A platoon of dust devils are marching across the sandy plain, line abreast.  Marking time with the tall, elegant steel ladies who’ve been tasked with carrying, by their dainty finger tips, a few high tension cables. These ephemeral ghosts of dust are retreating before an advancing storm, collapsing and reforming, falling back in an orderly retreat. Whilst the ‘pyloneñas’ are the civilian stalwarts who will have to withstand the advance, accept the thunder’s bolts and frights, whilst singing patriotic songs, to the thrum in their cables.

To windward, an ominous mob of thunderheads have coalesced into a crenulated rampart, a wall of boiling trouble, advancing on us, advancing on a Cuillin Ridge. Away to leeward a single mega head has started to dump its payload from a swollen, distorted mushroom cloud. Trailing successive curtains of hail across a Ben Hope and a Quinag. It’s up this glen that we are racing for the innocence of blue quietness and puffy white clouds, across an exposed plain that, if we’re captured can offer no quarter, no surrender; there’s simply no shelter. Our attention and concern is for the trouble coming out of the airts of Skye, whilst the Assynt granite wastes are off radar, offering up some safe, stunning cloudscapes. Despite the distance, it’s this storm cell that’s been brewing up it’s own armament of gravelled ice shot, that is now so engorged, that it won’t fit  into the camera’s lens, neither in portrait nor in landscape. Whilst those proto-twisters are now sand bright, etched against the lead slate of storm, drawn by the lowering evening sunlight. It’s this mega cell that has accumulated such a surfeit of energy that it can now mount a pincer movement, advancing contra windward, circling around behind us, and heading down the Inner Hebrides. The Lords of the nor’west are off for a wee contretemps, maybe a wee skirmish. 
    
We need to find shelter soon. In the distance, the land rises to some low hills that could offer some shelter, some concealment. There’s a stone walled ‘corales’ that might suffice, if it’s not already occupied by donkeys or llamas. It does and it’s not, so we move in. Pitched, and the herder finds us, to wish us a peaceful night. To move or to stay, it’s that difficult conundrum. Any shift will still be in the exposed, wide open visible space, so we stay, for a grandstand viewing of an approaching conflict.

The charge commences, but for once we’re safe spectators, out of the firing line. We’re like the Victorian aristocracy viewing from a Crimean hilltop the sporting spectacle, The Battle of Balaclava. I count the flash to crump ratio from the bombardment and calculate that the fallout of melting hail, the fertilising rain, will be that patch of maize corn beside the truck stop where we had lunch. Not even a near miss. I find distances and perspectives near impossible sums to determine in this vast, wide open scape.

Later in the night we’ll take a spot of collateral damage, catching a trailing edge of a shower thrown by another sneak ‘storm lord’. this one emanating out from Perthshire. Well, as every Scots Magazine subscriber and Munro bagging ticker knows, if it’s triangular and on the horizon, then it must be Schiehallion. Here, that county’s iconic hill are ‘Ten ‘a Bolivar’, not entirely surprising as they all have a similar volcanic ancestry. 
In a small way, I’ve succumbed to that travellers sin; of comparing places abroad with those from home territory. Yet it’s a piece of simple fun, and can be justified on the grounds of geological enquiry. Scotland would have looked like this once. The second transgression is to

Did Iceland ever go for this design?

anthropomorphise the animate out of the inanimate. Cycling slowly through these vast open places, pushing against the potential of mind numbing emptiness, mind numbing distance, where the asphalt and the pylons are man’s sole imprint, vivifying cold galvanised steel  becomes a pleasurable mind game. Pylons have always intrigued me, both for their resemblance to their alter egos, and their ability to fade from view, the way a wind farm can’t.

I’ve started a collection of photos, a montage that might make for an interesting quiz: ‘Name that Scottish Hill’. I’ve nearly got a complete cast for Arran, even an Holy Isle, tethered to a hillside rather than it’s Lamlash Bay, and a Goat Fell, but taken from the Rosa Burn, when it needs to be from Brodick’s pier head.  However, you can be reassured that there will be no rounded, indistinct blobs named Geal Charn. There’s plenty of examples with that profile along our route, but they are easily overwhelmed by the kaleidoscopic array of colours, the contortions of shape, the convolutions and striations, of ziggurats and Neapolitan confections, that mix to make an Andean chain.  All incomparable and irrelevant to a home country comparison.

