The drive from Sucre to La Paz takes 9 hours (even though it is a fairly well maintained toll road). It is a beautiful ride but after 5 hours I started looking for a place to sleep for the night.
On the iOverlander App I found an entry for a camping spot that seemed good and on OpenStreetMaps there was a road that went there. I found the entrance to the road and it did go for some 500m to an old graveyard but sadly it seemed like the map was outdated after that for there were fences crossing the section where the road should have been and behind the fence there was already plenty of grass. So the map must have been outdated for some 10 years already. This was not the first time OSM had been wrong though so I was not entirely surprised.
So I turned around and wanted to look for a new place but the way back went in a right turn around the graveyard and in my turn and with only my headlights to go by I must have missed the ditch that was there. In any case, I ended up plowing my car more or less straight into said ditch.
I spent 2 hours that evening trying to get the car free using my jack and the stones that were lying around but I only ended up putting it deeper into the ditch. It was then that it dawned on me that I did not have a true differential lock on my car. I only had a front-to-rear differential lock but no left-right differential lock. That was an issue because the car was basically lying on the transmission and only one front wheel touched the ground. The rear wheels had almost no traction either because most of the weight of the car was in the front (engine block etc.).
After 2 hours I realized that I would not get out of there on my own so I started researching who to call (luckily I had reception there). The automobile club bolivia has a crane service but their auto-responder spoke so quickly that I could not understand what she was saying. I think she told me to call a certain number.
Then I called 911. I explained to them my situation and where I was and that I don’t know who to call but the woman at the dispatch basically just said that I need to contact someone else for this and just hung up on me. Nice.
The place was not far from the last toll station so my plan was to go to the toll station in the morning and ask them for help. A good nights sleep would also help to make the situation more relaxed. Luckily I was not in a rush.
The next morning the dude who owned the adjacent fields came over and asked me what I was doing there. After explaining my situation he said that he would be back in an hour with some tools to help me. After one and a half hours he was not yet back but I saw that there were some construction workers on the main road who were taking a break. So I went over to them and asked if I could borrow a shovel from them. Luckily, they agreed and so I started digging out a hole under my car so that the front wheels would get some traction again. Sadly, this plan did not entirely work out. I think it was because the reverse gear did not have enough power to climb the walls of the trench; I don’t have a reduction gear for reverse (only forward).
By noon the guy returned with the tools and helped me dig. He had a better plan too. Drive the car forward and up the other side of the trench and fill up the trench enough so that the car could reverse through. He also brought a pickax which made it a lot easier to move the earth around. Two of the construction workers also came over and joined in the effort. After digging out a bunch of the opposite wall as well and putting some big rocks in the trench I finally made it out.
I thanked them 3 times and gave each of them 100 bolivianos (~13€) for their efforts and was happily on my way with a gigantic sense of relief that the car still worked fine. It just made some bad noises when it accelerates hard but more on that later.