Journal

  • Carretera Austral
    2008-12-15

    Getting to the Carretera Austral was easy. Actually making any progress was very hard. Acting on some bad information that I got and had confirmed several times by independent sources, I rode my bicycle to the island of Chiloé. In Ancud, I found out that there were ferries from the island to Chaitén as I had hoped and was informed, but the first one left at the beginning of January. It was the beginning of December. Bust.

    Then I decided to backtrack to Puerto Montt and take the Carretera Austral all the way. You’d think that the major route — in fact the only domestic land route — into the southern part of Chile would be passable in late spring. At least I thought so. I made my way across the first ferry, encouraged by reports that the ferry between Hornopirén and Puerto Gonzales (perhaps you should read this section with your southern Chile map at hand) ran Saturdays and Wednesdays. So I rode the rough dirt road all the way to Hornopirén and there was informed that it actually ran every day of the week — during the months of January and February. Outside of those months it didn’t run at all. I asked what my options were, and if there were any boats that took on pedestrian passengers. No boats. My only options were to return to Puerto Montt — again — and take a ferry to Chaitén or to return to Argentina via the same lake crossing route I used to enter Chile just a week prior and ride down Argentina to the next pass into Chile.

    So I returned to Puerto Montt to wait for a ferry to Chaitén. This was actually the option I was least expecting to take, because just six months ago the city was destroyed by a lahar and until recently was completely evacuated. ¿Qué? But there it was. So at the time of this writing I’ve taken two infuriating detours and ridden over 200 miles south of Puerto Montt only to still be in the city. My own personal Groundhog Day.

    Well, that boat did manage to arrive in Chaitén. While waiting for the boat I met an older Czech(!) couple and a Chilean father-son pair also traveling by bicycle. Between the two of them, the Czechs spoke no Spanish, very little English and about the same amount of German. So we communicated using the little Czech I still remembered, and the little German and English they still remembered. Good people though.

    So, Chaitén. As the ferry started to approach the area, the ash cloud from the still-erupting volcano became visible, and all the foliage in the area took on a greyish tinge. It had rained the previous day and all through the night, so at least the air was pretty clear. The town was practically deserted except for a few basic services like a small food market, and ash lined the streets like two-day-old snow. After marveling at it all for a while, I shook my head and left. The city had learned disastrously what I have had beaten into me over the past year and a half: Nature is far stronger than man, and our cities and development only provide us with the sense of power, but not power itself.

    That day, the combination of rain and fine grit from the dirt road caused my chain to snap again. I repaired it and spun on down the road. I finally stopped for the day when after descending most of the way down the other side of a pass I encountered another Czech couple, the man on bicycle and his girlfriend on motorcycle. They both spoke good Spanish and English, so we all kept switching between those two languages whenever we’d forget that we decided on one or the other. Being multi-lingual in a group of multi-lingual people can be extremely confusing sometimes… They were fresh from Argentina, so they were still very much into drinking mate, and in the tradition of that drink, offered to share with me. Two hours of that stopped me for the day.

    The next morning it was still raining, and would rain the whole day through. My chain broke three times that day, and at that point I started to get very concerned. I looked more closely at the chain, and am now fairly convinced that I was sold a 7-speed chain in Bariloche. The increased width of the chain over 9-speed, plus all the grit from the dirt road was putting too much stress on the links in the chain. pop pop pop.

    In the town of La Junta, I saw a group of five cyclists and asked where they were from…the Czech Republic! At this point my Czech was coming back to me enough to confuse them for a while about just how much I could speak. I took off to reconnoiter the town and score some bread and milk, and they took off further down the road.

    Oh that milk! Earlier in the day they were doing some blasting, and the road was extremely rough. So when I finally finished for the day and went to savor some delicious milk I was horrified to discover that the carton had ruptured and a fifth of its contents had spilled into one of my panniers. WHY GOD, WHY? And adding to the misery of the situation, my prized jalepeño mustard had chosen that same stretch of road to burst open inside my food bag and deploy all over everything. Why does god delight in terrorizing me so much?

    I did my best to clean everything, but the milk… oh the milk… Now that pannier smells awful.

    I put it all behind me the next morning, and bolstered by a break in the rain, rode the remaining 8 miles to Puyuhuapi, hopeful of passing the road closure sign before the road was blockaded for several hours for more blasting. I got there a minute too late.

    Back in the town, I met a Dutch couple on bicycle and we passed the three hours of road closure chatting and discovering that every single cafe or restaurant in town was mysteriously closed. Well, the road eventually opened again, and I rode along a much better quality road than I’d had the day before. Eventually I came to the entrance to a national park created to protect the area around a hanging glacier. I decided to give the glacier a gander, and am very glad to have done it.

    Some people at the trail entrance told me that the trail was “very hard”, and I can see how that might be the case for someone who doesn’t spend the majority of each day engaged in endurance exercise involving their legs. But I do spend each day so engaged, and ran up the trail. It was a lot of fun jumping over rocks and really pushing my legs as hard as they would go. I don’t think I’ve had so much fun running and jumping since I was five years old.

    Well, it would’ve cost a fortune to actually camp in the park, so I left around 7pm, and blessed with another two and a half hours of useable daylight, I rode south until I found a suitable spot to set up camp and start cooking dinner. I did, and as I was eating, the group of five Czechs saw me (I was camped in plain sight of the road, I’ve long since stopped caring about hiding myself), and decided that where I was camped was a pretty great place for them to camp as well.

    The next morning I was a bit faster getting ready than they were and so I started up the second big climb of the entire road alone (there are maybe only four in total along the entire Carretera Austral). Predictably, my chain snapped again, but after what has become a routine repair job, I made it to the summit. From there it was an unpleasant descent over a very rough road down the other side of the pass. I met an Austrailian riding on a bike named “Puyuhuapi” — after the town where he had an accident a few years before and broke his leg.

    I used up way more energy climbing up to that pass than I expected to, and when I got to the town of Villa Amengual, I was tired and famished. So even though it was only 2pm, I called it quits and got a room in some hospedaje. Besides, I was soaked to the bone and the length of time since I last had sensation in my feet was starting to get worryingly long.

    The next morning it was still raining. I rode out the randomly paved stretch that I was on, and onto the worst dirt of the entire trip. Just as I was wondering whether that pavement would ever return again, I encontered an older Brisith couple. Eight years ago they’d ridden the same trip that I’m now on, and we talked a good long while about that. They told me that the pavement started again in less than a mile, and lasted all the way to Chile Chico.

    YES!!!!

    Finally able to use my large chainring again, I spun out 70 miles to Puerto Aysen. The highlight of that town was its massive supermarket and a storm so violent that some of my guy-lines actually ripped out of the ground. Man that was strong wind!

    The wind was gone in the morning, but of course the rain wasn’t. So, reluctantly, I pulled my warm, dry body into wet, cold clothes and got back on the road to Coyhaique. I couldn’t physically warm up any faster than my body could pump heat out against 40 degree temperatures and light rain, but I could warm up my mood by singing every Christmas carol I knew at the top of my lungs while I rode. This did the trick nicely, and it also attracted several dogs. One of the lil’ fellas actually was able to keep up, and surprised me by following along for at least five miles before his pace slowed and he dropped out of sight. I was sort of sad to see him fall behind, but pirate rules applied (“If you fall behind, you’re left behind”).

