Mi Casa y Gnarly Paseos

I've spent the last few days to settling in, figuring out my way around La Paz, getting to know some people and riding. So far I'm pretty happy down here. I live in a nice area of town, but close enough to downtown to walk or take a cheap taxi. I've met some people and some interesting characters. Then of course, there's the riding. The riding is spectacular and awesome and sometimes gnarly.

First of all, let me tell you about where I live. Gravity has two offices. One is a hole in the wall place on the Prado (the main street) for tourists to come for information, to sign up for trips and whatnot. Our back office is really a house in a nice area of town half way up the mountain to the north. The first floor is the office part, the second is two apartments and the third floor is the owner's apartment. I live in one of the two apartments with the other two full time gringo guides. My bedroom is spacious and has big windows that allow lots of sunlight in. One of my windows faces out into the street. Across the street is a small plaza with benches and a statue in the middle. Its a very small plaza tucked back and hidden in this neighborhood so it turns out to be a popular place to come make out on the benches. There are also the occasional prostitutes who hang out on the corner waiting to be picked up by really fancy cars that are obviously from a much nicer area of town. Apparently my window used to have an awesome view of Illimani, a towering peak with glaciers. Now there's a half built five story building right in the way. We have two maids who clean the apartments and the office and general stuff around the house. The older head maid, Dona Rosa, lives in the other apartment with her husband, Don Juan, who also does a lot of odd jobs for the company around the house and the workshop. The workshop is right around the corner and one block away. The space is perfect. There is a huge amount of storage space for bikes, a large room for the mechanics who each have there own personal station and a bike shop attached to the side. Gravity is the South American importer for Kona, Santa Cruz, Titus and a lot of the big component companies plus a lot of smaller companies. This means we get sick deals on pretty much anything we want.

I've met a lot of people and its difficult keeping track of who’s who. First there is Alistair the owner and the other two full time gringo guides. One most rides we have one gringo guide and one Bolivian guide. There is a small army of about 12 Bolivian guides who also work as mechanics in the shop. Most weekdays they work in the shop and then get pulled out to run rides whereas we just ride everyday. Many of them are really good riders and they're all great mechanics. They are all pretty friendly and seem very laid back. Laid back seems to be a very Bolivian attribute. Our drivers are similar. We have one permanent driver who works the most and then we have a few other guys that come in as needed. These guys are smiling, happy and cracking jokes the whole day. Aside from the guys who work in the shop, we also have the maids and all the people in the offices. The office staff is pretty mixed with both Bolivians and gringos. There's also a small number of part time gringo guides who come in whenever they feel like and are needed. Many of them have other jobs in La Paz that keep them busy and they just guide for Gravity for fun. One of them that I rode with the other day runs an NGO dealing with sex trafficked women and their children. I’m sure MTB guiding is nice way to relax. Another really interesting character is Jack, the head brewer at brewery here in town. The brewery is actually part owned by the owner of my company, which means its a great deal for us (really cheap beer!). Jack could be described as an uber-conservative, Texan, mile a minute man who likes to drink, a lot. Aside from that description though, he's a really friendly guy who. I really enjoy hanging out with as long as were not talking politics. He told me that he came to Bolivia when his girlfriend dumped him, his dog died and Obama got elected to office, so he said “I gotta get out of here.”

Lastly for today, I have to talk about the riding here. That is why I'm here after all. I got really lucky. My first ride happened to be our Secret Single Track ride. We have a lot of other rides to offer from just the World's Most Dangerous Road, but the WMDR is easily 90% of our business. I think my pictures on Facebook really speak for them selves about how amazing the landscape is and how gnarly the trails were. Our day started with a drive up to the trails just outside La Paz in a Land Cruiser listening to Rage Against the Machine and general 90s hard rock. For the morning we shuttled the La Paz downhill race course three times. Multiple runs gives the clients time to learn the course and get better at anticipating features and riding more smoothly. The course had some pretty hard sections too. Two of the three clients took diggers right off the bat on the initial drop in and the third client took the easier line around and still walked a bit. I've got a good picture on Facebook of one of our clients launching over his handlebars. There was one turn in particular farther down that I couldn't ever get without dabbing. It was a tight steep off-camber turn around a large rock. After a picnic lunch on a high pass, we spent the whole afternoon descending a long series of trails crossing all sorts of terrain. We started high on a ridge-line flowing over hillocks and dips and then dropped into a rocky trail that actually passed straight through the center of a village. After the village we passed through an incredible landscape of cliff edges and giant sand spires. After wrapping through the spires, we continued down a long ridge-line that got narrower and narrower. Eventually coming off the toe, the got super steep with several options constantly. You could either choose the steeper straighter line down or the route with tight switchbacks and small berms. We took a small break right at the end of the toe, before the ridge just completely dropped away. From this vantage point we could see two old women and a small child walking up the trail, so we waited for them to pass before continuing. These women were dressed in the traditional layered wool ponchos. I can't imagine having to walk up and down this horribly long and steep trail on a daily basis just to go to town from that village that we had passed way back when. I was in shorts and a t-shirt and these women were dressed like it was below freezing out. After a quick chat with the ladies, we dropped the last bit of super tight switchbacks with cliff edges on the sides that were just begging to thrash us. I had to dab on most of the final switchbacks and I'm looking forward to nailing them in the future. I was also terrified on much of the turns due to the consequences of failure and look forward to putting that fear down too. Of course, while riding through the village way back, I smashed my real derailleur, so to fix it, I just took it and the chain off and relied on the power of gravity to ride down. However, this meant that through the switchbacks I couldn't get that oh so important half pedal stroke in. After dropping off the road, we had to ride a mostly dry river bed back to a town near La Paz where we met the Land Cruiser to head back. Sometimes this river bed was just angled enough downhill that I could cruise down without pedaling, but often I had “skateboard” my bike along. The river bed was really cool though, because much of it was caked in magnesium making it look like a bunch of streams of white powder intertwining each other.

