OK, but at the gas station at the edge of town, I find I have to\u00a0 disable the kick-stand safety switch in order to get the bike into gear.\u00a0 Another casualty of the three days of\u00a0constant river crossings, no doubt.<\/p>\n
We have a decent road for a while, way better than before now, and it continues to improve, although there are lots of construction delays and hazards, and still lots of un-bridged rivers to cross, one of which was 4-foot plus deep.\u00a0 Once again, we are soaked from helmet to heels, and covered with sticky, brown mud.\u00a0 This is another straight day without rain, which really helps with the road conditions, but after a few hours we are riding in extremely dusty conditions, and when we are passed by on-coming trucks or buses, we often have to slow way down or stop until the dust clears enough to see the road again.\u00a0 The thick, yellow dust sticks to our wet clothes and jackets, and make us look like some sort of desert creatures, with raccoon-like faces.<\/p>\n
Close to the Argentine border, the road improves and becomes a ‘real’ road, and we finally start to make some headway fro the first time in days.\u00a0 Getting out of Bolivia turns out to be very easy, especially when we figure out how to bypass the huge line of people waiting for exit stamps by grabbing a guard and getting him to help us, and so we get out quickly.\u00a0 But, then we wait 5-1\/2 hours for n immigration stamp on the Argentine side.\u00a0 This is just unbelievable!\u00a0 Levi stood in a line that seemed to not move at all.\u00a0 He only got the passports stamped after 5-1\/2 hours because a group he was standing in line with had some girls that chatted up a guard, and got him to take the passports into the building and get them stamped.\u00a0 I don’t know what the problem at this border was, but there certainly was a problem here!<\/p>\n
While Levi stood in line for all that time, I was stuck sitting on a curb in the customs area, watching the bikes.\u00a0 After a couple of hours, I noticed that Levi’s from tire was completely flat!\u00a0 I blew it back up with our compressor, and found that he had picked up a thorn in the tread, and had a slow leak in the tube.\u00a0 I also watched the patternof activity at the customs section, and identified the chief customs officer.\u00a0 I made sure to chat with him, and let him know that we had been waiting all this time.\u00a0 He told me to come see him when we got our passports stamped.\u00a0 Amazingly, when Levi did finally get back with the stamped passports, we had the motorcycle transit papers, and had cleared customs, in less than one-half hour!\u00a0 Still, the 6-hour delay at this border has prevented us from reaching our goal of getting well south of the border before dark, and with the leaking front tire on Levi’s bike, we decided we had to stop in the border town of La Quiaca for the night.<\/p>\n
We ride around town, stopping a a dozen places\u00a0looking for a can of\u00a0 ‘fix-a-flat’, and finally do find one!\u00a0 We shoot it into the leaking tire, and drive around to see if it will seal up the leak.\u00a0 We find a telephone ‘cabina’, and Levi makes contact with a friend of his from the US that is in the nearby town of Jujuy.\u00a0 We make plans to meet up there the next day.\u00a0 We bargain hard with a landlady for a\u00a0room in\u00a0a decent hotel, and get one with a great shower – which we badly need tonight!\u00a0 Our water sterilizer had exhausted its batteries, and so we need to track down replacements for those.\u00a0 The tire seems to be holding pressure,\u00a0and\u00a0\u00a0so we consider ourselves lucky.<\/p>\n
We are now in our 13th country, and I have travelled over 11,500 road miles since leaving home.\u00a0 The border crossings are the most frustrating part of the trip, for sure!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We got up early (for us!) and had complimentary breakfast in the hotel,\u00a0 which was a pretty nice place, with lots of foreign guests on their way to the salt flats.\u00a0 I repaired the left hand-guard that was damaged in yesterday’s fall, and replaced the clutch lever, and installed new rear brake pads on my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[25,6],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2803"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2848,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803\/revisions\/2848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}