Thursday, February 26, 2009

Tues, Feb 24th

(I've lost count of the days, and resorted to figuring out the date...)
We again stayed with our new friends at Campestre Maranatha in La Paz (recommended), where we took the chance to change our oil. In the morning we rode up the coastal road to San Juan de la Coasta (north of La Paz) and back. It was some beautiful twisty road, and Russ got some great video shots over his handlebars that we'll try to post if this wifi continues to work.

This ride is when we discovered Rachel’s bike had all but cannibalized her air filter (she was spitting blue smoke on high-speed deceleration), with only small bits of foam left and a lot of dust and dirt in her intake. This is not good. We drove into town to the bike shops and managed to get a foam filter from something else that we could make fit. That could have ended much worse, but the bike seems fine now that it's cleaned up.
After the morning ride, we packed up the bikes and made a run north to Ligui to camp on the beach. We arrived at sunset, and thought we’d be able to finally set up camp in daylight. True to form, we followed the road to the beach, and decided to follow the tracks to the far end (closer to what we suspected were the “banjos”). The far end turned out to be much softer, deeper sand (of course), and we got the truck & trailer stuck, 30ft from our destination. Some fairly quick but significant exertion using our firewood lumber to dig the truck out and make a board track to drive on as daylight faded, and we were making supper and starting a beach fire in the dark.

Del’s skipped meals and dehydration seemed to catch up after the work of pushing the truck out of the sand, and he had an extended dizzy spell that made the rest of us rather nervous. By the morning, all seemed to returning to what’s been passing as normal on this trip, so we packed the bikes for the next day and hit the road.

No comments:

Post a Comment