It’s only in the quiet innocence of early morning, as we climb out of our coral and rise above the low sheltering hills, that we see the result of last night’s action. The Black Cuillin of yesterday, has morphed into a sleet rimed mount, steep buttresses naked black against the sun-glazed, snow-choked gullies. But with the definition of a low morning light, it’s less of a Skye black gabbro ridge and more a multiple plane of flat topped mesas and red rock tors, of lobster claws and phallic glyphs. To westward, the Assynt wastes retain their singular, individual presences, cold and smudged in iron grey snow, turn to nor’ward and a rank of triangles are ranged out, marching along the horizon.

Man’s modern imposition has receded in it’s intent, yesterday’s gradients are still the same gradients of today, only their not lactated by fatigue and storm angst. Yesterday’s thunder heads have withered, yesterday’s pylons have wandered off down another valley. This benign morning I can travel with some new ghosts. contemplate on a humans ability to survive in this apparently austere environment. Speculate, unsuccessfully, for I don’t have the cultural memory, on the thought that the heard you tend today will be the same herd you tender to, two generations from now. The mud walls that you raised out of, and constructed from the earth, will in time meld back to it again, your stone shelter will dissolve to rickle of stones. Measured in generations, a lucid reminder of man’s determination to survive, measured in eons, a morbid reminder of man’s eventual release.

The ‘Lords of the Spheres’ have all moved away to the north-east, out over the lowland Amazonian jungle, gathering up a new armament of grapeshot hail, a new clutch of thunderbolts, a new supply of fork lightning, fanning up a new tempestuous rage, preparing to pump, yet again, the spinning tops of those poor, haunted dust devils. Hoping to hunt down, what they missed yesterday, to catch some unprotected cyclists before they can make the sanctuary of town and an hosteria. 

‘onest sur, a dun ma hamework, but see, the dug ate it, like’

If it takes the roll of a double six to escape Cumbernauld, you’ll need a treble seven for Potosi. A city of one signpost. So we walk the route through the narrow calles, the one-way streets, out from the old colonial centre, down to the main road. The Navigator has, in the interest of planning research, gone to the length of visiting the municipal visitor centre, more in hope than expectation, gets a map and asks directions. Yet a sixth sense has rung a wee bell, the wavering pen line that they’ve scored out doesn’t flow with confidence, so she seeks a second opinion. Normally we would just head off and play ‘escape the city’ game, using chance and hazard, climbing the ladders and sliding the snakes. Playing the ancient Indian game of Moksha Patam; ‘The Path to Liberation’, only we’re playing in a place with but one sign, and by a variation to the accepted norm: starting from the top right, and concluding anywhere on the bottom rung. Any errors in the vertiginous alleys of Potosi will be a heart-thumping, thigh-screaming, slither back to the start. She tackles one of the many tour companies that run jeeps to Uyuni and they offer a different version. It’s why we walk the initial, supposedly most problematical, part of the escape route, and that I now know that these old colonial properties don’t have gutters. Streamers of rainwater are cascading off the tiled roofs, right into the middle of the narrow pavements and down my neck. Funnels of road wash from the upper levels spout at ankle level, flushing debris and lubricant across our now slippery, steep paths.

It’s early Sunday morning and we roll a six to start, set of before the trucks take to the new week. The road should be quiet, or so the theory goes. True, the trucks aren’t out but the drunks are. Staggering, weaving, sleeping. On foot and behind the wheel. This makes for some interesting decision-making when asking for directions. Normally we try to hit on the student types, generally with success; only today they are not of this world. The old men who seem to be so easily charmed by the Navigator, aren’t up yet, so we resort to the colectivo drivers and the taxi men, at one point even following one through a chicane of criss-crossing broken roads, rail lines and contra-running down one way streets.

We’ve tried the map, but the blank areas on the plan that we’d taken to be cliffs, mines or slag heaps, turned out to be ‘dragons dens’. The bits the cartographer either forgot to explore or were lost in transcription. The places the old mapmakers filled with mythical serpents and sea monsters. 

