About 20km short of Patacamaya we were flagged down another motorcyclist on a KLR650. An Australian who with a mate was riding, eventually, to Prudo Bay in Alaska. He had a front tyre blowout some 5 hours earlier. Apparently he had seen a screw in his tyre but thinking that if he pulled it out the tyre might go down he had left it. The thing is tubed tyres are not like tubeless tyres and if it has not gone down it will not so extract the offending object. They had tried to plug the tyre but unsurprisingly it had gone down again. You cannot plug a tubed tyre since the air will escape from around the spokes. No problem I have a spare inner tube. Where is your centre stand? Does not exist so how do you lift the front wheel off the ground? With a block of wood. Where is the Allen key to remove the spindle? You do not have one. How long have you been on the road? Four and a half months. How have you got this far?

At that moment his mate appeared, he had been into Patacamaya to find a tyre repair shop. No he said the town was Oruro so I suggested we ride in find some accommodation drop off kit and he would then return to his stranded mate and the 2 ride very slowly, on a flat tyre, into town. The town was actually Patacamaya and there was zero accommodation so we opted to ride back and camp on the roadside. As we passed through a checkpoint I suggested we camp there. Very noisy, uneven ground but safer than on the side of the road. So that is how it all panned out.

Just goes to show how a little preparation would have nipped this nightmare in the bud.

OK enough of my preaching.