A "Rest" day in La Paz

 

We all went to bed last night believing that Nigel’s car has been sorted and that our rest day could possibly be just that. As the military say “no plan survives contact” and once again we need to replot and replan.

 

 

 

The border crossing from Bolivia connecting to Puno is clearly a non-starter. The crossing has been closed for 60 days and opened yesterday. 210 vehicles were allowed through, so there remains a huge backlog. What likelihood is there that they would allow 3 pre-war cars through as a matter of priority. Probably the square root of zero! In addition we are told that there is still a lot of aggravation in the area after the sacking of the last Prime Minister.

 

The alternative is to drive down from La Paz, cross the border from Bolivia into Chile spending the night at Purdue. From there we will cross the border from Chile to Peru and then travel up the coast road of Peru to Lima where we have pre-positioned supplies of tyres. To give ourselves plenty of time for our first border crossing and to face the inevitable challenges of La Paz rush hour we agree that wheels will roll at 07:00. The plan has been re-hatched, let’s hope that it survives contact!

 

Chris has a problem with his magneto and his spare doesn’t work. This means that only 6/12 spark plugs will fire at any one time (on the coil side) with commensurate loss of power and reliability. Chris and David decide to make one good magneto from the remains of the two broken ones. Now for readers not particularly up to speed with magnetos, they are very longstanding devices for creating a spark without the need for a battery. They are notoriously difficult machines to maintain so for two non-specialists it was a truly fantastic achievement. After about 6 hours incredible work, they appeared with a working magneto.

 

 

 

 

 

A number of other small scale fixes were done which gave everyone confidence for the morrow! Indeed sufficiently confident were Hugo and Ham that they took themselves off to the highest Championship golf course, The La Paz Golf Course. After the initial confusion of not being allowed to play because Ham was wearing a shirt with buttons we negotiated ourselves onto the course to play a fantastic 9 holes, with not another soul playing the course. I have to say that despite the myriad  of extreme courses I have played on various rallies around the world the La Paz Course was fantastic and our game will stand alongside the very best.

 

 

Sadly Hugo departs the team tonight and Nigel will travel alone to Lima. After another delicious home cooked dinner we packed our bags, laid them by the front door ready to crack on once again. What twists and turns will tomorrow bring?