Of course we enentually roll the treble seven; it just takes several attempts. We nearly circumnavigate the board, or at least the rotating restaurant on top of the tower in the park. Discover that Real Potosi are playing the tiger stripes of yellow and black, that sunrise is not too early to be purchasing your home team’s harlequin jester cap of lavender and white, or to top up on last night’s inebriation. A tour that takes in a long, distended queue of men waiting for…I’m not sure what, but as it’s Sunday it can’t be the usual suspect; a bank. The half-hidden settlement lake of leaden slate sediment from the zinc and tin mine, or the ominous translucent green burn that oozes from a pipe. The blown, discarded virginal white swan, carved from Styrofoam, that’s fallen from yesterday’s wedding car. It’s a tour that the municipal tourist officials don’t sell and might not want the visitor to make; it’s the tour that the travelling cyclist always and inevitably finds. 

We did do our homework, we just didn’t do it all. Didn’t follow through to the conclusion. Had we, we would have found that the single road sign with it’s solitary name was the short cut that would have saved a long tour and lost a short adventure.    

 The official height for the world’s highest city is confidently quoted as 4060 metres, which, before we arrived, led me to assume that it might be a level city, possibly set out on a rolling plain, with a mountain for a backdrop. When the reality is radically different. It’s perched precariously on Cerro Rico’s steep flank. One decent seismic shake and you can’t help feeling that it could simply slide away, like a woollen blanket from a tumbled bed. Yet only a small microcosm of that quoted population can claim this elevation, possibly those who share the contour line that runs through the  top step of the ‘Casa de Gobierno’. From those at the top of the hill, to those in the basement, is a drop through multiple levels of history, through timelines of exploitation and degradation, all in the name of religious and old world aggrandisement. An history of slavery and indentured labour, of greed and hypocrisy, of callous indifference for their fellow man.  A city where truth says, if the mine doesn’t kill you, the mercury in the refining plant will. A city where it’s clear, even today you’re either old or dead before your half century‘s out. An historical city built on cant and pious fraud, that today is sustained by the concept of a lottery, where the probability of winning ‘el Gordo’ are similarly minuscule, but unlike a national lotto, you will be killed by playing their odds. It’s a city waiting for the invention of the three dimensional holographic map, where a flat, two dimensional chart just can’t manage to explain the place with any truth or clarity.

We were to have the same experiences with La Paz and with Cusco, places with altitude and gradients, with narrow street widths and uncharted staircases, that defy a cycling culture. We’ve pushed our way up one too many slippery cobbled streets, usually to the encouragement of a taxi with attitude. These are cities for parking up the bikes and taking to ‘Shank’s pony’, to walking, then waking in the morning, stiff from exercising unaccustomed calf muscles. Walking through history. We spend a few days exploring the old colonial quarter, wandering up and down the steep streets, the immediate streetscape changes, but the outer views are essentially the same.   
      
Look downhill, down any narrow alley of polished cobbles and your view will disappear through a cradle of electrical wires, down into a vanishing point of balconied houses. Look to your left or right, the street will roll off the side of the mountain’s flank, leaving a distant view of far off hill horizons. Now turn around. You’ve been presented to a Morloch. A brooding monster that has expected and extracted extreme and terrible sacrifices. You’re in an audience with the enormity that is Cerro Rico. It’s unremitting presence, it’s unrelenting essence is a dark shadow that fills in the space between city and sky. A black shadow that falls across all the intricate stone carvings, the delicate wood mouldings  that festoon  the basilica’s façades and altars. With it’s excoriated skin and scoured-out entrails, it’s spoil heaps and it‘s ‘pieces of eight’, it once created the world’s richest men and the world’s richest city, driving the economy of old world Spain and consequently, the history of colonising Europe. The city and the mountain, the prison and the servant, ended up, one and the same. 

Yogurt, butter and milk from the ‘lacteos’, fine. Pan from the bread lady, simple. Bananas from the fruit stand and onions from the vegetable stall, they’re on opposite sides of the market hall, but we can cope with that. But where do you find salt? Now if this was Argentina, the answer would be very simple, in every shop that wasn’t a pharmacy. Argentines have a salt addiction. It’s what makes that lomo steak such a culinary delight. One day I watched the foreman for a construction squad preparing the siesta lunch. There was easily a kilo of meat per man. This is not unusual; it was the abandon with which the salt was thrown at the meat, on the hotplate, three-finger pinches, repeated, repeated and repeated. He won’t be preparing any vegetables – they’re poison. This was mainlining sodium chloride. 

