START: Mountain Bivouac #2
FINISH: Curva
DISTANCE: 15.5 miles
ELEVATION GAIN: 7304 feet
AVERAGE ELEVATION: 13714 feet
HIGHEST ELEVATION: 15391 feet

1. Wake-up basically on top of the penultimate pass of the trip. We only have one pass left.
2. Ride past an abandoned mine which abandoned mine is straddling the road with sluice boxes, pipes, pools, vats, hovels, and weathered pin-up posters.
3. Find the trail next to the lake that last night’s whistling miners told us about.
4. Hit bona fide singletrack for the first time in Bolivia.
5. Experience (if you’re James) the first of several Diarrhea Sessions just off the trail between two beautiful alpine ponds.
6. Come to the edge of a two thousand meter cliff. And walk, with our bikes, basically off of it. Down the steepest, most switchbacked trail in the world. Sidenote, this trail would be illegal in America. Or just closed. But probably illegal and closed.
7. Hike, scramble and slide down a rocky couloir for thirty minutes.
8. Run into a local dude “backpacking” wearing sandals and ear muffs hiking up in the opposite direction. He came from Curva. We are headed to Curva. Until this point we only suspected we were on the right trail.
9. At the bottom, cross a river with care.
10. Push bikes up a three thousand meter grassy mountain face on a marginal trail for five hours. FIVE HOURS OF PUSHING. FIVE. HOURS. OF. PUSHING. A BIKE. STRAIGHT UP. A MOUNTAIN. A WHOLE FUCKING MOUNTAIN. AT ALTITUDE. FOR FIVE HOURS. ON PRETTY MUCH NO TRAIL. Oh, and hurry up because today’s afternoon thunderstorm appears to be ahead of schedule.
11. Get socked-in by fog and clouds. Lose the trail. And each other. A little bit.
12. Seven Hanging Valley Huckleberries later, make it to the top.
13. Drop down the otherside (real fast), hit thicker fog, come to a split in the trail, maybe go the right way, maybe not. At a certain point you just can’t care anymore.
14. Ride down a 100% shale wall/moat/trail/dike thing built into the mountain, explode out of the fog into a scene from the children’s book called the Rainbow Goblins.
15. Experience a rainbow.
16. Experience two of the best views in your life, in the world, in the universe. One, a mountain in some post thunderstorm sun light. The other, a different mountain top with lots of water running off it in all the ways it’s possible for water to run - falls, creeks, glaciers, rivers, streams, clouds, mist, fog, steam, springs, etc.
17. Continue to drop and drop and drop off the mountain, and into the valleys below.
18. Help some dudes get their truck unstuck from the mud. Get lied to about a ride for us and our bikes should we contribute to the unsticking.
19. Ride down (DOWN!, the whole way!) a valley road in God light, passing lots of old ladies and fake horses the whole way.
20. Discover it would take WAY TOO long to ride all the way back to Charazani.
21. Ride to the town at the top of the hill on the edge of the mountain called Curva.
22. Find a bench, buy some bus tickets (THERE IS NO WAY YOU ARE NOT GETTING ON THAT BUS IN THE MORNING), buy some soda pop, make friends with a dog, sit on the bench, find the grossest most disgusting prison cell/hotel room in the universe to stay in, sit on the bench some more, watch the sunset.
23. Visit the hot food store. Order fried potatoes. Receive, stare at, then eat par-fried fingerling potatoes.
24. Fall “asleep” in a hotel cell that has been doused with the black mold scented air freshener.

Bolivia makes me feel like a westernized white person from America. Which, no surprise, I am. But more and more, the deeper we go, the further in we get, the whiter I feel. Obviously I’m not talking about skin color but yeah, that too. But who cares about that, nobody here even cares about that, except maybe the kids. No, I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about how every day on a regular basis, increasingly, I present like a high-maintenance clean freak with agoraphobia and lots of allergies to basic shit like flour and water. Listen, bottom line, Bolivia makes me feel like a pussy. Especially when it comes to hygiene and exposure.