    Of the many Christmas carols that rotated through my head that day, “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth” became corrupted into “All I want for Christmas is a new drive train”. That got me to thinking about what I could do to realize that Christmas wish, and a trip to a wonderfully stocked bicycle store made me 27,000 pesos poorer, but richer by a new 9-speed chain and two new pulleys for my rear derailleur. I didn’t feel like ponying up the dough for a new rear cassette or middle chainring, but even those replacements which I did buy made a world of difference. No more snap crackle pop of my chain? We’ll see!

    But of course the excitment continued even after I replaced the chain and most of the rear derailleur. While cleaning off my rear wheel I noticed a fissure that ran nearly the entire circumference of one side of my rim. This is bad news. I was able to ride to Chile Chico on the wheel, but I’ll have to avoid all really bad roads (read: the rest of the Carretera Austral) until I can replace the wheel.

    But replacing the wheel won’t really be a simple task either because out of ignorance, I built my bicycle with 28” wheels, and that size of wheel just doesn’t exist in Latin America (the size to get is 26”). Basically my only hope is to make the last 1000 miles to Ushuaia on this rim, and I really have no idea how much hope I have.

    I got as far as Perito Moreno, Argentina on my old rim, and indeed arrived there without any issues on that front. In Chile Chico I met two French Cyclists and spent Christmas with them riding to and from Los Antiguos, Argentina. The first time we crossed the border, we somehow all missed the Chilean immigrations office. When we arrived at the Argetine customs office, it became apparent that we’d have to backtrack the 3 miles with a vicious gusting crosswind, get out exit stamps and then return with that same infernal wind. Luckily, that was a detour we didn’t have to make with all of our gear, since the Argentine customs folks allowed us to leave everything there.

    So we spent Christmas in Los Antiguos, eating several pounds of cherries and not doing much of anything else. The next morning I headed with the wind to Perito Moreno and they stayed behind to catch a bus down to El Calafate. They’re smarter than I am.

    I got to Perito Moreno, realized that I’d be spending the majority of the next 300 miles on dirt roads with a crosswind that regularly gusts up to 70 mph, and further realized that there was no way on earth that my cracked rear rim would survive the trip. And in a moment of weakness, I purchased a bus ticket across the dirt parts to El Chalten.

    During the several hour wait, I had a crisis of conscience and realized that I didn’t want to finish my trip having to avoid all the best scenery and taking buses, just because of a component failure. I realized that my best option would be to return to Coyhaique, some two days away by bus and ferry, and go to the well-stocked and hopefully 700cc rim-having bicycle shop to build a completely new wheel. But for now I still had to wait for the half day Argentine siesta to end at 5pm before I could cancel my ticket.

    At 5pm the office reopened and I went to cancel my 6pm bus ride, but since there was less than an hour remaining before the bus left the station, their system refused to grant me a refund (it was a costly ticket, and I was very keen on getting that refund). My only remaining hope was that the bus would be too full to accept my bike, and they’d be forced to give me my money back. So I waited. And god be praised for continually denying me the easy way out, the bus was too full (four other cyclists also wanted to avoid the same road).

    But now it was just past 6pm, the Patagonian wind machine was in full effect, and even standing upright while exposed to the wind was a challenge. There was no way to get back to the border that day by bicycle, and following the precident set by flying from Panama to Colombia, I justified backtracking by bus. That bus left at 10pm, so I had some four more hours to wait. I got drunk.

    10pm rolled around, I loaded on the bike, got into my seat and successfully fought car sickness the entire way back. I hate bus travel so much. Arriving in Los Antiguos at 11pm, I headed the campground I’d stayed at the night before, pitched my tent in the dark and passed out. The next morning I made my way back to the border, got my Argentine exit stamp, and fought that infernal crosswind once again back to the Chilean border (this was the fourth time I’d ridden this same stretch of road). I arrived in Chile Chico early, hopeful of catching the ferry back to Puerto Ibañez that same day.

    No dice. The next ferry left the following day at noon. So, faced with time to kill in a wind-swept desert town with nothing to do, I spent the better part of the morning drinking mate and chatting up the girls who worked in the bus office. Around 1pm my natural inclination to flirt was overpowered by my desperate need to catch up on sleep, and I passed the entire afternoon dreaming about worst-case senarios for changing my rim.

    Maybe I’d have to do some welding work on my bike to take 26” wheels, maybe — just maybe — they’d have a 700cc rim that would work for my bike, maybe I’d be able to put on disc brakes and 26” rims and thereby avoid the welding work, maybe I could even weld the rim back together. Who knew? I had nothing but time to think about it, and my mind ran wild.

    Well, the next day I got on the ferry, again, and crossed the lake, again. I got on a bus back to Coyhaique and arrived at 5pm on a Sunday afternoon. No way the bike shop would be open, so more time to kill.

    I scored a six-pack of beer and followed the tradition I’d started in that bus terminal in Perito Moreno, and suddenly Sunday afternoon became Monday morning. I headed on over to the bike shop and waited to see what sentence would be pronouced upon me. 26” wheels? No, no, no, they said, that wouldn’t work. Maybe we have a 700cc rim that will serve your purpose.

    excitement

    Well, this one is a bit thin, but it should take your tires. The problem is that your hub is drilled for 48 spokes (when it was new, this was a monster of a wheel), and this rim is drilled for 36 spokes, we’ll have to change the hub or the wheel will be really weak.

    excitement

    Look, I said, you do whatever will work, and as long as I can ride on it, I don’t care at all. I only have 2000km left to the end, and I’ll be damned if I take the bus. So they did, and I came away a few hours later with a new wheel that fit everything perfectly. We (you, the reading public, and me) can now optimistically hope that this new rim will withstand the horrendous abuse I plan give it between Coyhaique and Ushuaia.

  • Lakes District
    2008-11-24

    I spent a few days cruising down the Panamerican highway through more pine and eucalyptus plantations on luxuriously wide and well paved shoulders. Every day a new snow-capped volcano would appear on the southern horizon as the one on the northern horizon dipped below view, and every day was filled by staring in amazement as another perfectly formed volcano resolved itself.

    Eventually I came to a junction where I had the opportunity to head towards Conguillío National Park and ride a circuit road around the base of Mt. LLaima. And I eagerly took that opportunity, since Mt. LLaima was one of the most beautifully formed volcanoes I’d yet seen. The park was every bit as gorgeous as I’d expected, but the roads were the worst I’d ridden on the entire trip. about five miles before I arrived at the park boundary the pavement gave out and the road deteriorated into a riverbed-like surface, and it only got worse when I actually entered the park and the large stones were supplemented with coarse volcanic sand that sucked my wheels down to the spokes and filled my shoes and infiltrated my socks.

    I had intended on making the loop around the park in one day, but my average speed fell down to three miles an hour, and the ratio of words I’d use on a sailing vessel to words I’d use around small children became the highest it’s ever been in my life. In fact, on that account I felt that my vocabulary in English wasn’t rich enough to convey my distress, so I incorporated all the German, French and Spanish vulgarities I could muster.

    Of course, every so often as I sat on the side of the “road” to empty my shoes of small rocks, I’d take a look around in wonder at the manificent beauty that surrounded me, and ask god to absolve me of all of the sins and evil thoughts that had just filled my mind. Never before in my life has my mood swung so sharply so often.

    And to be honest, it was a fortunate thing to stop where I did in the park. The lake I camped by was spectacular (I have a photo of it), and I met a Swiss family who’ve been traveling with their (now) four year old son by bicycle. If you think that what I’ve been doing is in any way amazing, I feel the same way about their tour, but more so about their dedication to their child while they travel.