Bolivia is not a meat culture and vegetables will appear in both the soup and the mains, as standard and not as an additional side dish. It’s not bland, it’s been salted. So where do they buy the salt? Much the same question could be asked about the firecrackers. The Forager asks the same repeated question at each and every stall, ‘hay sal?’, they look, they search, they shake their heads. Yet we’re only a short way from the world’s largest salar, a salt deposit that would out-supply any Argentine carnivore, yet we can’t find the salt. The suspicion is that we’ve just not yet found the appropriate section in Potosi’s market.

We’re clean out, but there’s no problem keeping up the input.  Perspiration output is down from Paraguayan Chaco levels, and we’ve been able to purchase salted bananas and salted broad beans to go in a trail mix along side the candy coated quinoa and the sugar coated peanuts. But that doesn’t solve the salt for the morning porridge.  At this rate I might be reduced to an adulterated  Anglification and the use of…..sugar.

Uyuni, and we’re now on the edge that ‘world’s largest’ salt pan. Still we’re encountering those shaken heads, those pointed fingers, suggestions that there might be a solution around the next corner. We’ve circumnavigated the market hall, wandered the pavements and slowly we’re being channelled off to a far corner, up an ever narrowing alley. We step past one sleeping stallholder, around a heap of peeled corn husks, stepping over the long neck of a skinned llama carcase, eventually to a stand and dealer. We have our fix, our small innocent bag of salt. Our eight pence of spend. Intriguing, the back of the package has a statement from the Bolivian government’s Ministry of Health and Sport extolling the benefits of salt in combatting thyroid deficiency and cretinism. A marked contrast to virtually every Argentine product that has a warning against salt.

Such a basic commodity, one that can be so easily taken for granted in our western based, consumer centred society. Where  travelling re-supply is generally easy; it’s a substance that’s stacked beside the lumpy curry powder and dried out thyme in an hostel’s leftover cupboard.  Not so Bolivia. Another subtle difference, another small acculturation, another timely reminder that you’re in a different culture.

The ‘Laverap’ is a generic term and an Americas institution. ‘Lave’ as in wash and ‘rap’ as in fold and sometimes iron. You’ll see the hand-painted board at the side of the road pointing to an innocent house, an anonymous shed, an unlikely shop, a garage forecourt. There all collection points for the cleaners. We’re down and out in Potosi, in an hostal with no clothes washing basins, so it seems like time to experience this institution. Much of our ‘ropa’ has undergone cursory hand washing, with the occasional assault on trouser seats with a scrubbing brush. It’s a lick and a promise, a light freshen up. But leather saddle stains require a heavy duty chemical attack. So gathering up all that we’re not actually wearing, we head of to find the place. This isn’t Whitehorse, Yukon, where we sat in the laundrette in our swimming costumes, watching the sum total of our garments go round and round. Potosi is at 4,000 metres, it’s too Catholic, too cold for that. Weigh the load, collect the docket, come back at six. So simple.

It’s when we get back to our room that night, I’m delighted to see that our kit has acquired a Bolivian touch. You wish to identify and assert ownership of your llamas? Tie brightly coloured wool to their chest or ears. Want to identify a customers clothing in a mixed wash load? Do the same. All our items now come with a vivid purple woollen thread.

I wonder what the fathers and brothers of the ‘Company of Jesus’ would make of the fact that one of their rooms has been transformed into a gringo howff.  An order who adhered to abstinence and austerity, abnegation and renunciation, whilst we appear to be of the order buy and hoard, gear freak and technophile. Our bikes perched in one corner, our panniers exploded, disgorging their acquisition and accumulation across the wooden floor. The sparking plug trying to power up a reaffirmation, a temperance of coffee and mate de coca.

