July 18, 2007

Danny emailed us the following dispatch for Tuesday night and Wednesday morning from La Paz:

Team Mabunga enjoyed a stellar day off yesterday in the highest capital city in the world. Joey and I were busy buying food and making transportation arrangements for our travel to Pinaya today, a pueblo at 14,000 feet at the base of Illimani. Last night we dined at El Gaucho, the local Argentine steakhouse. This morning we are waiting at the El Rey Palace Hotel (the King's Palace Hotel) for our jeeps to pick us up and drive us the 2.5 hours to Pinaya. On the salsa scale of roads in Bolivia (ketchup being mild and not too exciting, and habanero being mucho exito), the road we are about to traverse is a habanero. The road is cut into such a steep hillside it is impossible to put guard rails on it; in fact, there aren't really guard rails anywhere in Bolivia. In places, a car only has one or two feet of "play" on either side of the road before it would careen thousands of feet down into the Bolivian lowlands. Fortunately, our driver and guide Juan, has lived in Pinaya all his life and can negotiate the roads safely and with great skill.

Today we will arrive in Pinaya around 1 pm and then proceed by foot up to our base camp at 15,000 feet. Caballos (horses) will carry our gear. We will be poised for tomorrow's (Thursday) 1000-meter ascent to our high camp. We'll report more tomorrow.

Nos Vemos,
Team Mabunga