    The following morning we ate breakfast together, and then rode at our seperate paces with a promise to reunite in Villarrica at La Torre Suiza, a hostel run by a Swiss couple who, after riding their bicycles around the world, decided to settle down there. As the day progressed I started to think that I had a reasonable chance of reaching Villarrica before nightfall.

    But then I hit the dirt roads again. They were so bad and so steep that when I tried to ride uphill I’d hit a large loose rock, spin out and be unable to start riding again. So I’d push the bike up the remainder of the hill. And then at the summit, I’d have a steep downhill which I couldn’t zoom down for fear of hitting a large rock and cracking my rims, and couldn’t ride down slowly because I’d start to skid and be unable to stop. So the road was slow both going uphill and going downhill, and there was no flat to take advantage of at all. After another hour and a half of this I came to a small stream with a perfect spot to camp, knew that this was as good as it was going to get, and then threw in the towel for the day.

    It was a good choice. I sat by the stream under a thicket of bamboo, and listened to the water run over the rocks. Eventually I dug into my food bag, prepared some concoction for dinner, and then retired to my tent to let the song “Unchained Melody”, which had been stuck in my head for the past several days, work itself out.

    It rained that evening, but I stayed dry and slept the best I had in a long while. I took my time getting ready to go in the morning, dreading what lay ahead. Eventually there was no more delaying, and I pushed or rode the rest of the way to the town, and into the view of another spectacular volcano. Time for a break!

    Break time ended after four days, and it was well-spent doing nothing, unless stuffing my face with fresh home-baked swiss bread is something, then it was spent doing that. After break time, I headed south via Lincan Ray to a few other lakes of the famous seven lakes area. I spent a night in the awfully unscenic town Los Lagos, and then headed back to make a quick loop around Lago Ranco.

    The area around the seven lakes, and further south to Puerto Montt was heavily settled by German immigrants about 100 years ago, and this influence could be seen in German style barns and farms, and more importantly eaten in a German style cake called Kuchen. Deliciously, I pedaled from one Kuchen peddling establishment to the next from lake to lake, and as an added bonus occasionally bought cheese. As any bicycle tourist knows, actually seeing the sights and riding the roads is of secondary importance to eating, and in the seven lakes region eating could be done frequently.

    From Lago Ranco, I came back briefly to the Panamericana and to the city of Osorno. Nothing doing there, I left the next day for the Argentine border. That day I got as far as Puyehue National Park, and when I came to the campground and saw what they were charging to camp, I got a bit further.

    And this was excellent. I found a service entrance to the Sendero de Chile (a trans-Chile hiking trail which is under contruction), and about a mile down this road, I came to a wide field bordering a small creek. I immediately recognized this as one of those rare perfect free-camping sites that the bicycle tourist dreams about, and set about bathing in the icy water, washing my underpants, and lying out in the sun to dry. The only way it might have been improved is if the Chilean Bikini Team had also decided to make camp there the same night. But I was happy what with I got…

    Coming into Chile they were extremely anal about fruit and vegetables, and I figured that leaving Chile for Argentina would give me some tit-for-tat treatment at the Argentine border. For that reason, I’d let my stock of vegetables and various other snacking products run empty. Well, the border was a 20 mile climb in the heat, and my meager breakfast of spaghetti didn’t last the distance. My chain also snapped again, and I had to cobble in the spare links I got a few weeks ago. These worked imperfectly, and in fact the chain snapped again before I figured out a method of making the transplant last. So with low blood sugar and greasy hands and face, I approached Argentine customs. And passed through without any hassle.

    So after a descent that felt more like climbing than descending with my dead legs, I finally arrived at a supermarket in Villa La Angostura, Argentina. I let my purchasing impulses have free reign, and as soon as I got outside with my loot, I stuffed my face with chocolate sandwiches, milk, and peanuts.

    Sometime during the milk drinking phase, I noticed that just next door to the supermarket was a campground, and realized that I would be going no further that day.

    At the campground I met my second family on bicycle. This family was from the Netherlands, and were out for a ten week tour with their two and a half year old son. I entertained him with what little Dutch I still remembered, and he entertained me by pointing out the resemblance between the eletrical socket at my campsite and Sponge Bob Square Pants.

    The next morning I took my sweet time getting ready, figuring on making maybe 30 of the 60 miles remaining to Bariloche that day. But I found out once I started riding that my strength had returned, and in fact had returned to a level that I hadn’t remembered since — maybe — Panamá. I spun out the entire distance, including several breaks for banana and chocolate eating, in something like four and a half hours.

    When I came back to Argentina, I was reminded of the difference between the two countries. Chile is naturally gorgeous, there is no question about that. They also sell ginger ale. But Argentina has a culture that Chile seems to lack. They have the folklore of Difunta Correa and Gauchito Gil, they have a strong camping culture — stronger, I think, than in the American West. I’d forgotten about that leaving Argentina the first time, and I’m delighting in it again in Bariloche. I think I’ll spend a few days here…

    My residency in Bariloche ended after several bottles of wine, a few forays down a natural waterslide, finally buying and replacing my worn out chain and most excitingly: cutting the sleeves off of one of my extremely worn-out shirts. This last bit was a major win for me, since my mind has been the battleground for an ongoing battle between hippiedom and normalicy, and doing something so redneck as turning a t-shirt sleeveless is a sure blow against hippiedom.

    Heading back to Chile this time involved three ferries across as many lakes with short stretches of dirt trail riding in between. Like in Juneau, Alaska, the ferry terminal was placed 15 miles outside the city and the only ferry that would allow me to make this trip all the way into Chile in one push left at 8:30am. So I rode over to the port to see if I could camp somewhere in the vicinity in order to catch the ferry on time the next morning.

    I got to the terminal just fine, and went to to inquire about purchasing tickets. After some confusion about just what I wanted to do, the folks working at the port told me that I couldn’t actually buy tickets there, but would have to go back to the city and buy them from the office there. Hunh…

    I wasn’t about to ride another fifteen miles there and fifteen back with my new chain skipping every time the connecting pin passed through the derailleur, so I left my bike at the terminal and caught a ride. When I arrived back in town, I eventually found the ticket office, and also found out that they wouldn’t open back up after siesta for another hour and a half. Ah yes, Argentine siestas…

    So I sat in the park for a while drinking a soda I bought from the gas station until the office opened back up, and then mosied on back. I finally got the ticket, found the bus going back towards the port and rode on back. Unexpectedly, the folks working at the port wouldn’t allow me to camp there, but they suggested a place about two minutes walk along the beach. That worked great.

    The next morning the ferry took off on schedule, and I started some luxury cruising through gorgeous scenery. The first stretch of riding between lago Nahuel Huapi (“Puma Island” in Mupudugun) and lago Frias was only 2 miles long and flat, and I arrived at the next port before the buses. That ferry was uneventful, and on the other side of the lake I cleared argentine customs before heading up and over the pass that separates the two countries. Then it was a mad dash down the other side to customs. There was no stopping on this entire stretch for two reasons. The first was that I thought I was under time pressure to catch the next ferry (I found out later that I wasn’t at all), and the second was that these giant flies would land on me and start carving out chunks of my skin every time I stopped. They were easy to kill, but often the only time I knew they were on me was after they’d already struck. It was truly horrible.

    But I made it after hopelessly tearing my tar-stained riding pants, and eventually the next ferry left for a spectacular cruise down lago Todos Santos. This part of the crossing was so beautiful that it justified the cost of the entire thing. Sheer cliffs on either side of the river would occasionally yield views of several tall peaks and volcanoes, and the ferry eventually docked on the skirt of Mt. Osorno, a nearly perfect cone volcano.