We’re staying at the ‘Hostal Compaña de Jesús’, the Jesuits whose missions we visited over to the east in Paraguay. A monastery, a complex of buildings that fit together like loose jigsaw pieces. A small secluded courtyard, off which thread passages and tight alleyways, canyons where the sky is a mere strip, a line of light a few inches wide. The room was busy even before we arrived, with it’s three large beds, each with it’s smothering stack of quilts and woollen blankets, table, TV and bedside cabinets. Add our detonated collection and our cell becomes cosy, then with each succeeding day of occupation, entropic disorder sets in. A tent is easier to manage. Yet this chaotic eruption is a small price to pay for three centuries of imagined history.
Did the brother who worked or slept here, trip every night on the low half step at the door during his nocturnal wanderings, as he rose to chant Matins at midnight?  Did he curse the thin glass door that would do admirable service in a china cabinet to a latter day generation of Victorians? Did his conscience prick him for the inestimable mine deaths that plundered all the wealth of silver that he sent back to his Church and Crown in old-world Spain? Did it bother him that all his places of worship faced not the rising new day sun, but the hypocrisy of silver-rich Cerro Rico, to the mammon south? Or was he too busy persuading the rich, conscience-stricken mine owners to make a sin offering? A daughter to enter the purdah of Santa Teresa, perhaps, so that they could acquire an easy passage through the ‘pearly gates’ when their time came? And having accomplished this feat, further persuade them to endow the convent with many trappings of extravagance,  ‘A surplice of gold and silver thread for the Bishop when he visits, would be nice’.

In this building it’s hard to see where the old stops and the restored starts, but there is an aura of calm, of peace that pervades the place, that must have pervaded throughout the centuries. A single dry leaf, caught in an eddy, rustles around the courtyard, the wind a precursor for the afternoon deluge. The dirty underside of a thunderhead blots out my small sky, the skeletal shadows of the passion flower are scrubbed away, replaced by a diffused, flat light. The threat is there, but calm remains in my quiet monastical corner. A peace accentuated and in contrast to the amplification of an event that rolls out from the plaza. I’m convinced I’ve just heard Andean pipe rap. The bugling horns of jammed and frustrated cars, the barking dogs arguing with the crumping thunder. The deluge, when it hits, blankets over all other sound, the amping speakers are shorted out.  But the respite is short lived. The klaxons slowly intrude, the traffic still constipated, whilst lost in my hermitage, I’m quiet and dry, lulled by a modern melodic canticle; the dripping water in the tin downpipe. A piece that starts with a rapid vibrato, moves to a wavering tremolo and concludes slowly, dissipating to a lethargic protracted conclusion. The second half of the concert is just as modern, but not nearly as soothing. A score that might have been composed in Detroit, Birmingham or Linwood, but no more.  Antiphonal, as two collectivos debate supremacy of one junction, verses of frustration, exchanges that nobody listens to, all to a background of a car alarm.  An habañera of auto horns that dance on and on, incessant, discordant, a nocturne that will play long into the dark.   

My spiritual, monastically minded tenant wouldn’t have known these interludes, he was too busy constructing ‘A silver bridge all the way back to Madrid’.

We’ve no idea what height we’re at, we’ve no idea what the road ahead might do, for mapped contours and spot height are but a Scot’s Ordnance Survey obsession. All we have is a distance to Potosi, except that the sum of the road engineer’s chain marks and our odometers don’t add up to the total on the green roadside sign. Will it be the level plain of Jujuy, or will it be like yesterday, when the road gave us a repetitive succession of long, steep climbs and hot rim descents? A long, sweaty collection of climbed metres and a poor accumulation of altitude. Somewhere we need to find 400m before we can enter the world’s highest town. The temperature at night should be a height indicator, but we keep hearing the same mantra: it’s too hot for this time of year. The beds in the hostals come with a crush of blankets, yet we sleep on top all night, hoping for a cooling breeze to come in the open window.

What we do get is different from before. We end up in a valley, a road rising and falling as it clings to the valley sides, through cuttings of loose, unconsolidated shale embedded with giant granite boulders that are only waiting to tumble and bomb the asphalt, leaving small craters with a radiation of cracks. This is shaky country, one tremor would close the road; one deluge, wash it away. The route keeps clear of the scarce, sparse marginal cropping land set beside the dry river bed. Small parcels of corn and beans, patches of blazing emerald green, connected by a capillary of thin irrigation channels. Flowering peppers and greeting willows sun shelter the encampments of anonymous adobe steadings that are visually sucked into to land. Tall, fastigate poplars offer exclamations alongside the submerged river in it’s dry bed. The hillside a reversion to dry, heavy thorn country, of flowering cacti and acacia scrub.

