Mountain road turns cold, foggy and dark towards Sucre

Day 19 (312 km)

We had to change some money and received 6.91 Bolivianos to the dollar and there was a Casa de Cambio next to our hotel, left around 9 am and saw a sign Sucre 500 km. On our way out of town, we stopped at various gas stations, but none wanted to sell us gas, not even for 3 times more the money, what is the price for vehicles with foreign plates, because none of them was set up to process the special receipts, they had to give us. None of the attendants wanted to take the risk to give us gas, because every gas station in populated areas have video cameras installed, so we ended up buying a 20 liter jerry can for $ 3.00 and send a moto taxi for $ 1.00 to fill it up, while we were hiding around the corner. After sending him 2 times we had our tanks full for the cheap price and continued towards the mountains with an additional piece of equipment tied up to the back of the moto.

                  The road was paved but narrow, windy and when you least expect a pot hole or turned into a piece of dirt road for 100 meter or so. Soon we were climbing to an altitude of 1500 meters with stunning views, but the last 100 km was pure dirt again and rapidly we were exceeding 3000 meter (10000 Ft). Around 3 pm we were driving through the clouds and it became foggy to almost zero visibility and the temperature dropped significant to the point it became very cold and dark and had to start looking for additional sweaters.

5:30 in the evening, we came down the mountain and saw a small village, deep in the valley and decided to stop and luckily it had a small hotel and probably we were the first tourist they ever seen, because this place “Pojo” was on a dead end road in the valley, away from the main road.

Had some chicken, a beer and start to prepare for next day to get to Sucre, according the map on an even smaller road, It make totally no sense to ask anybody about road conditions, names of places or directions, because none of them have the faintest idea,  where they living themselves.

Anyway, it was a very interesting day to get finally in the mountains after being been in the low lands for the last 3 weeks and this is just the beginning, we not in the Andes yet!