    It also happened to be a national park with a campground. I was pretty sleepy from not exercising very much the past several days, and thought I might just call it a day there. But when I found out that they wanted something like $15, I just said “no gracias, voy a buscar un sitio gratis mas adelante en el campo. Es una locura cobrar tanto para acampar” and took off. You have to like the argentine camping culture, they’d never think of trying to charge so much…

    So, after filling my water bottles up from their clean water supply, I took off into the country to find somewhere to camp. They really shouldn’t expect people to pay their prices when it’s so easy to find a free spot a half mile down the road. At any rate, that worked out fine and I woke up the next morning still feeling pretty lazy. As I was debating whether to stop in Puerto Varas, further on in Puerto Montt, or to try all the way for the ferry crossing to Chiloé, a headwind built up to the point where the answer became easy and obvious: Puerto Varas.

  • Central Chile
    2008-11-08

    On the other side of the tunnel the mountains kicked their natural beauty into full-gear. And it was immediately obvious that my climbing had ended, and moreover I was about to plummet down — fast.

    But before I could punk some trucks down steep winding roads, I had to clear immigrations. And there was the problem of the $130 reciprocity fee that Chile charges US citizens upon entry into their country. Well, wonderfully, I soon learned that this fee is only leveed on US citizens arriving via an international flight, and land-based entry into the country is free of charge. ¡Yipee! After passing a very thorough inspection for fruit and vegetables, I was free (it’s best to say that you have fruit and vegetables on your immigration form even if you are pretty sure you don’t. If you say you don’t, but it turns out that you have something like peanut crumbs, you’ve got to pay a very steep fine. However, if you say you do, and you don’t have anything, then nothing happens. Just a tip…).

    The plummeting commenced and continued until I’d lost 7,000ft of elevation and arrived in Los Andes, my first chilean city. The central square was immaculate and had working drinking fountains, the stores sold ginger ale (I’m a man who loves his ginger-based beverages very much), and the fields were cultivated well and responsibly. Alright, I thought, if there are abundant campgrounds like in Argentina, I’m set in a very big way.

    And I don’t know about abundant, at least not where I was, but I did find a campground with toilets with seats, showers with hot water, a pond which had been developed for swimming, and my particular campsite was surrounded by streams on both sides. And it only cost $4. This was perhaps — perhaps — the finest campsite I’d been in since Cape Lookout near Tillamook, Oregon. So I spent that night wondering if I’d maybe not survived the descent down into Chile, and had in fact died and gone to heaven.

    The next morning, the mystery of my survival continued as I rolled through lush wine and avocado country (40 cents a pound for Hass avocados??? 30 cents a pound for mandarin oranges??? ¡¡¡Si!!!), but was finally resolved as I hit some pretty awful traffic around the town of Quillota, with no clear alternative route around it. But before that town I’d ridden along the outskirts of a national park, through gently rolling country (the best kind of country) along quiet rual routes, so it was clear that Chile offered some really tranquil roads to ride along.

    As I neared the coast, the hills started to roll more sharply and the going got pretty slow as I had to continually give way to speeding busses. But eventually I reached Viña del Mar and was struck homesick by its strong resemblance to San Francisco, a resemblance that continued into Valparaíso, the “Jewel of the Pacific”. I decided that I’d have to give this region a few days of my time to explore (as well as endure the difficult task of familiarizing myself with chilean wines).

    Familiarization done, leaving Valparaíso was a very difficult task. Not only was my liver weighed down by all the fine wine, but leaving Valparaíso meant more or less riding straight up. Well I did that, and in the process my super-metabolism came back on line, and after about thirty minutes I was back in riding form.

    In many places, Chile offers high-quality rural roads that head in the same general direction as the main highway. I decided that taking some of these roads, and losing track of where I was for a while, was too good a prospect to pass up. So I found myself riding through pasture, pine plantations, and fields of wild flowers in full bloom. Every now and again, I would hear the faint and distant rumble of a truck on the main highway, and think about how its exhaust and wake were not even close to affecting me. I smiled. I had water, I had food, and I had daylight until after 8pm. I didn’t have a care in the world. This is what my tour started out as, and this is what caused me to fall in love with touring in the first place.

    Briefly the pasture gave way to vineyards, a town, and a junction headed back towards the coast, and more significantly, towards the house of the late poet Pablo Neruda. Being a sensitive sissy-boy, I was greatly taken by what examples of his poetry I’d encountered along the way, and was keen on seeing his museum-home.

    So I took the junction, the vineyards died off and the pasture returned. The hills continued to roll and roll towards the coast, until finally I could see a bank of fog and smell the cool salty breeze of the Pacific. Strange how it smells exactly the same way down here as it does in California. And perhaps the combination of transplanted monterey cypress, eucalyptus, and sea air is exactly the same.

    At any rate, I went to his home and it was closed. Dag! So, reluctantly, I rolled down the coast a little ways and shortly came across a campground just before the town of El Tabo. It had a view of the ocean, was situated in a grove of cypress, and the caretakers were a canadian and american couple. Well, that sounded perfect.

    In Valparaíso, another traveler had given me his copy of “Into the Wild”. I’d seen the movie, and since some of you had drawn comparisons between him and myself, I figured I’d read the book to get a better idea of what motivated travels, and whether I felt the comparisons were fair. Until I find the right words, I’ll just say that I don’t think that what he may have been seeking and trying to fix in himself, are what I seek and have sought to repair in my own soul. I did enjoy reading the book, and it seemed to compliment the mental space I was in while reading at that campground and over the next couple of days.

    I never did try to go back to Pablo Neruda’s house the next day. Sometime during the night I realized that his poetry was not tied to a place or situation, and that by giving them context, I would be taking away context from my own interpretation and understanding. So I continued south along the coast.

    Around the town of Santo Domingo I took the road headed inland through strawberry fields towards Lake Rapel. En route, my chain started to come apart again as it had a habit of doing in Bolivia, but hadn’t done since. This troubled me greatly, as I thought that the chain and I had grown beyond this. I spent a lot of time ministrating to the chain, and when I was fairly sure that we’d reached an agreement, I set off for the final climb and descent to the lake.

    I arrived around 7pm, and started to get anxious for a place to make camp. The first campground I came across was gorgeous, and was charging $15 for a night. So I left. The next was closed, and the following may have been closed as well. But the water ran from the taps, the location was wonderful, and the prospect of camping there for free was too good to pass up. So I pitched my tent by the lake, washed the chain grease from my hands as best as I could, then set about eating, and finally crawled into my tent after it became too dark to do anything useful outside.

    The following morning I took the same rambling approach of the previous two days towards the central valley and the Panamericana. As I approached, the Andes once again came into view with their glorious snow-capped peaks, but when I finally arrived in the valley, I was confronted with 95F temperatures. I rode south for a little while, trying to make the best of it, but finally decided that I really needed to do was to head back to the coast at the next possible opportunity, and then work my way along that.

    And while I’m glad I did, my legs are not at all. Before I could reach the coast, it was one more trip through wine country. This particular valley is supposedly the best region in Chile for wine, and there are train tours available to see all the wineries. But I was alone and drinking alone — even for educational purposes — has never held much appeal for me, so I forwent the train tour. Luckily in Santa Cruz, where I stopped for the day, there is a wonderful anthropology and paleontology museum focused on the development of life in Chile from Pre-Cambrian times to the present. It was extremely comprehensive, and I enjoyed every minute of the two hours I spent wandering through it.

