Flip card
X
info
map
zerega
 | |
| Country: | Germany  |
| City: | Munich |
| Registered: | April 25th, 2005 |
| Num of photos: | 356 |
| Age: | 45 |
| Selected as fav: | 62 |
| Photogear: | - |
tell a friendX
send emailX
The Flying Pigs of Chacaltaya
Posted by zerega on October 1st, 2011 | 1 comment | 958 views
Chacaltaya, Bolivia is the world's highest ski area with one vintage ski lift that tows you up to 5470m above sea level. It is somewhat dangerous to ski, apart from the thin air: You could be hit by hogs falling from the sky.
One of the words you hear most often in Latin America is peligro or peligroso, that means dangerous and people beam with pride when someone in La Paz tells you the road across the Andean Range into the Amazon Lowland and the Oriente was declared the world's most dangerous road by the Inter-American Development Bank.
The Inter-American Development Bank says, this road is dangerous.
It takes quite a while to get produce from the fertile lands at 500 meters above sea level across the Cordillera Real at 5500 plus meters to the capital La Paz at 4000 meters altitude. Especially fresh meat gets a bit smelly after three days on the road and this is where the Carniceros come into play.
This is where the food grows
Carniceros they call themselves, butchers, they have a flying license and can take some of the rusting metal of the corrosion corner of the Aeropuerto International de La Paz to the meat of the Oriente in a just under two hours.
Finding something flyable from the Corrosion Corner.
This sounds quite simple and like a perfect business model, but for the two hours forth and two hours back a mechanic has to patch up 60 year old wiring, hydraulics, electrics and a pair of 18 cylinder Curtiss Wright R-2800-34 Double Wasp piston engines. United Airlines may use adhesive tape to mend holes in their Boeings, but here at the butchery, it is old school welding, riveting and screwing until these metal hulks are darned into airworthy condition.
After 65 years of service, this Curtiss is in for an inspection.
Let's seeeeeeeeeee ...
Especially the 18 cylinders are highly stressed. They live in an environment, where their outside basks in air at -40C, and inside they handle hot and flaming gasses. Cylinder heads respond by cracking. Other parts break off, like exhaust valves within a cylinder which are squeezed between the piston and the head. Changing a broken cylinder head above your head are tedious affairs involving stripping off the air baffles, ignition components, fuel injection lines, exhaust stacks and manifold intake pipes.
Can you just get me a new spare motor?
And a couple of thermocouple leads?
All kinds of oil, avgas and hydraulic fluids find its way out of every gap and results in getting oneself and the underlying soil soaked in dirty lube oil. The unsurfaced cargo maintenance area is a completely mess, and you walk through a potage of various petro fluids.
Ready for an invigoration with a deluge of dirty lubricants?
... or maybe an electrocution?
Once airborne, the old Commandos have to climb near their service ceiling to cross the Andean Range, which for lack of power they do at a mountain pass, cramped between much higher mountain walls. From there it is just 30 kms from arctic glaciers into the tropical rainforest. Somewhere between 6000 meters and 800 meters altitude, a runway had to be cut out of a mountain slope. Limited space meant to built it with a bend in the middle, so landing and starting airplanes had to go around a curve.
It is easy to cross the Cordillera Real ...
... with an empty cargo hold.
This is also where the infamous Coroico Road is clinged to mountain walls and earns its title of The World's Most Dangerous Road.
Waterfalls may be a welcome natural car wash but make the surface so slippery, that brakes simply have no effect.
Driving directions are switched from Napoleonic right to Imperial left, so the downward driver sitting on the left side of the car is able to see how many millimeters he has left of horizontal slide before it gets all vertical shoot.
About 250 cars pass this road every day with an average rate of one car lost every other day. Caterpillars are on guard to topple over any remains of an accident into the great green bin.
Mr. Caterpillar, can you clean the road of this BMW, please?
passing the pass
Way above the road, Commandos try to push 5000 kgs of pig halves across the mountains. Weather changes may render the cargo weight calculation obsolete and the 5260 horsepowers aren't enough to clear the pass. Even with La Paz in sight it may be sometimes one or too pigs above the maximum landing weight. So some of the grocery has to be delivered direct without the detour via airport and market.
A good customer of this one-level supply-channel is Karl from Austria. Carlos manages the mountain hut next to the Chacaltaya Ski Area. The hut was built by Austrian civil engineers in the 1920ies as a base for their ski excursions. The Club Andino Boliviano even procured a used ski lift from Cortina d'Ampezzo, as in this altitude, skiers have as many difficulties to climb as 1940ies cargo haulers.