This thing is long enough. I'll write more about the WMDR and the city another day. I put up an album of the single track on Facebook and I should be getting some more pictures of Lima, Peru and La Paz up soon.

I'm in Bolivia

Part 1
I write this one from the front of an express bus on a 27 hour journey to La Paz. Its about 9:15pm and dark. This bus is far different from the overnight buses I experienced in China. There, they packed in as many beds as possible and everyone got their coffin to spend the night in. This bus feels like luxury comparatively. There are two decks. The bottom is mostly the cab, crew quarters, los banos and cargo space. The upper deck has rows that look like normal bus seats except bigger, more leg room and they lean most of the way back to laying down position. There is even a padded foldout leg rest thingy. The front of the upper deck has a half-circle table with benches facing a large window stretching across the bus width. That is where I sit now, facing the dark highway, watching traffic go by. There is a Peruvian couple sitting on my left flirting in Spanish and listening to Jack Johnson. Honestly, its a bit scary sitting in front of this window watching scenery come at me through the dark on this narrow mountainous highway. Occasionally I grab the computer as we swing around switchback after switchback.

Lima truly is built in the middle of a desert. I spent a day in a town on the outskirts of Lima called Miraflores in-between arriving Sunday and catching the bus Tuesday. The city is quite a non-photogenic place this time of year. All winter long Lima is covered in this fog that just sort of blankets everything white. It is not the type of fog that you can watch coming in and out, covering and uncovering the world creating epic photographs of clouds moving through objects, but instead gives the whole world a sense of being two dimensional

We began this journey from two-dimensionality at 9am cruising down the coast of Peru with the Pacific ocean crashing upon the beaches to our right. The sand dunes stretched out for miles off to the left. The desert grew as we veered a bit inland and all I could see to either horizon was nothing but sand. Save for the occasional concrete village there really was nothing but sand and rock. Eventually we started into the mountains which could really be better described as giant rocky sand dunes. I noticed many of the villages we passed had walls that seemed to have been built to keep the desert from taking over the village.


Part 2
Okay, I'm now writing this section from my new apartment in La Paz. I've met most of my co-workers, taken a stroll around town and unpacked all my stuff. Bus ride turned out to be 30 hours total, but I rather enjoyed it. The scenery was unbelievable and I have decided that I definitely need to go back and check out the area around Lake Titicaca some more. The other guys here say there is more incredible mountain biking around the lake and up into the Cuzco area. I have quite a headache, but I'm not sure if its from the altitude or if I just didn't drink enough water on the bus ride. Either way, I plan on getting stuff done tomorrow, so it can't stick around. Anyways, I hope to be riding real soon as I sit here and stare at my lovely bike in the corner of my bedroom. I also hope to have facebook albums up soon.
Peace

Even the airports in Florida have hundreds of old people

As many of you know, I'm headed off to La Paz, Bolivia for a while. A few friends suggested I start a blog and I hope this is a better alternative to tagging people in Facebook notes. At the moment I'm actually sitting in the Fort Lauderdale airport on a three hour layover. If everything goes well I'll be in Lima by 10pm tonight. I'm pretty stoked to be heading to South America this time. I'll actually still be in the same time zone as everyone back home in NC or IN. I scored a sweet job guiding awesome mountain bike trips in the Andes near La Paz. I'm planning on sticking around a year or so and seeing what I feel like doing then. You can check out the company I'm working for here: http://gravitybolivia.com/index.php?mod=homeb or just google “World's Most Dangerous Road”. About 90% of our work is guiding tourists down the World's Most Dangerous Road. The “dangerous” part is mostly due to the amount of trucks and buses that have fallen off taking plenty of people with them. Don't worry, biker accidents are way less common. The road itself is a gravel road much like the roads we encounter in Pisgah National Forest. This gravel road has cliffs on the side that drop three thousand vertical feet though. The ride actually starts at about 15,400 and drops 11,800 vertical feet. Sweet! I'm really hoping I enjoy leading more touristy type trips since I've committed to coming to Bolivia and living here for a year. I also hope I get some friends to come visit to either ride the death road or not. We also have a bunch of other trails and rides that we take more experienced riders down.

Plane is loading soon. I hope to have lots of adventures while I'm down in South America and write about them here. Spread the word about the blog.