Day 54

 39,782 – 40,106   324 Miles today (17,406 Miles Overall

Uyuni, Bolivia – San Pedro De Atacama

For how nice this hotel and bed was I sure slept like shit. Lots of anxiety the last few nights and i’m pretty sure it’s due to the bike having issues. I packed up fairly quickly and was on the road by 7:10. Thankfully I was smart today and put my neck buff on along with my heated gloves because it was cold! It was 45F when I left the hotel. I had a 3.5 hour ride to the border crossing into Chile.

The morning started out with a shitty shitty paved road if you’d even call it paved. It was maybe 30% paved with a ton of holes. I had 120 miles to go so I wasn’t thrilled. But it got much worse. There was a detour and they made traffic on a dirt path next to the highway they were building and paving. There wasn’t much traffic as I passed maybe 5 cars in an hour and one passed me from behind. The dirt road was hard packed in spots with some deep soft sand so I stopped doing 40-50 on it because I almost ate it a few times with the deep sand. It was also bad with the washboards on all of it so I pulled over to take the camera out of the box and put it in my pannier so it wouldn’t damage the sensors in the camera.

After about an hour of this shitty riding it got way worse, The road started cutting through some uphill and downhill spots and it turned into deep sand for a few kms in a row. I couldn’t stop because if I stopped and tried to move again my back tire would just bury itself and I would be stuck in the middle of nowhere. To make matters worse, maybe 8-18 wheelers came head on with me going the other direction and the amount of dust their trucks put up blinded me. I wish I had it recorded on my go pro but I couldn’t see my hands after the trucks passed me. I was terrified of another trunk being right behind one another because they would kill me and not even know it. I couldn’t stop for any of this due to the fear of getting stuck and I am very thankful I didn’t crash once even though I came real close about 10 times.

I was so thankful to make it out of this at the end of the ride. The road turned back into hard packed dirt for another 30-40 miles at the end but with some soft patches of sand so I couldn’t go too fast to get to the border still. The views were incredible when I was able to look away from the road to enjoy the view. So many mountains in the distance with volcanoes. One of the volcanoes had white smoke coming out of it the entire time I saw it. It’s really a desert out here in the middle of nowhere. This is starting to look like the Chile I hear about.

I eventually made it to the border which was a piece of cake. 30 minutes to get done with it all. I hit the road and thankfully it was paved. The views here were beautiful. Wide open land with mountains in the distance and salt flats everywhere. It got a bit boring after a while but it was still fun. Long straight roads with no turns after a while and I decided to pull over for food at about 2pm. I didn’t get breakfast in Uyuni because nothing was open yet. I couldn’t keep the bike in sight for lunch so I decided to roll the dice and turn the bike off. I was pretty anxious the whole lunch and rushed eating so fast but thankfully the bike started up right away. I decided I’m going to start rolling the dice more as I get closer to Mendoza so the issue can come up again so the mechanic can see it. With my luck i’ll show up there and we can’t get the bike to show the issue.

I finished my ride to San Pedro de Atacama and got myself a SIM card along with a nice hostel room. I’m gonna stay here for two nights and check out the desert in the surrounding area as I have some time to kill before I have to be in Mendoza.