    But after that was done, I had no reason to linger in the town any longer, and so I continued my push back towards the coast. I finally arrived in the town of Bucalemu (mapuche for ‘large forest’), found a spot near the beach with a good view of the surf, and made camp.

    The following morning, the road rolled out of town, and then pitched sharply upward and downward as it crossed over hills seperating the numerous river valleys. Finally, having gathered great strength from my cursing, the road pitched upward at an angle that I didn’t think possible. I took one look at that road as I approached, and thought “There’s no way in hell that I’ll be able to ride up that…”, so I got off the bike and hoofed it for about half an hour, until the grade calmed down enough to ride again.

    Along the ridge I was surrounded by pine and eucalyptus plantations, and these continued for my duration along the coast. Eventually, the road started to wind around the perimeter of Lago Vichuquén, and finding a free campsite, I called it quits for the day.

    And a good thing too. Apparently as I regained strength, so did the road. The grade out of town could only be summited by forestry equipment, and I walked the bike uphill once more. Eventually I reached the crest of the hill, and the road followed that for a while until finally it got near enough to the coast that it decided to plumment downward at the same rediculous angle. I rode down this, and at one point I tried to stop to take a picture. I found that the combination of loose dirt road and demonic grades were too much of a match for my brakes, and stopping proved impossible.

    Well, that troubled me greatly while I was descending, but I made it to the bottom safe and quickly tried to put the whole experience out of my mind. And that wasn’t so hard to do either. For the rest of the day, the road was more or less gentle rolling along the coast. I stopped on the beach a few times to picnic, and finally finished the day in Constitución, a city known for its cellulose plant and also as the place where the original Chilean constitution was signed.

    After the beaten that I’d received at the hand of the road near Lago Vichuquén, I started to think that I’d rather sweat from the heat, rather than from that torture, and so I resolved that if the road started to get stupid again, I’d take the next chance to head back inland that came my way. That day it never did, and the scenery was still just as lovely as it had been the past few days. But all the same, I was starting to get tired of exclaiming “This is just like California!” every few miles, and after a restful night in the Chanco National Reserve, I knew it was time to head back inland.

    And that was a excellent idea. When the Andes finally came into view, gone was the grandeur of Aconcagua, but in its place had arrived snow-capped volcanoes. In my first few of the Andes, I saw about three giant peaks, with a fourth view opening up towards the south. Also, just before my arrival in the town of Chillán I left what Chileans consider to be the central part of their country, and had entered the south. Soon come the lakes…

  • Mendoza, Arg.
    2008-10-29

    The rain has long since stopped bothering me. I remember a time my second year in grad school where I’d take the bus whenever it rained. Looking back on that now, it’s hard to imagine that person ever became me. I am crazy now, I’m certain of that. I know that the wind is a conscious force, and that it hates me. I know that there is a god that controls insects, and that he delights in directing them into my eyes or ears (but why beetles!? Those hurt!). I spend over 23 hours a day outside. In the rain, the hail, the heat and the cold. I sleep on the ground and compete for space with sharp thorns and curious goats. I know that man does not and cannot control nature. And I have given up believing that I can live my life seperate from it — it is too powerful. So of course the rain doesn’t bother me…

    It was a day of rain and a day of climbing into the Sierras de Córdoba my first day out. It must have been a dream that my bags were ever water-proof. If they ever were, they’ve stopped being so long ago, and the memory of it is the same as a memory of a dream. All my clothes soaked up the rain-water and weighed down my bicycle. But as long as there was climbing to do, my body pumped heat into my torso and strength into my legs and I went on. Towards the top of the sierra the fog came in and I had trouble in searching for a camping spot along the side of the road. Finally I rolled past a tourist stop and asked them if I could camp on their lot. They offered the covered garage, and I was grateful to the core of my being.

    I set up my tent, hung up some clothes, and tried prying apart the water-logged pages of Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland, which a friend from Córdoba gave me (in its dry state). I gave up after a few pages, and lied awake wondering what kept me going on. What does keep me going? I’m so tired and so lonely. I meet so many people who I can never meet again except through luck. That day I rubbed off all the skin on my knees and most of it on the underside of my thighs because my pants were so wet they clung to my skin. And the next day I would have to ride in excruciating pain, because what else could I do?

    And I did just that the next day. And after 110km I had to call it quits to give my wounds a chance to scab over and I made camp next to a river in the town of Villa Dolores. It was the filthiest campground I’ve come across in my life, and the first one since Cafayate where they actually charged me money to pitch my tent. In fact, the next morning a 11 year old kid I talked to expressed his disgust at them charging me for that very reason. But whatever, I would forget about it in a few hours as the ground rolled on beneath my tires and that campground along with everything I could see from it rotated over the horizon and out of sight and out of mind.

    And on this day, partly motivated by the ridiculous hope that I might have one last chance to see a girl I fell for in Córdoba before she left Mendoza, and partly motivated by that unknowable part of me that keeps going and is so much stronger than the rest of me could ever be, I rode for eleven straight hours and covered 210km against a cross-wind. This was the furthest distance I’d ridden on the trip to date, and the last time I even came close was in Alaska when I rode around 200km. I ended the day — for the first time on my trip — sleeping behind a police station on the border of the San Luis and San Juan provinces.

    The police were really good folks. They let me use the shower and the stove, and fill up my water bottles for what I hoped would be another record day the next day (it would have to be, since Mendoza was 210km further on down the road). Knowing that I’d have to eat a lot to cover the carb debt, I cooked up 500g of pasta and set about eating it all. I failed, incidentally, and I guess my stomach isn’t what it was earlier on in the trip.

    So the next morning I woke up and tailwind? A strong tailwind? I hadn’t had a tailwind in so long that I momentarily thought I was disoriented about the direction I had to travel that day. But I got on the road, in the correct direction, and sure enough I was blown down the road at the greatest speed I could manage. And that lasted about five miles.

    Then the road started to curve and curve and curve, and curse it, my tailwind only lasted for a small stretch of the road which happened to head 90 degress off from the rest of the road. So now it was a sidewind and my joy was crushed in that complete way that the wind god delights in and draws strength from. And to pour salt on the wound, the road I had to turn onto later was 90 degress off again from the road I was on.

    For a brief period that morning, I thought that the demon in charge of making my life difficult had fallen asleep on the watch. Surely such a tailwind on the day I needed it most, on the day that it would offer me the greatest benefit could not possibly happen. And so I rode those first five miles in disbelief and in the state of joy that comes in realizing that what you’re doing is so good it should be wrong, but somehow it isn’t. Those five miles…

    But back to the wind. It howled fury though my ears and into my brain and thousands of tiny claws scrapped across my face and drew tears from my eyes. I thought that this wind might continue to mount until it competed with the day I entered Los Angeles, or the day I tried to climb up to Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas. But it knew it didn’t have to be that bad to demoralize me completely, and it saved its strength for another day. I finally just gave up and found a spot on the side of the road to pitch my tent, crawled inside and finished off the book, hoping that somehow the wind would die off in the night.

    Well, thank god, it did. And it turned out that the forsaken spot I’d chosen to camp in was just a few miles from the start of lovely wine country, and the remainder of the distance into Mendoza was a pleasant stroll along poplar lined rural roads. So now I rest, and begin to think about Chile.

    After a few days in Mendoza to recuperate and to take a leisurely ride through wine country, I left town with much higher spirits than I entered. Mendoza is a beautiful city with mature trees shading every street and I had a very pleasant time there.

