Day 12 Sucre to Uyuni

The journey starts well with a good tar seal road until the lads left the navigator behind and went 15k the wrong way before I could catch them. We managed to get back on course and made good time until we hit roadworks which hampered us for the rest of the journey.

The scenery was mostly was the same dry mountain terrain with occasional vegetation until we popped over the hill at Potosi - we could see the Cordillera rising in the distance to the west a dry unforgiving plain that seemed to slowly rise to the sky. We climbed this for the rest of the day.

As we came over the last set of mountains the Salar de Uyuni glowed a bright white below us as far as the eye could see. We set of to Uyuni to find accommodation at a nice orderly hour of 2pm or so. Our plan was to have a rest then head for the Salar De Uyuni for a quick photo shoot in the late afternoon. This gave us some time to prepare for the desert journey ahead filling our fuel cells, hunting for spare tyre tubes and re affirming our route and references.

We headed out to the salt lake via some cool sand tracks - with no loads on the bikes it was just like riding the easy tracks at Woodhill. about 20 km in the small vegetation gave way to the vast sea of salt as far as the eye could see. We road about 5 km in and just parked up and soaked up the late afternoon sun and the surreal white bubbly landscape - again another out of world experience.

This blog would be boring if I didn't throw in another of the "Catastrophic Quatro's" famous disasters. Brian rolls up on the salt flat where we are all parked and tells us the "f***ing Pig's" engine is about to fall out!!! A quick diagnoses by Sam C reveals that the Alloy frame has snapped where the left foot peg connects. This is disastrous for our schedule especially considering it would need some time to repair and we have only just caught up from previous mechanical issues. On closer inspection the crack has been there for some time, and has finally gone all the way. So strike 2 for the "pig" and it could well be out.

We head back from what was meant to be an awe inspiring photo shoot, all thinking about how this would end. By asking locals and generally searching all of Uyuni we find a small welding workshop that will fix the break for us in the morning - we calculate that we would need to be on the road before noon if we are to make the middle of the desert by sun down. We prepare the bike that night by stripping the back wheel and suspension ready for the weld in the morning. We still have no spare tubes - so we will be looking for those in the morning as well.

Fingers crossed - Destination Desert Hotel tommorrow.....