Car meets cow

We spent the last three days in the Pampas or wetlands in the Bolivian Amazon.  It's a popular tour spent riding in a boat on the Yacuma river during the day and sleeping in a lodge on the banks at night.  The memorable things you're meant to take with you are the animals and experiences, such as swimming with dolphins and fishing for piranha.  But for us, it will be the car journey back from the river to Rurrenabaque.  

The road is a stereotypical Bolivian road, with loose gravel, big stones and plenty of potholes.  This was our car when we got in it.

Yep, that's a smashed windscreen.  Most of the cars we've been in in Bolivia have had cracked windscreens to varying degrees, but this was the worst.  One of the suspension springs was broken too and we soon realised why - this driver drove fairly fast, even over potholes.  And there was lots of sudden braking whenever he realised a hole was bigger than he thought.  

What he didn't brake quickly enough for was a cow, which suddenly ran out in front of us.  Of course we hit it, and he was going quite fast, so I was convinced it was coming through the windscreen.  Luckily (if that's the right word) it came off the right side of the car.

That is a dent in the shape of the rear end of a cow on the bonnet, with evidence of the cow emptying its bowel on impact.  The cow survived, but stayed sitting on the side of the road looking shocked, so I assume it suffered damage to its legs and/or internal injuries.  

The driver presumably thought he'd got away with it because after getting out and picking up the light off the bottom left which had come off, he got back in and carried on driving.  About 20 minutes later though, the car started losing power and clunking, so much so we had to stop.  The impact had pushed the radiator back and we had leaked all the radiator fluid and overheated.

It had been raining, so after stopping another car driving tourists back and using drinking water from them, the driver filled the bottle with rainwater from a ditch on the side of the road and poured that in.  He cooled it enough to drive another minute down the road and then we had to stop again.  Impressively by then, about 30 minutes after we broke down, our tour company had managed to get another car to come and take over, so we were spared any more stopping to refill with rain water.  To our relief we also got a new driver, so the old driver had to sit on the handbrake in the replacement car.

Yes, the cow bolted in front of us suddenly, but he shouldn't have been driving as fast he was through a herd of cows in the road.  Wonder what will happen to him...we heard that if drivers crash, they are punished by docking of pay.

Given the state of one of the tyres on the car we had on the way out to the river, I wouldn't be surprised if this happens quite regularly during rainy season.

Well and truly bald!  Scarily, this is pretty standard in Bolivia.