The morning showers and decent breakfast felt good; really good. We were in a backpackers' town surrounded by civilisation for the first time in a while and, on the surface, all was well. However, our problems had reached their peak. There was not a drop of fuel to be had anywhere, nor could we get gas to fuel a camping stove so we had no way of heating our rations either, which could prove to be a hunger-inducing issue in the wilderness of the Gran Chaco yet to come. The endless string of breakdowns and lack of fuel left us out of options and out of time. This Junket wasn't finished with us yet, but nor were we finished with this Junket. By any means necessary was the call so Gareth and Paddy went of in search of alternatives. A couple of hours and $1200 later and we had booked a truck with a transport company through a very nice young lady who spoke no English but took a shine to Gareth via the use of a dictionary, a phrase book and Paddy's Pidgin Spanglish. The plan was to take the truck overnight from Tupiza, through the final mountain range and on to the Bolivia/Paraguay border so that we could complete an epic final day across the Gran Chaco, and ride in to the finish on our battered, bruised taxis in what shreds were left of our fancy dress. The cow suits had completely changed colour by this point and were barely holding on. Armed with this plan, the survivors spirits rose. Time to meet the driver rolled around...and passed. This was going to be another case of South American timing. Eventually Gareth and Paddy were introduced to their driver, who had a strangely French name. Then they were introduced to his very old pick-up, which needed a radiator top-up every 5 miles. The girl who had done all the booking seemed a little sad to see Gareth leave and they departed to very enthusiastic waves. Then they were introduced to his truck. Then they were introduced to his family. Finally the truck set off for the rendezvous with the rest of the weary heroes. The rickety looking Volvo was backed up to a berm and, with a little genius and a lot of brute force, the bikes were loaded on to their home for the night in surprisingly painless fashion. This was followed by seven very excited furballers who rapidly made the back of the truck a cosy little place to bed down in and awaited the roar of the big engine as they disappeared in to the sunset...or not. Five minutes after departure the journey came to a halt, a conversation about diesel was overheard and then we moved farther down the road. This continued for a couple of hours; some stops were successful whilst others came up dry. The furballers attempted to shrug off the delays with a laisez faire attitude to it all whilst chomping on fresh meat and cheese sarnies and making their way through a crate of local beer. Then we ended up a couple of hundered metres from where we had loaded the bikes and before we knew it, our Volvo was missing a wheel! An hour later, said wheel was being welded and the tyre was being changed. At least we only had twelve completely bald tyres now. As the sun went down we were showing no signs of moving on. With the wheel back in place the wheel went on and a further search for fuel ensued. Finally, with a full tank, about eight hours after we were due to depart, we did so. The cheers went up and the beers went down as we pressed on into the darkness and climbed our way into the hills. The occasional peer over the side revealed that looking was a bad idea so we settled in to sleeping bags and actually manged to doze our way through a good chunk of the night despite never being more than a few feet from death at any given point.