A fellow travel blogger once claimed that they should have been presented with an “I Survived Bolivia” shirt upon departure, and I don’t think truer words have ever been spoken. After a great ordeal at the border (which I described in the prior blog), I reached La Paz and promptly started vomiting. Bolivia is notorious for food poisoning, so this was no surprise and I expected a quick recovery. Nope!
I got progressively worse, and in my weakened state, struggled to sort out a doctors visit with the little Spanish I have. Luckily, a friend I’d met at the border (who speaks perfect Spanish and was in great health), arrived to town just in time:
Bolivian healthcare is suboptimal, so there are private services that bring sick travelers to tourist clinics in an “ambulance” of sorts (as seen above). The whole ordeal cost $100, and while I lay in the clinic crying as they drew blood (I hate needles), only to be diagnosed with Salmonella, I began to wonder if cheap healthcare was the only thing Bolivia had going for it.
About a week later I felt normal again, so it was time to climb mountains. My goal was to summit Huayna Potosi, a 19,974 foot peak outside La Paz:
To prepare for the altitude on Huayna Potosi, I first climbed Pico Austria, a 17,500 foot one day trekking peak:
I’m in the red jacket in both photos above, which were taken by my guide. On Austria Peak (and also Huayna Potosi), I used a guide service called Jiwaki, which specializes in guiding backpackers up Bolivian mountains.
After Austria Peak, I spent a day resting in La Paz and then set off on a 3-day Huayna Potosi expedition with my climbing partner, James. I had met James (who is also long-term traveling) in the street at the border of Bolivia and Argentina. He had said to me: “you know the border is closed right,” I said “oh that sucks,” and we’d been friends ever since.
For the climb, James and I were joined by a great group of fellow backpackers (assembled by the Jiwaki guide service), one of whom was my Australian friend, Chris. Four months ago, Chris was my classmate at a Chilean Spanish School during the very first week of both of our trips. We’d since been traveling a similar route at different paces, and finally overlapped in La Paz.
On day one, we departed La Paz and drove to “Low Camp” at 15,500 feet, where we spent the afternoon on technical training. Here’s a photo of our accommodations at Low Camp, and a photo of James in the technical training:
On day two, we hiked to “High Camp” at 17,000 feet, then spent the afternoon resting. Here are two photos of High Camp:
Bedtime at High Camp was 6:00pm, since our summit climb would start just after midnight (climbing is safer at night, since heat from the sun can cause portions of the route to collapse). No one slept well, and many of us (myself included), didn’t sleep at all. At midnight, we all got up, put on our climbing gear, split into our climbing teams (two climbers per guide), and started to hike.
Hiking at that altitude was excruciating. I could barely breathe, but managed to avoid the nausea and headaches that turned many other climbers around. Five hours into the climb, the sun started to rise:
Shortly after sunrise, our guide suggested we eat some sugar to stay alert, since we’d allegedly need to really focus for the last hour of the ascent. We’d soon see why this was the case, when we came upon the final ridge-line to the summit, which was an absolute “no-fall” zone:
Here’s another photo of a few other climbers on this ridge-line (this photo was taken an hour later from the summit):
As you can see, we had to hike up a two-foot wide path with significant vertical drops on either side. James, myself, and the guide were roped to one another, but not to the mountain, so a fall by either of us could have been deadly. To make matters worse, we were delirious from the altitude (and hadn’t slept). I was freaked out, but continued on, and the last few steps to the summit were the highlight of my trip so far. Here’s a photo of the last few steps, in which you can also see a victim of altitude sickness seated behind me:
Here’s a video of the Jiwaki team on top:
And two other photos from the summit:
We spent about ten minutes on the summit and then started our descent, during which Bolivia nearly killed me again. James was sick from the altitude and struggling to walk, and I was attached to James by rope. There were steep cliffs all around, so this set up was not ideal. Just below the summit ridge-line, on another narrow path adjacent to a steep vertical cliff, James fell and started sliding down the mountain, tied to me. Luckily, our guide had seen him struggling, had preemptively placed a metal screw in the ice, and had tied our rope to the screw, which successfully stopped the fall. Without it, we would both have broken bones at a minimum. We were shaken up, but continued to descend and made it down in one piece. Here’s a photo of another climbing team descending ahead of us:
All things considered, the Huayna Potosi climb was awesome, and while I’m not sure this is necessarily a good thing, it was also remarkably cheap. Jiwaki charged $120 USD for the 3-day climb, which is comparable to a summit of Mount Rainier in the U.S., a ~$2,500 experience.
After the climb, I rested for two days in La Paz, during which I experienced the strangest thing on the South American backpacking circuit. Every day at 1:00pm, in a public park in La Paz, a guy named Crazy Dave gives an hour long speech about the 16 years he spent in prison for cocaine smuggling. Every backpacker in the city shows up at least once to the speech, which gained popularity entirely through word of mouth. As another blogger put it, Dave has “main character energy” (he’s also certifiably insane). If you’re ever in La Paz, head to Sucre Plaza at 1:00pm. You don’t need to find Dave, he’ll find you. If you’re interested but not headed to La Paz anytime soon, here’s a short clip:
Post Huayna Potosi recovery, it was time to head North into Peru — a two-day, three-bus process. James was headed in the same direction, so we set off together, hoping to fare better than we had with the Bolivian border crossing (a low bar). We fared much better, and crossed with great ease into Peru, where I figured that surely Bolivia would be done trying to kill me. Nope!
The great curse of Bolivian food poisoning returned. Unable to board the third bus, I spent the night vomiting in a $15 hotel room in a bleak Peruvian border town. I can assure you that a $15 hotel is not where you want to be with any sort of illneess. Luckily, the next morning, I was well enough to board the bus to Arequipa, a really nice city in the South of Peru. I’m here now, writing the blog at this nice cafe:
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