    But the bicycle called, and I headed up towards the border. There are two routes from Mendoza to the town of Uspallata. The southern route follows a river valley and receives the brunt of the traffic, and the northern, longer route is mostly dirt and climbs 7000ft before descending down into town. Of course, I took the northern route.

    One the road became dirt, I switched into my guatemala gear and spun away for hours as the road wound and wound up the side of the mountains. I saw a few guanacos off in the distance, and heard the sentinals call to alert their companions of my approach. When will animals learn that the bicycle tourist poses them very little threat?

    At around this point the clouds gathered enough to drop some rain on me, but I could tell that their hearts weren’t in it. I think that it only rained at all because it was the day I started back on the road after a few days of rest. Every time…

    Anyway, the road kept winding, and at one point I encountered a couple of french people doing the same trip in a landrover. The ran into another cyclist that I rode with from Cuzco to Puno, and the social world seemed to shrink. Near a giant opening in the earth called El Balcón, I saw a fox investigating things and watched it for a while. When that got boring I got back on the bike and finally summited the road.

    Riding down was a bit of an adventure, because loose gravel and steep grades equals more adreneline than I like to produce, but the pavement eventually returned and the valley opened up revealing snow-capped peaks and colored hills. I stopped frequently to take pictures, and found that the views along the descent made the previous several hours of climbing well worth it.

    I made it to Uspallata about an hour before sunset, found a campground and prepared to set up came. Then the manager told me that he wanted around $10 for the night, and I just laughed and rode off. $10 to sleep on the ground? He said it was because the bathrooms had hot water, when what they had was a giant wood-fed boiler that produced lukewarm water. Anyway, I went over to the municipal campground and found no one there. I set up my tent anyway, and spent the night for free. Bitches…

    The next day I started climbing up an old glacial valley. Around ten in the morning the wind went from calm and nothing to take notice of, to the wrong direction in a wind tunnel. It was like a tsunami of air came down the valley and it stayed that way for the rest of the day. I talked to some locals about it, and they said that it always starts like that around noon. Today it was early… How strange that it should be early the day I decide to climb it!

    Anyway, I reassessed my distance goals for the day, and when I found a small hostel with small prices at Puente del Inca, I paid up and relaxed. Well, almost. At first I figured I might make it the 8 miles to the next little town, but after I got about a quarter mile from Puente del Inca the rain came down off the mountains, and conspired with the wind to send cutting droplets at my face and hands. Immediately numb, I turned tail and found the hostel.

    Best decision ever. The next morning the weather was clear and I had time to explore the national park which contains Aconcagua. Since I wasn’t anywhere near high-season, no one bothered to charge me, and I basically had free reign of the park for a few hours to hike around and marvel at Aconcagua.

    That was great, but it meant that the wind had a chance to really start roaring, so the next six miles of climbing were again against a tsunami of wind. But it was worth it for sure.

    I made it to the border tunnel, was told that it was too dangerous to ride through and that I’d have to wait for a service vehicle to come and ferry me across. I guess they didn’t really wonder at how I’d made it through the last several tunnels (which, btw, were like trying to ride out of a vacuum hose). Anyway I wasn’t too bothered about a short ride through a tunnel, and got a cup of tea while I waited. That was delicious, and marked the end of this chapter of Argentina.

  • Northern Argentina
    2008-10-08

    My arrival in La Quiaca, Argentina felt a bit like arriving in Oz. When I asked the receptionist at my hostel whether the tap water was safe to drink, she said that it was, and moreover went on to tell me that she prefered the tap water here to the water in Chubut (a Patagonian province). So, from this I learned that the water is safe to drink, and the receptionist of my hostel had traveled throughout her coutry… This was very different from what I was used to. Anyhow, I filled up my bottles with the tap water, and gave it a hearty quaff — and she was right: it was tasty!

    So, filled to the gills with delicious non-disease carrying water, I set out the next day. The road was flat or gently uphill for maybe 60 miles, and by a stroke of luck I didn’t have any headwind to impede my progress. I finally crested at a 13,000 ft pass near the mining camp of Tres Cruces and then began a long descent down the Quebrada de Humahuaca (Humahuaca River). The river had carved out at times a canyon and others a river valley through yellow and red colored rocks, and I followed this for the rest of the day, finally stopping in the town of Humahuaca itself. That day, thanks to the flat road and pavement I saw my first 100 miler since probably Colombia.

    The next day the descent continued on down from Humahuaca at 10,000 ft to Jujuy at around 4000, but this wasn’t the downhill funfest that I’d hoped for because I had to battle a very strong headwind from about 10am onward. Still as the scenery continued to green, and the air became thicker and more humid, and especially because I crossed the Tropic of Capricorn somewhere along the way, my spirits remained high the whole day.

    From Jujuy to Salta was another order of magnitude better than the previous days had been. The most direct road to Salta from Jujuy is not the main highway, and for that reason is largely devoid of traffic. It is also a single lane winding road through densely treed hills and along several lakes. In short, it is a road that is ideal for bicycling. So it was after 50 miles of pure pleasure and 5 miles of entering the city along a seperated bicycle path that finally I arrived in Salta. I found a cheap hostel with free breakfast and a swimming pool, took a shower, ate half a pound of ice cream (!), dropped off my clothes to be washed (is it normal for your clothes to smell like vinegar?), and set myself to relax. Ah, the developed world!

    In Salta I also was far more productive than I’d expected to be. Remember how my bicycle was covered in tar? Gone! Remember how my rear cassette went wacky after my derailleur went postal? Fixed! Remember how in the same event my hanger arm bent and subsequent unbending went too far? Corrected! Also, I trued the wheels and degreased and regreased everything (pretty much had to after removing all that tar). Also, I found a produce market where I could get three pounds of tomatoes, an onion and a carrot for around 60 cents, and made some fantastic, yet dirt cheap sauces several nights in a row. And astute readers will remember how I got my haircut in Coban, Guatemala and haven’t mentioned cutting it since. That’s because I hadn’t — until Salta. Now I don’t look like a raving hippie anymore, and in fact after a day of careless riding after leaving Salta, my neck is a vibrant shade of sunburnt red!

    And that brings us nicely to the riding. The first 60 miles leaving Salta went through flat hot land whose flora was thorny trees, except where agriculture was practiced. I stopped in a town called Colonel Moldes for lunch and tried my hand at taking a siesta in the shade. I arrived in town, took my leisurely time eating and drinking my apple juice, and then just sat and watched. Satisfied with a siesta well taken, I got back on my bike and consulted my watch. 30 mintues had passed. I need to practice siestas more…

    Now the noon-day heat was in full swing and my thermometer was reading in the high 90s. I went through my water at a faster rate and knocked off the rest of the distance to a town promisingly named La Viña. When I got there I discovered not a vine in sight, so I pressed on to the next promisingly named town: Alemania (Germany). I got there, and the town was nothing but a train stop for a train that hadn’t rolled along those tracks in several decades. But they did have a water spigot which supplied me with fresh cool water. I loaded up on that and set out further down the road, resigned to another night of wild camping as opposed to the municipal campground with running water and hot showers which I’d hoped to find at the end of my day.

    Luckily for me, I’d just entered a natural reserve called Quebrada de las Conchas (Shell River). The river wound through tall mountains and improbably eroded rocks, and the road followed the river as best as it was able. I eventually came to a dried up tributary river, walked the bike up that a ways, and set up camp.