We climb up through the differing vegetative bands, slowly reaching the golden tussock country and the return of…. The Eucalyptus. At over 3,500m, there they are, standing long, tall and straight, superior regimental ranks. Either the visa restrictions aren’t onerous enough or they’re back to lambast me, to mock for questioning their utility, their sheer ability and power to survive, thrive and colonise. Eventually they too must give way to the llama-grazed tussocks, the cropping reduced to minuscule parcels in terraced plots. Shrunk beyond my comprehension of viability, lost beyond the tenuous touch of my perceived civilisation.

My progress fractures into shorter and shorter spells of activity, the pauses for recovery more frequent. Each and every vehicle sounds it’s horn to announce it’s intention to pass – it’s written in the national highway code. I can ignore it, even forget that it’s a warning of intention and not a greeting. To respond and wave is an invitation for the bike to visit the gutter. Then one of these intrusion catches my wrath: ’F… off, I know you’re there, I heard you long before you saw me’, but swearing only burns oxygen, the muscles are stiff with lactates and the brain’s depleted enough already.

We later calculate the height to be around 4,500 m, a new P-B pb,(loaded).

We had intended to break up this section into two days and we even stopped at an hotel that claimed to have a room, eaten and paid for the establishment’s lunch. We think that ‘señora muy vieja’ understood our request, she then disappeared, never to return. No room materialises, so we give up and push on uphill. Did they have a place, but felt it was inadequate or no rooms but didn’t want to admit the fact?

Now we have a second day to tag onto this morning’s. Although fed, we’re still running on a dearth of calories. The last few k-posts are slow, the last two hills we push up. Iconic Cerro Rico mocks us, sitting cold, bold and close, yet the town will not materialise. Crest that last rise as the sun sinks below the horizon, there far, far below is Potosi. Now I understand our lactated legs, the melting hail and the strong cold wind. This is high.

Descending, racing the dark and the rush hour, dropping into yet another Americas town. Into a maelstrom of litter and shanty, broken paviors and billowing fumes, wandering drunk miners and shiny Land Cruisers. The Navigator’s age or grey hair has it’s usual miraculous effect: stop and look perplexed, which only attracts out from the pavement a solicitous gent, an enquiry and help with a direction. Down, down, threading narrower and narrower streets, deeper and deeper into history. Down and out, into the happy ambience of evening paseo and a collectivo-clogged plaza. Map to hand the Navigator tries to plot our position, propositions a local who says.. ‘Potosi’.  A joker who points us to an hostal, and another ‘two in one’ day.

This place is growing on me, even if tomorrow I’ll be floored with amoebic dysentery.

‘A silence more musical than any song‘……CG Rossetti.
Pitched in the lee of a Black Acacia, the sole piece of vegetation that’s dared to raise it’s crown above donkey graze that’s offered any semblance of shelter all afternoon. We’ve been hammered and grit blasted by a Zonda, a southerly hairdryer wind, that has offered questionable assistance on some of the worst washboard ripio we have ever encountered. Now these acacias down on the pampa are an obnoxious weed, chain sawed mercilessly. Up on the Jujuy Puna they’re shelter and the sole indicator of habitation, as the adobe structures disappear into a background of dust and scrub. With the refuge comes a problem…..thorns. A lance that will pierce even the best of armoured tyres and they will gravitate relentlessly towards any inflatable mats. Yet battered cyclists aren’t the only souls hunting shelter, if the evidence of the churned up sand is to be believed. We might get company tonight.

This poses yet another conundrum. Do we leave the bikes in the ‘kissing’ position, propped together, only to have the wind play havoc and topple them into a tangle? Or to pre-empt the event and place them ‘missionary’, then have a donkey play gooseberry, and become entangled in the spokes?

Zondas usually die out a few hours after sunset, and then the contrast is sublime. Suddenly the landscape is friendly, an utter silence descends, a tangible quiet that’s solidified by a full moon. An altered  space that has no place for butt-battering ripio, no hidden pools of impenetrable sand, no salt-laced grit storms, no black thoughts for the integrity of our bikes. All these demons are held at bay, only waiting in a silent truth, waiting the return of sunrise.