ADDITIONAL SUPPORT PROVIDED BYSRAM

Hygiene for example: there is so much Bolivia and so little me I’m starting to simply yield. Also, let’s be honest, hygiene is a form of maintenance and I loathe maintenance. So yeah, fuck it, When in Rome (if Rome is the second poorest country in South America) maybe you don’t floss because flossing requires, regardless of technique, sticking your fist in your mouth. And trust me if your hand looked anything like my hand you wouldn’t stick it anywhere near your own mouth. Okay wait, that’s not true. Just the other day I caught myself casually observing, as if in the midst of an out-of-body experience, the three of us, barehanded and joyful, sharing a bag of imported potato chips after a long day of riding bikes through literal shit, some of it human. The chips were barbecue flavored and they were finger-licking good, Goddamnit. The three of us crowded together, huddling around the bag, cramming and jamming, jamming and cramming, going for it, bag to mouth, one after the other in spite of the dirt and the funk and the feces in our fingernails and all over our fingers and now the corners of our orange-encrusted mouth holes. But still, I draw the line at fisting, and maybe I don’t know how you do it, but I personally can’t floss without fisting.
The transition in situations like this is always a source of mild to medium discomfort. But here it’s so severe, abrupt and absolute as to be alarming. It feels less like the exercise of peeling back the layers of comfort and civility through a few nights sleeping in the dirt and the need to shit behind a rock, and more like parachuting into a 16th century cholera epidemic.”- DWP;

I started peeing into my titanium Snow Peak cup two nights ago. We were at Edgar’s and it was late and James and I were pretend sleeping in the back room. The only way out was through Edgar’s bedroom and I’d already done the lo siento necessito bano fire drill a few hours earlier so I located my titanium Snow Peak cup which is actually the bottom portion of a french press kit, emptied out all the CLIF bars/gels/ropes/sticks/nuggets/pouches I keep in there, and filled it to the brim with hot piss. Titanium, in case you didn’t know, is very conductive. Also, I don’t know about you but my urethra governor or kegel or whatever you call it is out of practice so watching that 20oz cup fill-up in “real time” was terrifying. Also, FYI, laughing uncontrollably with a headlamp on, especially if the headlamp is the primary light source illuminating a delicate procedure, is not recommended. And finally storage, even in areas not prone to earthquakes, was a source of mild concern. I mean, you really just don’t want that puppy to spill even a little bit.

Two nights later, throughout our evening at Mountain Bivouac #1, I urinated into my titanium Snow Peak cup no less than three times. That night it was because I was in a tent, and it was raining outside, and everything I owned was already wet and close to being ruined. Also, I’m lazy, and the seal had been cracked so to speak. I mean, until Bolivia I’d never dreamt of peeing into a permanent vessel I intended to continue using for drinking and eating—the morning after Edgar’s insomnia camp I used the cup after a quick rinse for coffee and oatmeal, and it was fine—but now that I had, and there were no negative (so far) side effects, it just seemed like a “move” of sorts. Like a new part of my camping repertoire so to speak. Sidenote, I first remember hearing about the “pee cup” from Patrick aka @ultratradition on day six of Brodrick Pass because apparently, Club Macho founder Benedict aka @ultraromance is a practitioner. Anyway, that same night I also accidentally shit in my ninja suit a little bit. It wasn’t too bad, I just needed to wipe three times with three different wet wipes and the mess was all cleaned up. The next morning I put the trash from my dinner along with the dirty wet wipes into the cup which was now a miniature makeshift trash can and carried the hazmat bundle that way all the way to the Mountaineering Luxury Hotel, where I emptied the cup onto the concrete floor, more or less wiped it clean with the same t-shirt I’d been wearing for the last three days and filled it first with scrambled eggs and mayonnaise, then with off-brand beef flavored top ramen, and finally with a few rounds of genuine Coca-Cola. Things are just different in Bolivia.

It’s like how later that same night in the Mountaineering Luxury Hotel, under a set of world-class blankets, I had a wet dream about Stacey Stilts and jizzed into my ninja suit—that poor thing really took a beating on this trip. The crazy thing is I haven’t had a wet dream since 1988, but listen, altitude and stress will do weird things to you. Speaking of which, the following evening I had a dream that I was in Los Angeles breakdancing on a piece of cardboard in the middle of a bike path. Everything was going fine until I was surrounded by a grip of dudes from 18th Street who all wanted the amulet Mike Cherney made for me. Shit got kinda rowdy and next thing I know I was dismembering fools left and right. Straight limb-from-limb style. I guess I went crazy or something, but whatever because nobody got my amulet and eventually everybody left me alone. Apparently at that point I didn’t feel like breakdancing anymore because all of a sudden I was having sex under a freeway bridge with my cousin Denise who I haven’t seen since 1995.

