Sucre

BOLIVIA

Out of Thin Air

By AARON

Friday, September 24, 2010

So as we pulled into the bustling town of Sucre, I was busy reading over all of the optional excursions this town of amazement had to offer. One excursion that had caught Kim, Steff and my eyes was the mountain biking that Sucre had to offer. So after catching a quick lunch at Joyride Café, Kim and Steff headed downstairs to their tour office to check out the excursion offers, while I went to various banks for small change for our poker game we were all going to play the next evening.

Being avid mountain bikers, I fully trusted Kim and Steff’s opinion, and holding true to their expectations, they asked all the right questions of what a good downhill mountain biking experience should entail. Joyride Café’s tourist office had all the right responses – “Yes, there is plenty of bad-ass single track runs”, “Our bikes are dual-suspension Konas”, “Yes, all our bikes are fitted with hydraulic brakes” and so on and so forth. The only thing about the excursion that didn’t really sit well with us was that there was about an hour’s worth of uphill biking before hitting all the “wicked insane downhill madness” that was promised on the brochure. The cost for the entire tour ended up only being about $30USD, and seeing ourselves as fit individuals, we decided to do the tour, and even talked Lyndi and another girl Keryn in on the fun as well. But more on that a bit later….

That night was spent at Joyride Cafe watching a local Bolivian documentary called “The Devil’s Miner”, which followed the life of a 14 year old boy who worked in the mines of Cerro Rico, in the city of Potosi which we had just visited. After that powerfully moving documentary, we headed to the adjoining restaurant where Lyndi, Kim, Steff and I may or may not have eaten our respective body weights in some amazing tacos. We had a good excuse though, because tomorrow we needed our energy for some crazy insane downhill mountain biking!

The next morning we met at the café and promptly walked the 5 minutes it took to get to the warehouse with the bikes. We left on time, and geared up for a great 5-6 hour excursion. After about 1 ½ hours of uphill biking we were all pretty exhausted, but then our tour guide pointed out the first set of downhill runs, complete with a single track run that looked pretty interesting. We were psyched! It took us about 45 seconds to do this first run (Lyndi’s note: except when I fell and flipped my bike over me and got tangled up. That took about 5 minutes for regrouping and untangling) and we were then told that we had a bit of more uphill to do before we got to the second run. Whaaaa? I thought we only had that first bit? “Oh, don’t worry” says our able guide, “it won’t take too long”. So after about another half hour of uphill biking on dirt track, we made it to our next downhill craziness which was basically a dirt road that took about 5 minutes to navigate. We were then again informed that we would be taking another uphill route to get to the next set of downhill runs. I’m sure you can see where this is going so I’ll sum it up like so:

Time to get to bikes, test them out and start the excursion: ½ hour

Time to bike uphill for the “only” uphill run of the day: 1 ½ hours

Approximate time of downhill biking for the entire tour: 7.42 minutes

Approximate time of biking uphill or on flat pavement (highway) for the entire tour: 4 hours

Time of downhill biking on the “loads of challenging single track”: 45 seconds.

Needless to say, the staff at the office embellished on quite a few things and purposefully left other things out as well, but in the end, everyone finished safely and we kept reminding ourselves that you get what you pay for.

The night went a little better as we all rested our legs from our earlier spin class and all played some poker with the 20 cent Boliviano coins that I went to 4 banks to get for us (they all thought I was crazy). Each of us bought 100 of them (about 3USD in total) and enjoyed the rest of the night listening to music, mixing drinks and playing some good ol’ Texas Hold’em.