Waiting for the meat.
Karl is in the Guiness Book of Record as the highest living person on earth but this means a long way down to the local supermarket. In the Bolivian winter this is done quite simply by snowboard, at least to bring the empty bottles down. So he is quite thankful when the old WWII Commandos bomb his ski run with pigs.
Next day you will find Bavarian style roasted pork with dumplings and sauerkraut on the menu.
The airplane is faked to illustrate the pig dive-bomb but the rest, the highest ski slope of the world including some Japanese tourists at 5400 m is real.
But the Japanese cheated with their photography, too. They just went out with the ski gear to have their pictures taken and quickly returned to Karl's stock of Paulaner Münchner Dunkel.
More about Chacaltaya: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chacaltaya
In the mid 2000s the glacier started to retreat at an increased speed:
www.bolivia.com/noticias/autonoticias/DetalleNoticia23247.asp
The World's Most Dangerous Road was substituted by a new highway at last. Read more about the history of the road from La Paz into the Amazon Lowlands here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungas_Road
The Road has been used by cyclists since the 70ies. After car traffic moved to the new road, it became the exclusive turf of bikers. Obviously, still a huge reservoir for oblations for the Inca Gods:
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3814406.ece
CNN aired a feature about Chacaltaya. It is available as video on demand.
"Bolivians once boasted that the Chacaltaya glacier was the world's highest ski run. But the skiers stopped coming in the late 1990s. That's because the place known by the Aymara Indians as "cold road" is melting - and fast. The glacier serves as the main source of drinking water for millions of people who live in the region. As "World's Untold Stories: Bolivia Meltdown" reveals, that tap could begin to run dry within just a few years. Glaciologist Edson Ramirez says: "It's a critical problem - it's the same problem for Peru, Ecuador and Colombia - all the Andes." Global warming is at least partly to blame says Edson: "We do know that the effects of human activities accelerate it and play the role of the catalyst in this cycle."
Bolivia Meltdown on CNN international
search.cnn.com/search?query=Bolivia+Meltdown&type=video&sortBy=%20date&intl=false
2008, the glacier vanished for good.
La tierra tiene fiebre necesita medicina y pokito de amó que le cure la penita que tiene.
Bebe - Ska de la tierra
One of the words you hear most often in Latin America is peligro or peligroso, that means dangerous and people beam with pride when someone in La Paz tells you the road across the Andean Range into the Amazon Lowland and the Oriente was declared the world's most dangerous road by the Inter-American Development Bank.
The Inter-American Development Bank says, this road is dangerous.
It takes quite a while to get produce from the fertile lands at 500 meters above sea level across the Cordillera Real at 5500 plus meters to the capital La Paz at 4000 meters altitude. Especially fresh meat gets a bit smelly after three days on the road and this is where the Carniceros come into play.
This is where the food grows
Carniceros they call themselves, butchers, they have a flying license and can take some of the rusting metal of the corrosion corner of the Aeropuerto International de La Paz to the meat of the Oriente in a just under two hours.
Finding something flyable from the Corrosion Corner.
This sounds quite simple and like a perfect business model, but for the two hours forth and two hours back a mechanic has to patch up 60 year old wiring, hydraulics, electrics and a pair of 18 cylinder Curtiss Wright R-2800-34 Double Wasp piston engines. United Airlines may use adhesive tape to mend holes in their Boeings, but here at the butchery, it is old school welding, riveting and screwing until these metal hulks are darned into airworthy condition.
After 65 years of service, this Curtiss is in for an inspection.
Let's seeeeeeeeeee ...
Especially the 18 cylinders are highly stressed. They live in an environment, where their outside basks in air at -40C, and inside they handle hot and flaming gasses. Cylinder heads respond by cracking. Other parts break off, like exhaust valves within a cylinder which are squeezed between the piston and the head. Changing a broken cylinder head above your head are tedious affairs involving stripping off the air baffles, ignition components, fuel injection lines, exhaust stacks and manifold intake pipes.
Can you just get me a new spare motor?
And a couple of thermocouple leads?All kinds of oil, avgas and hydraulic fluids find its way out of every gap and results in getting oneself and the underlying soil soaked in dirty lube oil. The unsurfaced cargo maintenance area is a completely mess, and you walk through a potage of various petro fluids.
