Oil and Water Project

Just have to make a special thanks to the fabulous Silivia Datoli from the US Embassy for making our visit to La Paz Bolivia the best stop as of yet on the trip!

Not only did she organize all the events and media for us. She arranged with one of the local fried chicken chains, Pollo Cocacabana to sponsor all of their used cooking oil.

They had a big event as we all heated and filtered the used oil. This is a fast food chain that serves everything on washable treys rather then styrofoam and disposables. They had been saving all the oil from their whole chain, and made a donatioin of 130 gallons of choice soy oil for us. Soy oil does a lot better in the cold temperatures then the Palm Oil we have been using.

Yesterday we got to paddle the Coiroca river. Right now, it is the rainy season here in Bolivia and things are juicing. The Coiroca is what they normally raft down. We did the regular 2 day section in about 4 hours and it had some big fluffy waves and nice play.

We found another sweet river to run today.  A lot of great scenery and fun play, but nothing super serious.  It was good to get out kayaking in Bolivia.

We decided to go litterally days out of our way to visit Machupiccu. Our whole goal was to get pictures of us standing in front of the ruins with chicken hats. However, the authorities caught on and confiscated our camera and our chicken hats (we got them back as we were leaving).

But we had fun messing around at MachuPiccu anyway. It was actually the coolest ruin yet on the trip.

We left from the river 3 days ago, and are still headed to Maccu Piccu.

We are getting comfortable with just straight up running police check points without stopping. Since we arrived in Peru we have stopped 4 out of 17 times the police have tried to stop us. The police here are corrupt, and too lazy to chase after us. This guy was trying to convince us there is a special speed limit for gringos.

Mcdonalds fryer grease seems to be burning!

Seth couldn´t find his stash of clifbars on one of our breaks in the desert.

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Nothing could keep us from this river.  Even though we had days allocated to kayak, we didn´t have a clue where to go.  That was only until the owner of a raft company in Lunahuana, Peru found us doing an interview in Miraflores and invited us to his house.  Turned out it was at the foot of one of the best sections of whitewater in Peru. 

We met up with Pedro immediately, and he showed us the goods.  You will have to wait for the mags to see any real pics.  We shoot all our action on slides.

We got stumped on a couple of questions that these girls had waiting for us.  Our first arguement we have encountered against the use of Straight Vegetable Oil.  Does anyone have recent information about studies being done on a highly toxic biproduct of burning glyceryn (one of the elements found in veg oil)?

These girls run the lab at a Biodiesel Project in La Molina University.

They were throwin a little sass, so we had to keep reminding them….ummm excuse me, we are the experts here.

They have a couple of small biodiesel facilities in operation.  One of them is made from an old beer keg.  These young girls are motivated to change things here in Peru.

Our first day back together was a doozer.

Early morning veg oil collection from McDonalds.  It was a great big event, and all the important people from the Micky-D´s crowd turned up to fill our tanks with some filthy veg oil.

Does anyone notice a striking similarity here?

We spent the rest of the day running around on a photo shoot with some guys from “the Time Magazine of Peru” Carretas, followed by a ride along with the Channel 4 News.  THen to La Molina University to check out their Biodiesel Facilities.