Charity Ride

First of all, thank you very much to everyone who has donated money to this effort. We have raised much more money than we first expected. Between donations through our website, Facebook, clients on trips and the donation boxes in the offices, we have collected over $1000. In Bolivian terms, that’s over 7000Bs or a whole lot of money.

We have completed the first phase of our donation effort recently. Most Bolivians spend Christmas Eve and Day with their extended families as many of us do in USA also. Because of this, we can't actually do much donating of presents on Christmas day. Instead, this past Saturday, we held a Christmas party in the town of Yolosa and invited all the kids from the lower section of our route. Unfortunately, Leith and I had to work the day of the party, but I was able to enjoy it briefly as our group took a break in Yolosa. The party seemed to be a big success though. A couple days before, two of our office ladies, Paulina and Kayla, used a lot of the donations to buy school supplies and toys for the kids. Then, they made individual packages of a couple notebooks, pencils and pens, sharpeners, erasers, coloring utensils and of course a few toys. At the party all the kids received a package. Zzip The Flying Fox, the zipline company in Yolosa opened up and gave free rides to any of the kids. There was also a clown and many traditional Christmas foods and drink brought by both us and the villagers. Cakes, empanadas, hot chocolate and of course the Christmas classic, Coca-Cola. We also donated all sorts of sports equipment and ball pumps to the local school.

 Before the party though, the other lucky guides who didn't have to work decided to have a bit of fun, by building a dirt jump off the bank and into a deep river swimming hole. While Gabriele's first run didn't look so hot, it looked like everyone was having a ton of fun.

 

We have ended up with a great deal of money and will still be accepting donations until after we complete our challenge. Because of this, we have decided to also build a playground in Yolosa. This playground is something that we can start now and keep adding to in following years. Honestly, this charity ride is sort of an experiment to see how people respond, what we can do for the community and of course, what riding up the World's Most Dangerous Road is actually like. Our ultimate goal is to turn this into an annual event in which many people come out to raise money and take up the challenge of riding up the WMDR in a spirit of community friendship. So far this experience has been a huge success and I think we could definitely turn this into an annual event. In the future though, we are probably going to revolve this ride around Día del Niños (Day of the Children) in April instead of around Christmas time. April tends to have much better weather than December and I think holding the event on Día del Niños would allow more locals to come out in participation. Only a bunch of gringos far from home and thus having nobody to spend Christmas with are able to come out to ride on this special day. There is a pretty solid cycling community in La Paz and I'm sure we can get more people to come out and hopefully more bike companies to jump on the bandwagon to turn this into a big deal every year.

Once again, thank you to everyone who has donated and please spread the word. Also, thank you to everyone at Gravity who helped to make this happen.

If you would like to donate, you can follow this link here: Donate Here.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!

Phil

*All photo credits go to my friend and Gravity guide Andy Baker. Keep scrolling down to see more of his photos from the party.

 

 

Scary Santa

 

 

 

 

One of the packages we handed out.

 

 

Cody with the best dead sailor

  

Andy himself, happy he's landing in water.

 

 

 

 

 

Could you even have Christmas with out Coke?