Day 1: The Art of Letting Go, Potosi

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It’s 4 weeks until we leave Bolivia after 10 years here. Our final official Latin Link activity is the Team retreat. Andrea being a professional retreat leader has been asked to lead the 2 day retreat. She’s chosen the title “The art of letting go” which is fitting for us. So the past few weeks have seen Andrea spending many hours writing the material.

We’ve decided we’d like to visit some friends (Walter, Adela, Brisa and Cielo) who live in Tarija and we’ll take in Concepción and Santa Cruz whilst we’re at it.

Today Wednesday we’re up at 5:30am. It’s cold in Cochabamba this morning and making the porridge the milk seems off. I open another bag of milk and that’s off too, so give up on the porridge. We’ve run out of tea bags too L.

After our last big trip we’re pretty fast at loading the car and are on our way by 6:20am. The boys and Nady are soon asleep and It’s me first for the 2 hour stretch at the wheel.

As we climb into the mountains above Cochabamba we discover why it’s been so cold in the valley: snow. Lots of it.

We reach a tranca (toll) high up in the snowy mountains after 2 hours and get out to swap drivers. It’s Nady’s first experience of snow. She’s disappointed “it’s really hard”.

Deciding that we need to press on towards Potosi as we need to be there for lunch we don’t stop at our usual layby for coffee.

We’re at Oruro on the Altiplano about 9:30am and Andrea pulls over about 10:30 for us to change over and brew up some coffee. Getting out it’s immediately noticeable how high we’re up. Everything’s an effort and even brewing some coffee seems hard work. Ben’s brought his skateboard and wants photos of “Ollies around Bolivia”. He manages an impressive one.

There’s not much around up here apart from Llamas, big open spaces and then more mountains. The Xterra’s performing very well and with new, original Nissan front pads in is stopping very well even from 3 figure speeds.



Just before 1pm we pull into the Virgin de something or other retreat centre just outside Potosi at around 4000M. The sky is super blue and there are some hot springs running into pools. The rest of the Latin Link Team have just sat down to lunch as we arrive. Perfect.

Gray

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