    Unfortunately, I didn’t take into consideration the swarm of ants all around me, and the next morning the were crawling over everything. I brushed them off as best as I was able, broke camp and set off the remaining 35 miles to the capital of Northern Argentina wine country: Cafayate. Still a few managed to hitch a ride with me, and very occasionally I’d discover one crawling along my sunglasses.

    But I managed to make it to Cafayate, and headed for the municipal campgound (running water and hot showers? ¡Sí!). And after setting up camp, I wandered into town to see what wine might flow my way.

    I did all that, but there is only so much you can do in a town that is basically an oasis of wine. It was time to head back into the desert…

    I planned on a short day, in keeping with my resolution of trying to not exhaust myself at every opportunity. The first day I succeeded, only taking a small detour to the ruins of Quilmes. I got there and the combination of having to pay 10 pesos to enter the site and the intense desert heat put me in a foul mood. And after seeing the ruins in Peru, how could these compare?

    So I pedaled on, 10 pesos poorer (those tens pesos could have bought a kilo of dulce de leche or a bottle of wine, but now they’re gone…). I ended the day at a municipal campground in Amaichá del Valle, a town with absolutely nothing going on, except about 60 teenage kids having a good time at the pool.

    The next day I had a surprise 3000 ft climb into the fog. The fog grew denser and became mist, and the mist became rain. Then I had a 3000 ft descent to the town of Tafi del Valle and I got cold, cold, cold! I had to spend an hour over a lunch and various cups of coffee to warm back up.

    From Tafi, the descent continued on through increasingly lush landscapes. I had no idea that this would exist here when I started the day, and I felt like I was back in the highlands of Colombia or Chiapas. Eventually the descent bottomed out around 8000ft lower from the pass I crossed earlier in the day, and I found myself riding though fragrant orange orchards and then sugarcane fields.

    I continued riding on to the town of Concepción, where I hoped to find another municipal campground, but was told there was none. I continued on my way, using tried and true methods to find a free campground, and found an ideal spot under a large tree behind a ruined building. After I secured permission to camp there from the only people I could see, I set up my tent, cooked some dinner and crawled into my tent to avoid the continuing rain and to write in my journal.

    While doing this, someone started pounding violently on my tent, and demanded that I come out. I decided that answering him would best be done in as broken Spanish as I could muster, and I set about speaking so poorly that it made me cringe. It turned out that the man pounding on my tent was the owner of the land, and after I explained what I was doing and why I was there and how I thought I had permission, he let me stay. And thank god for that, it was pouring rain and pitch black, and I wouldn’t have found anything else.

    The next morning, it was still raining, so I packed up my things as best as I could, and tried to warm up. In the late morning, the headwind picked up and the rain had done nothing to abate. I ended the day in a town called San Pedro. While in the main plaza, asking where I might be able to camp, an old man who loved learning English invited me to camp on his lawn, right across the street from a public thermal bathouse.

    The rain let up, and so I hung out my things to dry on a bush. I fell asleep, hoping that in the morning they would be drier, and therefore much lighter. I woke up to the sound of rain pounding on my tent. Sighing, I took everything down, wrung it all out as best as I could, packed up and left.

    It rained the whole day again until just before the town of Recreo. Just outside that town I met a group of local cycling enthusiasts who guided me to the public pool, where I was allowed to camp for free. They also bought me apples and crackers and sent me off with their good wishes.

    I hung up all of my clothes on a tree to dry them again, and this time it managed to not rain the entire evening. This time it started ten minutes after I woke up. But in those ten minutes, I was able to put away all my clothes and take down my tent. It rained again the whole day.

    I made it to a town called Deán Funes, found their luxurious municipal campground, convinced the groundskeeper to let me camp for free, and to use her shower (the only one with hot water). That was wonderful. Expecting rain, I took shelter in a gazebo, and it stayed dry the entire night. In the morning, finally the clouds were all cleared out and the sunny weather came back.

    I rolled through rolling hills until the main highway to Córdoba, and when I got to that the truck traffic had intensified so much that I was being blasted off the road every thirty seconds. I decided that I had enough of all that crap, took a dirt road away from the highway, and immediately wished I’d done so much earlier in the day. It was so quiet and serene, and nothing as terrible as the dirt roads in Bolivia. I actually pulled out my iPod, and for the first time since maybe Costa Rica, listened to music while I rode. In fact, I decided I liked this so much that I took more wandering roads through the hills, and decided that getting to Córdoba could wait another day.

    I ended the day down by a stream outside a town called La Granja and was variously entertained by a local group of drunken teenagers. They were really good kids, and my approval of Argentines increased a lot. The next day I finally entered Córdoba along a bicycle path, found a hostel by chance, and set about relaxing.

    This ends the Northern Argentina portion. I’ll have to think about how to divide up the rest of this trip in the coming days.

  • Bolivia
    2008-09-14

    It wouldn’t be the third world if getting into the Bolivia wasn’t a bureaucratic disaster. We knew that Bolivia had just expelled the US ambassador for some imagined slight, and we knew that since Homeland Security was created various countries have started imposing “reciprocity fees” on US travellers to the tune of $130. We were prepared for all of this.

    Of course when we went to immigrations, the reciprocity fee had jumped up to $135. No problem, we had some extra cash. But oh wait, they only had one visa left! Well dang, it looks like we’d have to wait until somebody’s cousin arrived from Copacabana with more visa stickers. And in the mean time, we’d have to fill out some forms, copy our passports and our yellow fever vaccination cards.

    Well, I had my vaccination card. Travis didn’t though. So rather than refuse entry to somebody for being a potential disease vector, we just had to pay a seven dollar bribe. Good ol’ Latin America!

    Eventually the guy arrived with additional stickers, we got several pieces of paper stamped several times, and we were on our way!

    Leaving Copacabana was an exercise in breathlessness. I don’t really know why, but for some reason, both Travis and I had a lot of trouble with the eight mile climb that started the day. Maybe it was the altitude, but probably it was just some old-fashioned early morning ass-dragging. When we finally made it to the summit, however, all the huffing and puffing paid off several-fold with a magnificent and continually improving view of the 21,000ft peaks to the north of La Paz.

    However, all of that climbing had to be undone because before we could get to La Paz, we had to descend back down to Lake Titicaca to cross the Taquina Straight on a dilapidated wooden car ferry. While crossing, we witnessed several of these motorized rafts ferrying buses and I secretly hoped to witness one rock right over the edge and into the water. No such luck.

    Anyway, on the other side of straight, the road continued gently up and down for a while along the lake. We finally broke away from the shore with a roaring tailwind, and all time estimates about reaching La Paz (95 miles from Copacabana) were enthusiastically moved forward. But the dark clouds in the distant background became dark clouds in the near background. And all of a sudden our wonderful tailwind completely reversed direction and it started to hail on us hard. Our hands froze, our feet froze, and our lips were split by pummeling hail. But worst of all, with this headwind we’d be arriving in La Paz just after the sun set.

    What else could we do but go on? We pushed and pushed and finally outrode the wind and hail. But the onset of evening brought the cold, and our wet feet lost feeling and our wet hands stung ferociously. But still there was no stopping. We had just entered El Alto, a suburb of La Paz with all the character of a typical third-world slum. So we pushed on, dodging buses and taxis and slowly climbing upward into colder and colder weather.

