I met Fabien in Cape Verde during the transatlantic season. We were neighbors at the marina, and I was intrigued and impressed by his tiny, low-tech, 25-foot sailboat, "La Baboune."
More than a year later, I heard about the crazy expedition he was planning: to row across the continent, from the Andes to the Atlantic, on a traditional totora boat. He was looking for crewmates.
I couldn't resist the temptation of this amazing adventure, so I dropped my Andean cyclo-climbing dreams and committed to the expedition! After two weeks of cycling in the arid north of Argentina, I traded my bike for a wad of dollars and a backpack.
Hitchhiking and taking buses, I navigated between Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, trying as best I could to avoid snow-closed borders and the roadblocks that were paralyzing Bolivia during this election period.
On June 19, 2025, I finally arrived in Huatajata, at 3840 m, on Lake Titicaca. Fabien had been building the two hulls of the boat there for 50 days. Many friends had come to help him in a collaborative workshop style.
While I was making my way from the south, Erwan (a.k.a. Santiago) was speeding from Panama, hitchhiking and busing, sometimes accompanied by Venezuelan migrants. This 26-year-old Breton, a sailboat captain (he left his boat safe and warm on a small Panamanian island for a while), arrived at the same time as me. The crew was complete, and we immediately got to work: we had to launch the boat the next day for the Aymara New Year—a big party was planned!
Aymara New Year: The Launch 🛶
We worked with the magnificent material that is totora, and watched with wonder the sure hand of the Aymara artisans, who came in large numbers for the final sprint. The two hulls quickly took their final shape, and we improvised something that looked like a boat for the launch.
At the same time, all the logistics for the launch party got underway: Fabien hired a group of local musicians, and we cooked for 40 people. A beautiful celebration.
Finally, after baptizing it with 3 liters of beer, Pipilintu was launched. It was beautiful, radiant. More importantly: it floated, it almost flew! We were ecstatic and jumped in celebration into the icy water of Lake Titicaca. The day ended around a bonfire, exhausted from dancing with the cholitas, but with smiles on our faces.
Workshop and crew life in Huatajata 🪚
After the euphoria of the party, we entered the final stage, which involved turning these two totora hulls into a functional boat, ready for adventure.
Our lives were then organized around three locations:
- The workshop in Huatajata, on the shore of Lake Titicaca, where we made step-by-step progress;
- The hotel, our center for thinking, resting, and cooking;
- La Paz, where we bought our materials and tools.
One day, Thomas, a French guy who heard about this strange collaborative workshop to build a reed boat, came to the site. We got along great, and he impressed me with his planing skills: it looked like the guy had been doing it his whole life! In one afternoon, he delivered a high-quality rudder for us. He left that very evening to work in the best gourmet restaurants in La Paz, but something told me we would see this rascal again!
Under the alternation of the scorching sun and the freezing nights of the Altiplano, we bent over the technical solutions, based on the drawings sketched by Fabien. Mast, rudder, rowing station, sail... ideas bounced around and the boat took shape.
Our tools were scarce, and every loan of a drill, saw, or plane came with awkwardness and pain. Since the workshop was finished, our relationships with the family of builders had deteriorated. We often found them dead drunk very early in the morning, and we were sad not to receive the help and energy from those we were trying to represent with this project...
When we weren't at the workshop, you could find us at the Alaxpacha hotel, 500 meters away, where the wonderful Choque family welcomed us. The three of us had been traveling for more than 18 months, and I think for all of us, it was the first time we could afford such comfort: for 3.5€ a night, we each had a large room with a double bed and a private bathroom.
This is also where crew life truly began: we took turns cooking meals, shared evenings discussing the world on the hotel roof, bundled up in our down jackets, watching the stars reflect on Lake Titicaca.
La Paz, El Alto: Restaurants and a Labyrinthine Market 💸
Once a week, we would leave the shores of Lake Titicaca to shop in El Alto. In this city located on the heights of La Paz, we always went to the feria del Alto, a huuuge market that left us with mixed feelings:
- On the one hand, it's great: you can find everything, for cheap, and we had a lot of fun having weird, crazy ideas that we had imagined sewn/welded/assembled;
- On the other hand, it's terrible: you get so lost because it's so big, and you can spend half a day looking for a specific item. The atmosphere is not great, and I was punched or hit with a stick several times by grandmothers who weren't happy about me passing by their stall. Santi, in particular, had a lot of difficulty communicating peacefully with the vendors, which I found very amusing.
Usually, when we were done with our small purchases, we would take the cable car down to La Paz. We stayed at Eddie's place, a friend of Fabien's who lent us his apartment. Between the various administrative and logistical tasks, we took advantage of our incredible purchasing power to go and test all the gringo restaurants in the city.
The days passed and the weeks were all the same: workshop-hotel, workshop-hotel, Del Alto market, restaurants in La Paz, back to the workshop! We were on a loop, but the boat was making progress!
On July 6, we launched the boat again. What a feeling of pride to have a boat we could navigate. The sail carried us well, and we managed to make a few clumsy rowing strokes. We took a break in the middle of Lake Titicaca to take some pictures of the Pipilintu and prepare a picnic that we ate with our feet in the water, imagining our next life on the Amazonian rivers.
Time to get lucky 🍀
With the boat nearly finished, we started the procedures for the adventure's departure!
- Find a truck to transport the balsa to Guanay, some 300 km away (the closest navigable river to reach the Atlantic).
- Get navigation permits (better late than never).
We informed the authorities of our navigation, and one evening, Fabien received a phone call from the Bolivian navy!
Everything moved very quickly: at 8 a.m. the next day, we were in the army offices, a little anxious ("Will they authorize us to navigate? Why do they want to meet us?"), in a room with the highest-ranking officers of the Bolivian navy.
They very quickly revealed their intention: to give us "total" logistical and strategic support, to promote the expedition and Bolivian maritime heritage. [A dedicated article will soon explain the entire role of the Bolivian armada in this expedition.]
At that moment, we were completely stunned. We felt incredibly lucky: it changed everything for the expedition, and while we were preparing to launch into the total unknown, this was very reassuring.
We were passed from office to office, shaking a lot of hands, and establishing the conditions of our collaboration. Ministry of Defense, Armada HQ, merchant navy... It was insane!
So, paperwork. Fortunately, it went fast because "the orders came from above." In two days, the boat was inspected, registered, and authorized to navigate the country's rivers.
Departure! 🏁
Five days after this first meeting with the Bolivian armada, we left Lake Titicaca, the boat loaded onto one of their trucks.
In the meantime, we hadn't been idle because there was obviously an infinite number of things to do to prepare the boat. Also, Thomas (who had helped out at the workshop one day) joined us as a fourth crew member. He planned to stay for the first four days of navigation until Rurrenabaque.
The journey was eventful: at night, we were at a snail's pace on endless dirt roads. We especially remembered this one incident that is a bit chilling in retrospect: a 200 L gasoline can leaking, followed immediately by a live electrical cable being torn off. We came very close to a catastrophe.
After several hours of a break in the middle of nowhere, carrying out hazardous transfers of gasolina, we finally arrived in Guanay, around 5 a.m.
Waking up the next day was rough, but a huge mission awaited us: putting the balsas back in the water and reassembling the boat. We realized how lucky we were when fifteen marineros showed up to unload the hulls (600 kg each, no less) into the water.
It still took us three days to re-rig the boat, and we left Guanay on July 14, 2025, after a solemn ceremony during which we realized for the first time that this expedition might be something special.