3 Jan 2017 Day seven - Stage 2 - Argentina Resistencia- Argentina San Miguel de Tucum\u00e1n
Cursed CP2
The second stage was the real deal already. While the prologue is just a little ride around the town, the second stage took us a big chunk of the route back towards Buenos Aires (liaison).
The destination was the town of Resistencia, back in Argentina again. This part of Argentina is rather flat, green and pretty flooded after the recent rains.
The whole stage was 454 km. Only 39 of them were special, but it was tough anyway. This stage ended badly for Luk\u00e1\u0161 Kvapil on the bike. Part of it went through the desert, tremendous heat. One of the riders crashed and Luk\u00e1\u0161 saw it and, like a proper soldier, went straight over to help him. That's of course fine and it's expected at the Dakar, in fact the time you spend helping a rival in trouble gets deducted from your stage time. But Luk\u00e1\u0161 stayed with his crashed colleague even after the helicopter had arrived, and by the time he got back on the track he'd not only run out of water, but worse, the trucks were already out there. Which is a bigger mess than it sounds. When eight tonnes go tearing through the desert at 140 km/h, it carves ruts in the track so deep a tank would sink into them. A bike fits into one whole after the fifth truck. On top of that the trucks leave a wall of dust hundreds of metres behind them, you can't ride in it and for a biker it's dangerous.
When Luk\u00e1\u0161 reached checkpoint 2 (CP2), we happened to be there taking photos. He arrived exhausted, out of water and clearly not keen on carrying on. In the end he talked himself into it, but he rode off mostly sitting down (everybody else rides standing up off-road). That backfired on him too and about 300 m past CP2 he flew into a hole filled with fine dust (and therefore invisible), it threw him over the handlebars, he dislocated his shoulder and broke his nose. Sadly that was the end of the Dakar for him. He even let me photograph him in that state and my pictures then went round the whole Czech media world. For helping a rival Luk\u00e1\u0161 was eventually awarded a medal by the Minister of Defence.
In the truck category Kolomajz won! It's hard not to be happy about a Czech victory, even if you're there with a rival team. Besides, Kolomajz is a terribly funny bloke who again dropped by in the evening for a chat and a beer (or 5)
4 Jan 2017 Day eight - Stage 3 - climbing into the mountains
Argentina San Miguel de Tucum\u00e1n Argentina San Salvador de Jujuy
780 km, of which 364 special
The stage took us high into the Argentine mountains, which are gorgeous and in many ways remind you of the mountains on the US West Coast. Well, they are the same Cordillera after all.
Probably the most interesting thing was the fate of the crew of the biggest favourite for victory in the car category, Nasser Al-Attiyah. Unlike the trucks, cars have no speed limiter, so they happily do 200 off-road. Somewhere out there Nasser slammed it at full speed into some giant boulder and completely tore off the right rear wheel along with the axle!
So they piled loads of rocks into the left front part around the engine to shift the car's weight forward and to the left, and they drove it home on three wheels!
I talked to his mates at the end of the timed section, they claimed they'd have the car fixed by morning, no problem.
But the next day Nasser didn't start and the word was that since he'd lost so much time on that stage that he basically had no chance of winning overall, he got, true to his name, Nassered off and flew home\u2026
(Ale\u0161 Loprais eventually did something similar, except he left behind his crew, who had to haul the smashed-up car thousands of kilometres by road to the finish).
Nasser's car was maybe at the highest point of the whole rally, very close to 4000 m above sea level. It was as cold as a morgue there, no oxygen at all. I know from Nepal and Kilimanjaro that these altitudes don't agree with me, but at the Dakar it bothers me less. Either thanks to Mac\u00edk's tactic of stuffing yourself with blood-thinning pills several times a day for a week beforehand, or it's the adrenaline.
Anyway, the bivouac was way down below the mountains, so all we had to do was drive down the beautiful mountain hairpins and that's it.
But all three of us in the car are car enthusiasts and amateur diagnosticians, so we quickly noticed a weird noise from the left rear wheel. We diagnosed it as a bearing and reported it over the radio to Kocour (Martin Mac\u00edk Sr.'s nickname).
At an altitude of 3125 m he ordered us to stop beside the road on a little stone platform, where we then unexpectedly spent the whole night! The bearing was buggered, oil leaking out of it, getting in there from the diff. Risk of seizing up, or fire. We had no spare bearing, because it had been replaced in Sedl\u010dany in the autumn, so obviously it's good for 100k km J
Martin offered us his car, saying he'd sort it out somehow. No way, this is our baby and we're staying here and fixing it! So the guys set off in the other Toyota around Argentina to hunt for a spare bearing while we kept watch and took things apart as far as we could. Luckily Lavor stayed with us too, and unlike us he has more than just theoretical knowledge.
Sometime around one in the morning we got to the point where we couldn't get the bearing off the pulled-out half-shaft without a torch to heat it up.
At about two or three in the morning, I reckon, while delayed competitors were still driving past us (10 hours behind the top ten!), help arrived. They brought everything we needed! They'd begged a bearing off the organisers, who use the same Toyotas. And on top of that they brought us a bag of coca, because without that you can't do mechanics at three kilometres in the middle of the night. They had a welder too.
Over the following hours I was more useful as a photographer and Pilsner fetcher, but it was an experience all the same.
By dawn the bearing was done and we made it just in time for breakfast at the bivouacJ.
5 Jan 2017 Day nine \u2013 crossing into Bolivia
Argentina San Salvador de Jujuy to Bolivia Tupiza
521 km, of which 416 special
The most interesting thing that day was a water crossing, where the trucks only arrived after dark, so I have these dark photos of splashing water.
We drove past the Salar, which is a huge salt flat you can get tons of interesting photos from. Today it seems unbelievable to me, but we only saw the Salar from a great distance and never drove onto it! The Dakar doesn't wait, we have to crack on. We'll be coming back this way anyway.
At least we got to mess about with the Toyota at the water crossing, which we drove through 5 times for the photos J. If Kocour had seen us, he'd probably have killed us\u2026
