"Tramper Anne"

An extraordinary woman.

Anne is a woman from New Zealand with a respectable age, we may well say. She could have been our mother. Although that’s hard to imagine because she reaches just above my stomach, that small she is.

We see her and the American guy Justin when we step out of the bus in La Paz. Although we get along very well with most of the Aussie and Kiwi travellers, we’re a bit afraid we involuntarily got ourselves a follower on our trail, a fifth wheel on our car as we say in Dutch. A lot of persons reaching that age and going backpacking around the world are  complainers who should have stayed at home. They stick themselves to other travellers and are often quite tiring. We already had several of these “lonely” sticking backpackers on our path.
That feeling lasts only a few seconds. It turns out we could not have been more wrong about Anne. Back home she’s a member of a hiking club. In New Zealand they call it “tramping”, probably because of the steep and rough landscape. So we don’t have to worry about that tough oldie. She is as fit as a youngster and complaining is not her style at all. When we exchange our email addresses we know it for sure; she calls herself “tramperanne”.

She has taken a year off her work with children who have difficulties learning at school to travel around the world. Armed with a backpack, but not blessed with a large budget, she is not afraid to travel as basic as possible. With an attitude “a bed is a bed with or without cockroaches” she fully enjoys her year of freedom and she’ll accept anything to enjoy her once in a lifetime experience optimally.

“Anything?”

“Yes, anything!”

Descending the Andes Mountains with a mountain bike, sixty kilometres in full speed over the death road of South America, to end up about four thousand meters lower?

“Do it!”

Even if the road is really muddy and full of nasty wholes?

“I’ll do it!”

Taking a bus ride of about sixteen hours over a road as bad as the death road to the jungle of Bolivia?

“I don’t want to miss that one!”

Several days of tracking into the jungle?

“You bet I do.”

It’s really unbelievable for a woman of that age who is even travelling alone. She is a walking miracle who does things you just don’t believe if you don’t see it for yourself. And she knows that too well herself.
“Can you make a picture of me for my children because they’ll never gonna believe this”, she asks us several times.

Justin and Anne have the same plans as we do, so we’ll probably hang out with each other for some time. Together we search for a tour agency to do the downhill madness thing and use my old-cycle-racer eye to find the best-looking bikes.

End station will be the jungle village of Rurrenabaque. But first the death road…

We exchange glances and both think the same; even without conquering the death road, we will never forget her!