So, let's catch up a little. Where was I? Oh yeah, La Paz. So I left La Paz, headed for Sucre, but I knew I wouldn't want to do that all in one day. I stopped for the night in Potosi, a town mainly known for its' silver mine. Tours of the mine are a big business there, but I didn't feel like going. It just struck me as further exploitation of the miners poor working conditions, but I guess I won't know now, since I didn 't go. I left the next day for the short ride to Sucre. Sucre turned out to be a really nice town, and I stayed around for a few days. I had read about the Joy Ride Cafe there, run by a Dutch motorcyclist, who used to run motorcycle tours out of there, so I stopped in for lunch and met Gert, the owner. He does run mountain bike rides now, so I signed up for one the next day. It was on this ride that I met Simon and Lindsay, a British couple who I would continue to run into over the next couple of weeks. This ride, unlike the WOrld's Most Dangerous Road, actually had up as well as down hills, so I had to work, which was a good thing. Sucre is the Bolivian capitol, so there are a lot of government buildings, and realy nice looking parks. Sucre is a much smaller city than La Paz, which is the finance center of the country, with high rise banking and insurance buildings throughout the downtown.

After Sucre, I headed toward Uyuni, which is the town nearest the Salar de Uyuni, the world's highest and largest salt flat. This meant backtracking to Potosi and then taking a gravel road 130 miles or so to Uyuni. The road was an easy ride, except the washboard on the gravel was pretty fierce at times, keeping my speed down. It ended up being a pretty easy days ride. I rode into town, and started looking for a hotel, and as I was about to walk into one, I heard someone holler my name. It was Jeremiah, who was sitting in an internet cafe writing me when he heard my bike go by,and went outside to look and see who it was. Jeremiah is someone I first met in Mexico at a HU meet, and then again this summer in Colorado. He is also the one who knows the two Ecuadoran guys I met in Mexico on this trip, who I ended up staying with in Ecuador. Small world. I knew he was roaming around down here in Bolivia, so it wasn't a total coincidence that we met up here. He was travelling with Ming, another American rider from Oregon, who he met on the road. Jeremiah and I knew that Allan, another American, was in the area as well, and we tried to figure out where he might be. We came to the conclusion that he was probably out on the Salar on a jeep tour, since we knew he had shiped his bike here on a train, due to an injury he had from a small crash in Santa Cruz. Are you keeping up with all this? If you want all the gory details on that story, you can read up at www.worldrider.com. Allan was in fact, out on a jeep tour, and we all eventualy got together for a traditional Thanksgiving pizza dinner, at a restaurant run by a guy from Massachusetts. It was here that I ran into Brits, Simon and Lindsay again, where thanks to me introducing them, they were cornered by Allan and interviewed for a podcast on worldrider.com. I'm sure they will thank me for that someday. Not today, though.

Jeremiah and Ming had just come back from a few days on the Salar on the bikes and were headed for Chile, so Allan and I took off the next day for the salt. We spent a few hours taking stills and film of each other at speed on the salt, and camped out that night. The night was absolutely cloudless and the star show was great. I could have been a little better, but the moon was fairly bright. I could see Orion low in the northern sky, instead of overhead like he is back home. Never did find the Southern Cross though. The next day after some more fun and games on the Salar, we headed back for Uyuni. In all, we put over 200 miles on the bikes on the salt. I was concerned about the salt on the bikes, but it was packed so hard that not much got on them, and we washed them back in Uyuni, so no worries.

When I entered Bolivia, they asked me what country I would exit to, and I said Argentina, so that was what was on my visa, so I was more or less committed to heading southeast from Uyuni to the border crossing at Villazon. Also I had a contact in Salta Argentina for insurance, which is supposed to be a pain in Argentina. Allan wanted to go through Chile, so we split up in Uyuni. We are both headed the same general direction though, and might get back together. I never did a trip like this before email, but it is great for keeping track of people like that. So with good intentions of getting an early start, we got up and ate breakfast. We discovered some of the mounting hardware for Allan's panniers had disapeared, probably out on the slat, so we had to cobble a fix for that. Then his bike wouldn't start and we had to organize a jump start for that. So much for the early start. Another washboarded gravel road took me to Tupiza, where I found a surprizingly nice hotel for $6, and stopped there. That left an easy 60 miles to the border the next day.

Once into Argentina, I rode 100 miles, until it started raining. I found a really nice little town called Tilcara, and ended up staying 2 nights there. From there it was an easy paved ride to Salta. My main goal there was to get insurance sorted. I found an agent through my Horizons Unlimited contact who could insure a foreigner, and stayed here 3 nights checking out the city while I waited for my insurance policy. While I was walking down the street, I bumped into Simon again, and met he and Lindsay and 2 guys they were travelling with, for dinner and drinks later. Tomorrow, Saturday, (is it really December already?) I will head south toward Mendoza. There are a lot of outdoor activities there, plus I need tires for the bike, so I will likely stop there for a few days. Maybe a bicycle tour of the wine country is in the works.

As far as first impressions of Argentina, as far as people go, it reminds me of Colombia. The European influence is obviously more present here. There is is every combination of skin, eye, and hair color here. The European influence can also be seen in the cars on the road. They use Puegeots for taxis, and the working mans car is a Ford Falcon. Ford must have kept building those here long after they quit in the US, There are millions of them on the road yet. I saw a couple very old DKW motorcycles on the street. If memory serves, these are the ones that the Harley Hummer and BSA Bantam are cloned from. Except for the language, walking around in Salta doesn´t seem real much different from a city in the US, which is a big change from Bolivia.