By 9am the thermometer on my bike read 24C. It topped out at 36C in the afternoon. I had two litres of water with me for the day and I was short of water by lunchtime when I got to Mojo, 30km from the Argentinian border, where I hoped to get lunch and water.
My T-shirt was damp when I took my backpack off, so I was still sweating a little, which was healthy, but my throat was dry and I had a dehydrated dull pain in my head. Things didn´t look too good when I got to Mojo. Mojo has a train station and is on a significant road junction. It is the sort of place that you might expect to have a shop or a cafe, but the village had maybe 100 houses and no one in sight, except for an old lady sitting under a tree, talking to a chicken.
After spending 5 minutes walking around the village, I asked the lady if there was a shop. I had not seen one, but often in small Bolivan villages the shops are not labelled and are simply the front room in someone´s house. The lady said that there was a shop, the post office, but it was closed and that the owner was in Villazon on the Argentinian border. I asked here if she had any water and she told me to go to Villazon, so off I went.
The road from Mojo to Villazon is very good. Fairly flat and tarmac for most of it, so I made the remaining 30km in pretty good time. I met two cyclists coming in the opposite direction, one from the village where I had camped on the evening before. One was quite excited as he had just got his bicycle and it was the first time that he had been to the frontier with Argentina, maybe 80km from his home. He was giddy with his new freedom and was talking about his future plans to see his country. I cycled on and maybe 10km from Villazon I met another cyclist from Argentina who was cycling home. I chatted to him for the remainder of the way to Villazon and it was good to have some company as I was feeling rather ropey by that time.
I got to Villazon and got a 2 litre bottle of Fanta into me before I went to customs. The water and sugar were just what I needed. At customs, the friendly official asked me what I´d been doing in Bolivia and kindly waved the fine for me overstaying my 30 day visa by 5 days. I cycled on into Argentina and was scratching my head as there was no Argentinian customs office to be seen. I cycled on a bit and came to an army post with a soldier outside, and I asked him where the office was. He said that the Bolivians and Argentinians share the same office and that the guy who stamped me out of Bolivia should also have stamped me into Argentina. I had a look at my passport and indeed he had.
I cycled on into the town of La Quiaca, the Argentinian side of Villazon, and into a local hotel. I got half of a bottle of water into me, a small bottle of Pepsi and a beer with a well salted dinner and then went for my first pee of the day.
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