Panamericana roadtrip memories 7

Day 23: La Paz - Puno

We ended up in a traffic chaos that you had to smile your way through. We’d lost 2 cars within 5 minutes. The trick is to keep driving and hope that others stop. They usually do, about 5 centimetres from your bumper. After 20 minutes we’d lost everyone, but that was around the time that we’d pretty much left the city. We then had a wonderful day. We found ourselves at some sort of dancing festival on a rock at Lake Titicaca. Later, we had to cross the lake on a raft that I wouldn’t even dare put a Dinky Toy on. When there’s a bus on the raft, the passengers of the bus have to travel on a separate raft. One of those rafts – with a bus on it – was once tipped over by the wind. Our little tank made it safely across.

We drove through magnificent landscapes and enjoyed the drolly dressed up people. Today we went up to 4300 altitude metres again. Meanwhile quite a few people have become sick. Thankfully we have two bottles of oxygen on board, so every now and then we take a deep breath of oxygen and we feel better. Crossing the border to Peru was easy. We drove in the dark the last hour and because we don’t have any lights anymore (just the distance headlamps) that wasn’t too great. Oh yes, we narrowly escaped intensive care as well. On a gravel road there was a car coming towards us that was speeding, slipped and came spinning towards us. Mel quickly turned the wheel so we ended up in the shoulder. We felt the stream of air from the other car pass us. In a cloud of dust we waited breathlessly for impact. It had missed us by a hair’s breadth.