Whenever we spend a night in a town of any reasonable size, we like to have dinner at the #1 rated restaurant on TripAdvisor — it makes a nice change from the dinners of instant noodles and rum we eat out in the field. More often than not, the restaurant turns out to be a pizzeria, which it did that night. The food was excellent, but stories aren’t about food. The guy at the table next to us had an impressive camera, so we struck up a conversation with him. His name was Joe, and he was in Bolivia shooting a documentary.

Joe was cool, and very interested in our trip. Within twenty minutes, we’d moved over to his table and had roped his driver, Marcos, into the conversation. We brought out a map and Marcos started to divulge information about routes through the Eduardo Avaroa Nature Reserve.

“There are two main routes through. On this one, you will go through the valley of the rocks, which is very beautiful, and the road is quite good.”

“And what about over here?”

“It is very difficult. There is a pass which is very famous among the drivers, they call it the “Toom-Toom Pass” because the car goes ‘toom! toom!’. And you will have to go through the desert, where you will not see a road, just thousands of 4x4 tracks in the sand.”

“Which way is more beautiful?”

“The difficult one.”

That settled that. We finished up our dinner, and went out in the dark to Marcos’s Toyota Land Cruiser, out of which we sketchily copied his GPS waypoints in the manner of an illicit drug deal. Without much prompting, he also offered to drop 40 liters of fuel for us at the park ranger station. What a guy.

The next day, Tibet and I found a mechanic to fix various ailments on our bikes, while Alex went out and procured 40 litres of jerrycans, filled them with gasoline, poorly secured them onto his bike, and dropped them all over the road while riding around the town. Eventually, we met up with Marcos, handed over the gasoline, packed up the bikes, and headed for the desert. The adventure began!