Monday 24th March 2025 Patacamaya to La Paz
Woke up to a bitterly cold morning, breakfast in the sparse room, both of us looking forward to staying in a nice apartment in La Paz, breakfast cold porridge and frozen chocolate. Inching to get out the door and get riding, but had to wait 15 min for the light to get better.

Same again today stay on route 1 all the way to La Paz, though expecting it to get very busy as we enter the city.
Both of us all layered up, even the little stream adjacent to the road was frozen. Had to keep the legs moving to stay warm, not a bad thing, also takes your mind off the miles. Once again a nice view of the snow capped mountains as we hurtled towards La Paz, think the only thing that was making us go faster was the thought of having a lovely hot shower and shave.

Stopped in a tiny village, not much was open but Bingo managed to get a soft drink for us, then a guy came over to open up his store, gave us a Grape fruit each and then wanted to give us a 2 litre bottle of Orange, thanked him for the Grape fruits, but said we could not carry the soft drink.

Carried on, then hit the outskirts of La Paz, to be perfectly honest it was disgusting plastic litter just dumped by the side of the road, wild dogs roaming around, occasionally giving chase and barking like mad, very scary. We stopped and brought some bread and cheese, sat on an old railway sleeper just looking at the about of rubbish around, something really needs to be done about it.

Then the nightmare began, the run in to La Paz, possible the most scared I have ever been on a bike, traffic coming from every direction, beeping their horns, cutting in from either side, belching out exhaust fumes, it was frightening. Went through the open air market area, it was chaos, venders running into the road trying to sell their wares, with the traffic crawling past then, I just followed Bingo, think I had my eyes closed most of the time, going up in between the traffic, to add to this it then started to rain, not much, least it suppressed the dust. Just as we turned off the main highway to head in to down town La Paz, the hail stones started, mate the size of marbles bouncing of you, they hurt me, Bingo just shrugged typical. We then took refuge outside a builder merchant office, as they had a canopy, the lovely girl in the office, let us come in and shelter, both of us dripping wet.

The hail stones stopped, rain carried on, just went for it the last 4 miles, all down hill great, except of the traffic and how steep the down hill was, road was tarmacked once I think many moons ago, pot holes all over the place, made the roads in Kent look superb. With the water cascading down the road, it felt more like surfing than riding, we where like two drown rats, when we arrived at the apartments, managed to get booked with the help of the caretaker, think he looked a bit shocked when we rolled the dirty bikes in.

Was so good to get out of the wet cycling gear and get into the power shower luxury. The afternoon spent sporting out all the kit, hanging the tents, sleeping bags out and doing a big laundry, nice to have a proper washing machine, the kit really needs its.

Relaxing evening, just walked up the manic street and went into the first noodle place we could find, big fill up of food few beers and bed, plenty of time to explore the city.