La Paz to Buenos Aires

Trip from La Paz, Bolivia to Buenos Aires was 1800 miles. Bolivia was one of the toughest countries we have gone through on this trip. We had to deal with not being able to buy gasoline, local protests, road blocks through out the cities, and road construction and closures on 70% of the roads we were using. Lets start with the gasoline the Bolivian government subsidizes the gasoline for Bolivians to keep it cheap for local citizens for example the gas in Bolivia is 3 Bolivianos/liter and would be about 10 Bolivianos equivalent per liter in Argentina or Peru. Because of the price difference they had problems with neighboring countries coming into the country to buy the cheap gas….so they outlawed its sale from most gas stations to anyone without a Bolivian drivers license and Bolivian plate on their vehicle. As you can imagine this was hard to understand at first and very inconvenient for the chicken bike crew. We ended up only getting gas in La Paz thanks to the help of an awesome cab driver who let us first siphon it out of his cab and then drive our bikes to the pump and bribe the attendant to fill them up. He is the guy in the pictures with the snow capped mountain in the background.

The hotel we got in La Paz we paid extra (about $5) for a private bathroom only to find out that we had no water at all in the room or otherwise. As you can imagine we were pretty happy to get out of town when the time finally came. We did get our new tires on the bikes along with some other mechanical upkeep and repair. After all the work was done hit the road hard and didn’t look back glad to just be out of town.