TRAVEL:In November, two Irish cyclists, Fearghal O'Nuallain and Simon Evans, set out on the first Irish circumnavigation of the world by bicycle. Here, O'Nuallain writes of the first five months of their epic journey.
OUR ROAD TO BOLIVIA had begun five months earlier on an uncharacteristically crisp, sunny November morning. More than 250 friends, family and well-wishers turned out on the main street in Greystones, Co Wicklow, to help Simon and I start our 30,000km expedition around the world by bicycle. The first stage of our route took us to Cork, then a wet and windy France, where we restored dampened spirits with cheese and dry cider bought on the roadside from red-nosed bon vivants. After crossing the Loire Valley, where we were given royal treatment at Domaine de l’Aujardière, we tackled the Pyrenees, which were under snow when we crossed into Spain. Here we discovered that, unfortunately, rain doesn’t fall only on the plains.
Two weeks before Christmas, we flew from Madrid to Buenos Aires, and were joined by Marina, who had undertaken to cycle the 2,500km to La Paz in Bolivia. From Buenos Aires we headed north through the pastoral hills of western Uruguay, where we endured 40 degree midday temperatures and abundant local hospitality. At Salto Grande we crossed a 3.5km dam back into Argentina and traversed 1,000km of the featureless baking and bug-ridden Gran Chaco plain, duelling with grasshoppers the size of finches, before beginning the 4,500m climb into the Andes and Bolivia.
Powering 50kg of bike and kit (an average bike weighs around 15kg) is a test for lungs and calves at the best of times. Cycling at an altitude of 4,000m is especially challenging. As the air is thinner, fatigue sets in earlier, and muscles begin anaerobic respiration sooner, so lactic acid build-up is a problem. For me, cycling at altitude meant being constantly breathless.
Travelling by bike in Bolivia has been, to put it mildly, tough going. We’ve found local people to be either welcoming and friendly or reserved and gruff, depending on the community.
Most of the smaller settlements we encountered in the southern altiplano were constructed predominantly from mud bricks and rough thatch. Often, the villages we stayed in had electricity produced by a petrol generator only for several hours in the evening, and water came from the village pump. Food was hard to come by, as many of the villages in southwestern Bolivia are populated by subsistence farmers who have little to sell, other than quinoa and llama meat. Village shops stocked a meagre supply of crackers, sardines and cheap sweets, so no “five a day” for us.
As we were fully loaded with equipment for camping and communicating with the outside world (satellite phone, laptop, solar panel) and with enough supplies to last for a few days in the wilderness, our heavy bikes and trailers made for slow progress on the rutted, rocky and meandering tracks that pass for roads there. By the time we arrived in Uyuni, a dishevelled town that forms the base for much of southern Bolivia’s tourism and not much else, two weeks of hard travelling had left us feeling fatigued. The prospect of 100km of straight progress on flat terrain with little or no traffic and, best off all, no potholes was too good to miss, so we decided to cycle due north across the Salar d’Uyuni, a massive salt flat, rather than spend another three days on the dismal tracks that mark the conventional path to Bolivia’s capital, La Paz.
Crossing a 12,000 sq m wilderness of salt requires a little planning and preparation. A decent map posted on the wall of a local restaurant by an American miner from Michigan gave us the lie of the land, as the map we were using was more Fisher Price than Michelin standard, so we spent a good 10 minutes committing it to memory. If we cycled due north and aimed for the volcano, we decided, we couldn’t go wrong. With navigation taken care of, we set about buying provisions. Off we went to the market to find 18 litres of water, 3kg of granola and porridge oats, 15 apples, 15 oranges, 10 flatbreads, three packets of water crackers, one packet of wafer biscuits and two tins of spam. As the crust of the Salar is too tough for conventional tent pegs, we picked up some nails and a rock to ensure our tents didn’t turn into kites in the middle of the night.
With bikes wobbling under the heavy load we lumbered the 25km down the rutted road to where the salt begins, stopping for a salchipapa (sausage and chip sandwich) in the almost deserted mud-brick town of Colchani. As the wind picked up and the evening chill set in, our tyres touched salt for the first time.
