Hitting the dirt road to Chile with a time bomb strapped to my back

Day 26 (205 km)

      Dead battery this morning for Scotty, so we had to dismantle the bike to get to the battery, filled her up with acid and re tightened all connection and was lucky she started on the last juice the battery had. Left nine to start the 600 km dirt road to Chile and stop at various lagunas. The first 100 km went pretty fast and reached the place of San Cristobal, which had a nice old church! We filled up for the last possible time and would hope this would make it to Chile with the already 10 liter of spare gas; I had in a container strapped to the bike.

The second part of today, the road deteriorated rapidly and we almost came to stand still due to the excessive amount of sand, what made it almost impossible to stay on the bike and soon we were only doing 15 km per hour and we were back in 4000 + meters high and bright sun.

Saw my first flamingo’s today at one of the lakes, we passed. Snowcapped mountains showed up in the distance and after riding five and half hours, covering 205 km we reached Villa Mar, a small village in the middle of nowhere. This is usual an overnight stop for all the jeeps making tours in this area and we ended up in a resort style hotel and they gave us a great price  as being the only customers and everything was first class, such as hot shower, cold beer, 3 course dinner and decent beds.

                We did some more maintenance, such as 

lubricating the chains and the noticed, Scotty lost his license plate, so I gave him one of my old ones, made some changes in it and put some mud on it and all was ready to go again. Our license plates only differs one number on the end, so it was easy to 

do.

              Found out the road tomorrow is even worse as today and probably will reach Laguna Colarado a 150 km away late in the afternoon! Looks like we not covering much distance in Bolivia, due to the quality of the roads and many flats and repairs, so have to cover greater distances to get to Uruguay in 2 weeks’ time, otherwise reschedule the route or leave the bikes in Argentina, where they can stay up to 8 months, if granted by officials, so we store them there till the end of the year to continue!