Today we are driving from Salta to the Bolivian border and then onto Potosi, so it’s a big day. There is just Casper and ourselves as the others arrived in Potosi yesterday. Casper has been fixed and George & Cherie got the car back late last night. We decided to leave our hotel at 6am in the dark and it’s drizzling with rain. We have 383 Kilometers to get to the border and then we have 500 kilometers to Potosi, so a big days drive on winding roads plus a border crossing. Initially we drove on narrow windy roads through dense lush green forest, encountering the odd horse or 2 in the dark. Once the sun came up we could see the scenery changed to the dramatic colored rocks that we had seen driving into Salta nearly a week ago.
We made good time and stopped at Huacalera for breakfast at 9:30. This was the hotel we should’ve stayed at on Tuesday night, so we ask if we could have Wednesday’s breakfast today and they said yes. We pressed on and arrived at the Bolivian border at about 12:30 and joined the queue first to exit Argentina and then enter Bolivia. It all went smoothly, although slow, it took about 1.5 hours and they didn’t look at the car, so that was good. We had to change some money at the town, so we exchanged our Argentinian pesos for Bolivian bolivianos so we could pay our tolls up ahead. We drive a bit out of town and have a quick lunch stop of avocado, tuna, biscuits & fruit and get back on the road.The roads in Bolivia are surprisingly good so we are clipping along at our Argentinian speed limit of 110kph and all of a sudden 2 policemen holding radar guns jump out in front of us waving for us to stop. We are in the middle of nowhere not much past the border and their car was hidden behind bushes. They show us the reading on the camera, it’ 109kph, Casper is 110kph and the policeman explains to us that the maximum speed limit in Bolivia is 80kph, so we are 29kph over the limit. Michael is driving and is so apologetic to the policeman I think he’s going to cry. The policeman smiles and says off you go! So we continue at 80kph, with 500 kilometers to go, which puts our arrival time back somewhat. The drive is slow as apart from trying to keep to the speed limit, we have small towns to go through and toll booths to stop at and the roads are windy.
We make frequent driver changes and it is dark at 7:30pm Bolivian time, so this slows us down even more. Driving over the mountains into Potosi we reach an elevation of 4,354 and the cars don’t have the power at this height as they do at sea level, so we drive up the mountains in 2nd gear. Potosi is a very old city with steep narrow roads, many of them 1 way. Our GPS is having trouble locating our hotel, so we end up driving around for about 30 minutes before a very friendly English speaking local gives us directions. We finally arrive at our hotel after 14 hours of leaving Salta, we are exhausted and because of the altitude of 4,070 meters we are also having trouble breathing. We collapse into bed, not bothering to eat, but we’ve caught up with the others.
Leave a Reply