At first, cycling on salt is a magical experience. The whiteness and the crisp crunching sound almost fool you into thinking you’re cycling on snow. As the salt crystals catch the sun’s rays, they sparkle like shattered glass. When the salt is wet, it allows itself to be thrown up by the tyres in ice-like chunks that stick to most of the bike and dry to the rock hard, but brittle, texture of royal icing. For 10 minutes we whooped and yelled delightedly, swooping in wide arcs, thrilling in the freedom of the empty expanse of crunchy nothingness, cycling with our eyes closed and with no hands, safe in the knowledge that no motorist or obstacle loomed.
After the initial euphoria died down, we looked north for our landmark and headed in that general direction, still indulging in sporadic swoops and the occasional veer from cycling with closed eyes. After an hour or so a storm was closing in, so we hammered down the tents and watched the the sunset. It was quite a show, a grey, pink and orange vanilla sky with the thunderous soundtrack of the approaching storm as musical background. We spent a peaceless night as the tents were buffeted by strong winds and rain, and their interiors lit up by the lightning flashes near by. Camping on a flat plain with nothing higher than eight centimetres for 20km or so, in tents with metal poles, during a lightning storm is not the best recipe for a good night’s sleep, and we were relieved to wake to find that we hadn’t been flash grilled during the night.
After breakfasting with the sunrise, the first job of the day was to take some of the obligatory silly tourist pictures. Playing with perspective – think of a bottle near the camera and a person far away so that it looks like the bottle is the size of a three-storey house – is a must on this flat expanse. Quickly tiring of our cameras and clever-clogs photos, we decided that this would be the perfect opportunity for some naked cycling, so we whiled away half an hour in fits of liberated giggles, again swooping in large arcs, this time in different directions to retain some modesty, enjoying the feeling of wind against flesh that doesn’t often get aired.
After the naked high jinks we set off to cross the salty void. The novelty of nothing but salt soon wore off and the monotony of cycling across nothing but salt kicked in. Trying to hold our course with no road or markers was surprisingly difficult, and aiming for the volcano in the far-off distance required a surprising amount of concentration. The crunch of salt under wheel that was at first so endearing became a grating cacophony, a constant and unrelenting reminder of the tedium of pushing pedals in a monochromatic and topographically unchanging environment – akin to white noise.
I recalled reading about a form of sensory-deprivation torture used by the Japanese during the second World War. It involved putting a poor soul into a featureless, perfectly white room until their mind snapped from the lack of sensory stimulation. The mind needs features to situate itself in time and space. In a spatially monotonous and featureless environment, it’s hard to tell how far you’ve travelled. The volcano still remained on the horizon, which was very frustrating.
Music soothes the inner savage, so in an effort to ease my frustration, and drown out the constant crunching, I put on my iPod and settled in for the entire Pink Floyd back catalogue.
Finally, after three hours of monotony, by which time I'd listened to The Wall, Wish You Were Here, and started on Animals, something noteworthy happened – Simon somehow, in a place with nothing more piercing than a salt crystal for 50km in either direction, managed to get a puncture. This, though annoying, at least gave some source of distraction.
At two o’clock we stopped for spam and crackers, amply seasoned, and a few apples and oranges. The volcano still seemed as far as it did when we started 75km earlier. After lunch, things really started to get testing. We could see a huge storm moving in from the east and the crosswind was hampering progress. The effects of being in the sun’s glare all day made themselves felt, and water, a precious commodity, was running low. The volcano still seemed to be the same distance away as when we started, and we were beginning to question whether we would reach it before nightfall. The tricks that we had played with perspective to get our humorous photos earlier were now being played on us by our ever-distant destination.
By early evening we could eventually make out what resembled a settlement at the volcano’s base. The wind was really whipping up at that point and it looked like we would have to spend a second night on the salt, weathering another storm if we didn’t hurry. After an hour or more we could make out a church’s spire in our little town, though progress still seemed mercilessly slow, as we ground out 8 kmph, held back by the wind and the increasing encroaches of negative thoughts. Doubts about ever reaching the north shore began to set in as the texture of salt beneath our tyres rapidly turned to slush.
Dusk began to drain away the light of day when the dark brown of the exit road appeared. It took almost half an hour until the wheels finally rolled from salt to terra firma and we were reunited with the familiar, and for a brief time welcome, rocks and ruts of Bolivian roads.
Simon Evans and Fearghal O’Nuallain’s trip is raising funds for Aware and highlighting climate change. Their blog is at revolutioncycle.ie