Having been woken at 5.30am by the cockerels on the farm in Mizque, we got an early start to Cochabamba. A good job because the road was mostly hand-laid stone.
This meant more bone rattling, but the scenery was pretty cool - we rose to almost 3,000m and made it beyond the cloud base.
We did a lot of the journey behind an empty fuel tanker, which meant some cool pix that show how mad the road was in places - precarious mountain passes, often with space for just one vehicle at a time. Again, we were lucky it wasn't too wet.
We also picked up a hitchhiker who endured about an hour of bone rattling before we got to tarmac and his destination of Punata.
Punata was a timely stop for lunch. We ate at a choriceria which serves only fried sausage.
Don't think you're supposed to really eat salad here because of the questionable water quality in Bolivia, but we're a bit maverick, me and Paul, so we just ate it....and we survived! Woohoo! It was delicious. The pickled carrot salad was particularly nice. Thumbs up for the choriceria in Punata.
Our overnight aim in Cochabamba was an out of town hostel called Hostel Las Lilas, which has a pool, Wi-Fi and, most importantly, a place where we can park the van. However, the spiky railings above the entrance were too low for us!
I thought that was it, we'd have to find somewhere else, but to my surprise, the owner Alex said we could bend the spikes to get the van in! How mad is that?! And despite having had hernia surgery just a week ago, he even helped us. In fact, when Paul came to have a go at bending one of the spikes, he was at a loss as to how Alex had managed it!
(View from roof of van as Paul tried to bend one of the spikes. The rake he was using bent instead.)
Anyway, after a major display of testosterone, I was on spike-watch on the roof while Paul slowly edged the van forward. We seemed to have bent the spikes just enough until the very last bit - because the path sloped down slightly, the gap between one of the spikes and the van closed as we drove in. My eyes almost popped out of my head when Alex started climbing on the roof armed with a hacksaw!!!! He was seriously going to saw off the spike!
But in clambering up, Alex inadvertently solved the problem without the need for such drastic action - his weight on the back of the van pushed it low enough to be able to clear the spike without having to saw it off! We were in!
Unfortunately, in our initial attempts to get the van through, we damaged the roof slightly in a tin opener-esque fashion.
Nothing a bit of waterproof roof tape won't fix...
Anyway, we're really glad we made the effort, this hostel is brilliant.
Just kidding. That's a derelict building they're refurbishing at one end of the site. The hostel really is very nice. We've been able to park under a canopy right by the hostel building, with shower and toilets nearby and use of the kitchen.
And even though we wrecked the security gate, we were fed a delicious meal of chicken and mash last night.
