Pizza with altitude

Wednesday April 23rd

Today was another long day on the bus. We only had 200k to do, but the roads out here are so bad, and our trucks suspension so non-existent, that it was scheduled to take 8hrs. Anyway it might have, but there we were trundling around a corner when the road pretty much disappeared. They were workign on it, but we had to park up for about half an hour to wait for it to be fixed. And from then on we seemed to be behind time. Again we set a new height record for the trip, over 4100 metres. We seem to be doing this the right way, each day setting a new height record before descending to a lower level to sleep.

So to make the journey appear faster we cracked open the drink. Specifically my Vodka, which I had bought for camping to keep up with the wine drinkers, as the amount of beer I would have required would have been a bit too much for the truck to carry.

The last two hours of the journey did go faster than the rest, and before we knew it we were in Unuyi. This town made Tupiza look like a metropolis, and as we arrived I rememered that I had the theme for "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" on my Archos. So I cranked up the volume and played it as we drove up the dusty streets. Everyone cracked up laughing.

This levity helped us as it turned out to be pretty cold. This was our highest nighttime spot so far, at 3600 (Tupiza had been only 2950) so it did get quite cold. We went to visit a train graveyard (it doesn't sound very exciting, and it wasn't) and then went back to our hotel. Our hotel is owned by an American guy, Chris, and we had been told that he does the best pizza in South America.

With a build up like that we expected it to be a little disappointing, but it may well be the truth. We all ordered way too much pizza, and I ate too much, but as we swapped over pieces I did get to taste some really great tastes, including llama pizza, which other than being a bit chewy, wasn't too bad.

By the way I didn´t come up with my blog title myself, it is the slogan of the restaurant.