Ready for an invigoration with a deluge of dirty lubricants?
... or maybe an electrocution?Once airborne, the old Commandos have to climb near their service ceiling to cross the Andean Range, which for lack of power they do at a mountain pass, cramped between much higher mountain walls. From there it is just 30 kms from arctic glaciers into the tropical rainforest. Somewhere between 6000 meters and 800 meters altitude, a runway had to be cut out of a mountain slope. Limited space meant to built it with a bend in the middle, so landing and starting airplanes had to go around a curve.
It is easy to cross the Cordillera Real ...
... with an empty cargo hold.
This is also where the infamous Coroico Road is clinged to mountain walls and earns its title of The World's Most Dangerous Road.
Waterfalls may be a welcome natural car wash but make the surface so slippery, that brakes simply have no effect.
Driving directions are switched from Napoleonic right to Imperial left, so the downward driver sitting on the left side of the car is able to see how many millimeters he has left of horizontal slide before it gets all vertical shoot.
About 250 cars pass this road every day with an average rate of one car lost every other day. Caterpillars are on guard to topple over any remains of an accident into the great green bin.
Mr. Caterpillar, can you clean the road of this BMW, please?
passing the passWay above the road, Commandos try to push 5000 kgs of pig halves across the mountains. Weather changes may render the cargo weight calculation obsolete and the 5260 horsepowers aren't enough to clear the pass. Even with La Paz in sight it may be sometimes one or too pigs above the maximum landing weight. So some of the grocery has to be delivered direct without the detour via airport and market.
A good customer of this one-level supply-channel is Karl from Austria. Carlos manages the mountain hut next to the Chacaltaya Ski Area. The hut was built by Austrian civil engineers in the 1920ies as a base for their ski excursions. The Club Andino Boliviano even procured a used ski lift from Cortina d'Ampezzo, as in this altitude, skiers have as many difficulties to climb as 1940ies cargo haulers.
Waiting for the meat.
Karl is in the Guiness Book of Record as the highest living person on earth but this means a long way down to the local supermarket. In the Bolivian winter this is done quite simply by snowboard, at least to bring the empty bottles down. So he is quite thankful when the old WWII Commandos bomb his ski run with pigs.Next day you will find Bavarian style roasted pork with dumplings and sauerkraut on the menu.
The airplane is faked to illustrate the pig dive-bomb but the rest, the highest ski slope of the world including some Japanese tourists at 5400 m is real.
But the Japanese cheated with their photography, too. They just went out with the ski gear to have their pictures taken and quickly returned to Karl's stock of Paulaner Münchner Dunkel.
More about Chacaltaya: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chacaltaya
In the mid 2000s the glacier started to retreat at an increased speed:
www.bolivia.com/noticias/autonoticias/DetalleNoticia23247.asp
The World's Most Dangerous Road was substituted by a new highway at last. Read more about the history of the road from La Paz into the Amazon Lowlands here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungas_Road
The Road has been used by cyclists since the 70ies. After car traffic moved to the new road, it became the exclusive turf of bikers. Obviously, still a huge reservoir for oblations for the Inca Gods:
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3814406.ece
CNN aired a feature about Chacaltaya. It is available as video on demand.
"Bolivians once boasted that the Chacaltaya glacier was the world's highest ski run. But the skiers stopped coming in the late 1990s. That's because the place known by the Aymara Indians as "cold road" is melting - and fast. The glacier serves as the main source of drinking water for millions of people who live in the region. As "World's Untold Stories: Bolivia Meltdown" reveals, that tap could begin to run dry within just a few years. Glaciologist Edson Ramirez says: "It's a critical problem - it's the same problem for Peru, Ecuador and Colombia - all the Andes." Global warming is at least partly to blame says Edson: "We do know that the effects of human activities accelerate it and play the role of the catalyst in this cycle."
Bolivia Meltdown on CNN international
search.cnn.com/search?query=Bolivia+Meltdown&type=video&sortBy=%20date&intl=false
2008, the glacier vanished for good.
La tierra tiene fiebre necesita medicina y pokito de amó que le cure la penita que tiene.
Bebe - Ska de la tierra
Comments
excellent blog, quite new { some pics i don't remember{ but with an old subject !!! )
your first one was already very interesting ; now, you added a bit of irony,( maybe a twist of disillusionment ?) and... a superb
song ;
your first one was already very interesting ; now, you added a bit of irony,( maybe a twist of disillusionment ?) and... a superb
song ;