Something disturbs my sleep, a slight footfall maybe or just a last shiver of Zonda rustling the leaves. Yet all is now quiet. Then a donkey starts his bray, a whinny that opens with an expectorant of sputum, a smoker’s cough and builds into an eeyore-eeyoring. A doleful, hard-done-to animal that seems to carry all the weight and woes of the world. The call is taken up by the next family group, and passes out and across the land, an echo that has no wall or cliff to bounce off, yet resounds and reverberates, accentuating the silent peace.

It could be the pedal, it could be the bottom bracket , it could be the frame. Alright, Bad, Disastrous. Or just something else. Only the creak comes with the hills. Effort or knee joints? So we blissfully ignored the issue all the way through flat Corrientes. It’s when the Missiones mumps encroach that we realise that we had better do something about the problem, ignoring the easy option of OSI…JCO is no longer an option. I’ve even stopped riding behind the Navigator, so distracting is the persistent intrusion. The saddle is suggested, yet the noise evidence suggests metal on metal, and low down. Yet it’s a well known fact that an ominous sound can travel the length of the frame, utterly confusing diagnosis. Yet there’s no play in any of the vital areas. Twist the saddle, vague creak. Maybe it’s catching at some point, maybe a wedge in there. Maybe we – OSI…JCO. Too many maybes, the Andes are sitting upon our horizon, we really have to do something, sometime soon.

The other bike decides to take a sicky in sympathy. Gear jumping, but only on hills, but as Corrientes is a single gear province it’s OSI…JCO…yet again.

Start with the simple things. Tighten the saddle bolt a half turn, a quarter turn on the gear adjuster. It took longer to find the tools in the bottom of my pannier than it did to effect a total cure for both sick cycles. A case of ‘a stitch in time saving nine’ out trumping Oh Sod It…Just Carry On.

Imagine a  mathematical set of Venn diagrammatical circles or a stream of soapy bubbles drifting through the gentle shade of the plaza. A square of tall, concrete Saints and plinthed heroes, knuckle-bolled pepper trees and incongruous date palms, resplendent at over 3,000 m altitude.  An iglesia on one side that’s toll belling in a gathering of the Sunday faithful, on the other, the dull whump of floor hammers and a squad who will have taken Mass last night; and this morning are laying the new gas main, entirely by hand. In the first bubbled circle is the convened ‘sewing bee’, the bangle pleaters in their Asian cottons and dusty feet, tie-dyes and tattoos, guitars and dreadlocks. Lotus sat, plaiting wire and composing songs.  A genre of youth that bemuses and amuses the two Bolivañas who sway through between them, the swinging layers of skirts, black plaited pigtails and short thick stockings, bowler hats and poly-prop bags.

Now to this equation, add the gringo trail. A phalanx of the Saxon fair and pale skinned, the girls in short shorts, the males no better screened against the glare rising off the part-broken open pavements, the Brits cooking from crustaceous blue to lobster pink. A troop of lost souls searching for a cambio to raise funds to pay for a horse ride up the ’quebrada’ today and a jeep ride to the ’salars’ tomorrow.  A company of young professionals, individuals who’ve only just met on the train down or the bus up, their sole common interest to find a quorum of four, for a five day tour of southern Bolivia. A salt lake and a stone tree, a rock salt hotel and a train graveyard, a smoking volcano and a Dali desert, a mantra of corrugated roads and endless driving.  Some here to tick off a set of natural superlatives, others at the behest of their ‘round the world’ ticket and an accident of happenstance.  Yet I envy and sympathise with these lost souls. I can still remember the bewilderment and chastisement by a severe Doña of Franco’s Spain, for the affront of wearing shorts and of eating a pear in public. I envy them their near-anonymity of numbers, the chance to hide within the herd, for today we are ‘sin bici’, for once below the radar, no longer a centre of attention.

Just four of many sub-sets, that can only merge and meld their spheres for a few moments in the close confines of the covered market place, or the stall-strewn pavements. Amongst the plethora of goods, and the exchange of Bolivars. The hardwares and the clothwares, the fruit and the vegetables, the bloodbath of llama and goat, the tiny dark alimentacions, the hot empanadas and the cold heladerias, the boiled humitas and the fried rellenos. Where we and all life are a floor show, for the dressed up baptismal party leaving the church, the triple generational family sitting, supping on a luminous confection from the ice cream shop and the wheelchair bound granny who’s determined to assist me with this entry.