| We had our coffee and bread breakfast at in the hotel confitería
at 8:00 and then quickly packed to be on the road by 9:00. Today
is Matt’s 23rd birthday. We also learned that Bolivian President
Banzer had resigned for health reasons. He’s been at Walter Reed
Hospital receiving treatment for lung cancer, my entire time here.
We arrived at the border in less than two hours and saw a Bolivian Army band and guard march into Argentina, apparently for some joint exercise or celebration. The formalities of the border crossing went smoothly and took less than 45 minutes. Road conditions deteriorated immediately. We drove to Tupiza, stopping along the Río San Juan de Oro, so
Brian and Rich could sample some basalts. In Tupiza, we bought some
bread for lunch and headed east. We'd smuggled in our Argentine cold cuts
and cheese. We stopped by the road to eat, overlooking the low ranges
or the Eastern Cordillera and the San Juan de Oro surface.
We continued on a spectacular drive through the Ordovician marine basin until we descended into the Cretaceous strata exposed on the west side of the Camargo Syncline. We drove through the syncline parallel to but east of the axis. The rocks in the center are supposed to be Paleocene but they look Miocene to me. It will be interesting to see what they really are. At Camargo, we decided to continue to Potosí, 5 hours away, even though it was already dark. We bought a whole roasted chicken to eat along the way. We also got a 12-pack of beer to celebrate Matt’s birthday. With Pedro driving but not drinking, we partied it up as we wound our way through the Eastern Cordillera. We ran out of beer just as we came to an obscure little town out in the middle of nowhere. The others went to get more beer in a store while Pedro and I waited. It turned out they walked in on a victory celebration for a local soccer team. They were drinking Singani, a Bolivian vodka. When they heard it was Matt’s birthday, they plied him with the stuff. As we drove through the night drinking the terrible, foamy beer purchased in the store, Matt was feeling worse and worse. He finally needed to throw up and we managed to stop so that he could get out and leave his signature on the countryside. He felt better afterward but didn’t contribute much to the conversation. We pulled into the hotel San Antonio in Potosí at 11:30 and got a quadruple room for us and a single for Pedro. The accommodations were much nicer than they were on our earlier stay here. We were all asleep by midnight. |