Anxiety isn’t new to me, I’ve been managing it for the last two decades. Anymore it’s not really a problem except sometimes when I run into people I know but whose name I’ve forgotten, say like in a grocery store or post office for example, and I can’t avoid them because we’ve already made eye contact and so we have to walk over and start talking to each other and but still I can’t remember their name. I start sweating. Especially if I need to recall whoever’s name to maybe make an introduction to someone I’m with. But even if I don’t, I sweat. And sweat. And sweat. All over my face. Like sweat running down my face. So quickly and so intensely that sometimes people want to rush me to the hospital and/or at the very least insist I lie on the floor next to some boxes in the dark in some back room while they take my pulse. Also, please don’t make me give a speech. Also, every time I get on a plane I take a Xanax otherwise flying is pure terror. But listen, generally that’s the extent of it.

So no big deal but sure, since landing at El Alto things have been a bit heightened but nothing was acute until we stopped for lunch a little less than half way up Pelechuco Pass on Day 02. That’s when shit started getting weird for me. I was dizzy and I felt like I was going to pass out and I could barely eat so I started talking pretty seriously about bailing, like just calling it, like just giving the fuck up. I started by quizzing Kyle incessantly about the names of various buses and destinations all related to finding my way back to La Paz on my own. I also asked him how to say key phrases in Spanish, shit like do you have a room I could have for the night? or where does this bus go?. Also, since I was carrying about two thirds of the cash we needed (collectively) for hotels and the bus back to La Paz, I made a point of dividing it up¹¹Side note: doing even super basic math at that this point was pretty difficult. keeping only what I would need should I, I don’t know… turn around and ride back down to the town of Pelechuco and throw my Fat Boy into the river.

The next day, after going over the wrong pass and having to sleep at altitude, I tried to turn around about an hour into the final push over Pelechuco. Kyle wouldn’t let me though, he said something stupid like, whoa, hey, Daniel, let’s just go over to that rock over there [pointing to a rock about fifty feet up the road] together and see how you feel then, what do you say to that buddy, does that sound like an okay plan to you, I mean, that rock is pretty cool, and it’s not that far away, I sure would like to ride to that rock with you bud, come on, let’s do it for old time’s sake. And for whatever reason I believe him that it’s a good idea to ride to this fucking rock he’s all cranked up about and in the five minutes it takes us to get over to this placebo huckleberry rock of his I’ve forgotten how bad I want to go home long enough to get a visual on the pass, and once I get a visual, then I’m fine, for now, on this pass.

I think what I’m reacting to is the exposure.

It’s hard to describe what it’s like to fight for hours, one step at a time, to get to a pass, on the other side of which is who knows what, and ride over it like BASE jumping into a black hole if black holes were filled with Amazonian weather systems, day after day. But I’m going to try anyway, here goes:

Dear ________,

1. Today you’re going to wake up on the side of a remote road in the Andes Mountains in a country that does not have helicopters or rescue bullshit of any kind.
2. You dont have a satellite phone.
3. You speak a little bit of the language, but definitely not a lot of it.
4. Your most recent map of the area is 20 years old.
5. You haven’t really slept or eaten much in the last four days.
6. It’s raining now, but soon it will be snowing.
7. You are carrying everything you need to survive, it’s actually conveniently strapped to your bike. Dont lose or break your bike.
8. Most of the time you will be on a road, except for when you’re not.
9. You will labor all day to get over a fifteen thousand, maybe sixteen thousand, even as much as seventeen thousand foot road, then plunge further into the unknown wilderness, undoing in minutes what it took an entire day to do.
10. There will probably be some semblance, some modicum of service(s) on the other side. But if there isn’t, you’ve got, like it was previously stated, everything you need to survive conveniently strapped to your bike.
11. Don’t get hurt. Or lost. Enjoy.

Whenever the issue of exposure comes up, Kyle likes to talk about New Zealand, a country he likens to some kind of very large, very convincing indoor Mountain Center in the atrium of an REI. You know, over by the climbing wall. He’s like yeah, it’s like those indoor ski slopes they have in places like Dubai and Landgraaf. Only it’s not just one ski slope, it’s a whole bunch of them with rivers and stuff and it’s all shaped like several mountain ranges stacked on an island. It’s very convincing stuff but guys, I’m telling you, it’s an indoor deal just like Disneyland, I mean Disneyland isn’t indoors but you know what I mean. And it’s got ALL the services you could want for, again, just like Disneyland. I mean, where else can you find free houses all over the place and organize an unscheduled taxi cab ride off an alpine mountain in less than hour? NOWHERE!!!!!!! That’s my whole point. NOWHERE!!!!!!

And maybe, the more I think about it, exposure is the wrong word. Maybe the right word is commitment. Because, really, when you think about it, exposure is shit that you can mitigate and manage, right?, because after all, all the shit you need to survive is conveniently strapped to your bike.