    Finally just at the edge of darkness we crested the lip of the canyon where La Paz sits, and began our descent into the main city. My night vision isn’t very good at all, so this was more of an adventure than it should have been. I spent the entire descent alternating between praying not to hit a pothole and cursing the stinging pain in my freezing hands. At one point my boot flew off my bike and had to be retrieved, but miraculously nothing else happened and we found ourselves in front of the micro-brewery that we intended to call our home in La Paz.

    We got couple beds in the dorm, took out my gasoline stove and boiled some water for tea. After a while I started to regain feeling in my feet, with none of the burning pain that I expected, and too tired to do anything else, we watched a romantic comedy with an Irish girl and a Belgian guy and then went to bed. Reflecting upon the movie later, I told Travis that I think I would have preferred being hit in the face with hail some more to watching the movie again.

    Now we had a problem, and it was a problem which I had never encountered before on this trip: time. Travis had to leave in eight days, and we still had to somehow ride from La Paz to Uyuni, then onward to Potosi and Sucre. From Sucre it just might be possible for Travis to catch a plane to Santa Cruz, where he would then catch another flight back to the world of all-you-can-drink soda and all-you-can-eat buffets… It almost doesn’t sound real when I write that…

    So what to do? We finally realized that the unthinkable would have to be done, and we started looking into buses to Uyuni. We found one, bought the tickets and paid the surcharge for our bikes. But about five minutes before the bus was scheduled to leave, intestinal trouble on Travis’ part made a 12 hour overnight bus ride sound like a very bad idea. Well, dang…

    I talked to the ladies behind the counter — well, more like pleaded with — about changing our tickets for the next day, and by the grace of god or my superior flirting abilities we were able to make the change without charge. So, seven days left.

    The next evening neither of us had any worrying issues, so we boarded the bus and set in for a sleepless and nausea-inducing 12 hour bus ride. And it was both: sleepless and nausea-inducing. Thank god that the nausea only overwhelmed us after we got off the bus, and secretly thank god that it only overwhelmed Travis. But clearly he couldn’t ride that day, and I too felt less than perfect after a night of internal organ reorganizing roads sitting in a bus seat too small for someone two-thirds my height. So, one more day down.

    But all was not lost. We met a German cyclist named Jochen, who beside from his tautonic social grace also delighted up with his knowledge of a really excellent pizza restaurant. We went there, found the pizza to be as good as anything in the United States, and were restored. Now I don’t normally endorse anything on this site, but if you are in Bolivia, or even near Bolivia, you owe it to yourself to go to Uyuni and eat at Minuteman Pizza. The owner, Chris, is a Bostonian expat and a hell of a chef.

    So back to the riding. Jochen, Travis and I set out the next morning along the very bumpy road to Colchani. Travis had to turn back and find his glasses; he had left them in some shop in town. But Jochen and I pressed on to Colchani along sand-filled washboard roads and trails — at 7 mph. This was no good, so we headed directly for the Salar, reasoning that the salt flats would be much quicker to ride on.

    This was wrong. It turns out that the area where we entered the salt was soft and my 35mm tires sunk right in. But rather than admit defeat and head back to the trails right away, I walked my bike along the salt hoping for it to firm up. And in this way my speed went from 7 mph to 3. And Travis arrived in Colchani before us, worried about where we were.

    We eventually found the proper entrance onto the salt, rattled down onto it, and our speed went from 7 to 10mph. Not what we’d expected at all. We were led to believe that the salt was smooth and the ride would basically be a rocket-powered blast across the vast whiteness. Well, after a while the salt smoothed out a bit, and when we weren’t dodging holes in the salt, our speed bumped up to 12 or 13 mph. Now that’s fast!

    Travis and I rode for a while guessing which of the purple-ish masses we saw in the distance would be the island we were headed for (Jochen was somewhere fading in the distance behind us). We eventually saw one with lightly colored patterns we took to be buildings, and assumed that would be our island.

    Of course, as we neared it, the patterns rose higher and we realized that what we were looking at must be a giant snow-covered mountain. And then we realized that some of the other islands we saw were probably equally large and distant. So we turned our attention to what I believed was a flying saucer, and Travis was convinced was the Loch Ness monster and headed for that. We were gettting pretty tired and hungry, and since that looked only a mile or so distant from us, we decided that we’d stop when we reached it.

    20 miles later we did reach it, and it turned out to be the island we were headed for the whole day. Oh, when I say “island”, I mean hill sticking out of the salt flat. There wasn’t any water surrounding it at all. So at the island, we investigated some rumors we’d heard about a refuge for cyclists, and were lead to this luxury cabin with a giant west-facing window and wonderful warmth. And when I say “luxury” I refer to the mattresses, blankets and table inside it. But considering we were expecting a drafty shack or nothing at all, this was great. And it stayed warm the whole night!

    So the next morning we rode back to the shore of the salt flats, across the bumpy road to Uyuni and back to Minuteman Pizza. While riding to shore, nothing ever seemed to get closer, even though we now had a tailwind and were cruising at 20mph. But suddenly after three hours of making no visible progress, we were at the salt hotel, and then back on the shore. Absolutely weird how it’s impossible to judge size or distance on the Salar and how one can only assume they’ve made progress through the progression of time and not by any physical feature of the landscape.

    The next morning, despite several people telling us how bad the road to Potosi was, and the evidence of a few cyclists who gave up riding on it and took the bus, we started out on the road to Potosi. And it truely was horrible. The sandy patches sucked out all our momentum, often causing us to get off the bikes and walk, and the washboard felt like being kicked in the butthole twice a second the entire day.

    But after fifty miles, and sore everything we arrived in the small town of Tica Tica, and called it quits for the day. I entertained Travis with tales of a beetle that lives in thatched roofs (like ours) and whose bite causes Chagas disease and then I fell into a deep and peaceful sleep. The next day was just as bad, and same with the following day to Potosi. The entire distance from Uyuni to Potosi saw an average speed of 6 mph. Six. That’s a trip record. Even in Guatemala and Costa Rica I never went that slow.

    But anyway, just outside Potosi the pavement started again. And except for a short section where we had to walk the bikes across a plank-bridge over metallic grey-blue water and then haul them up a steep staircase, the road felt like cheating. It was too smooth.

    I guess I had done something karmickly wrong after all, because while riding up a ridiculously steep road, my chain snapped, my derailleur flew into my spokes (again: the first time was in Alaska), and the hanger arm on my bike bent hopelessly inward. Oh nads! We only had one more day to get to Sucre, and given the complete lack of any bikeshop anywhere we went in town, we were in some trouble. Backing the narrative train up a bit, however, the derailleur was still intact, none of the spokes were damaged, and fixing the chain wouldn’t be difficult at all, so it’s not like this was a particularly devastating event.

    We bit the bullet a second time, got on a bus to Sucre, and spent the next three hours wishing we were riding. The scenery was absolutely amazing, and the music blasting in our ears was absolutely awful. The only thing that made it at all survivable was the fact that our ears were clogged with sand and dust and wax build up from the last three days of riding.

    But we did make it, and found Sucre to be a very lovely colonial city. Neither of us found Potosi to be all that appealing, which was shocking considering that it was at one time one of the richest cities in the world and indeed is still overlooked by a mountain deliciously chock-full of saleable precious metals and minerals.

    The following morning Travis left for his flight, and I set out to find a bikeshop to fix my hanger arm. I did, they did and it cost me only 3 bolivianos (40 cents)!

    After a few days of riding with my repaired hanger arm, I was no longer sure that the repair was the top-notch job I thought it was. The rear derailleur sticks out at about 10 degrees from true. I didn’t think this was a problem when I first put it back on and threaded the chain back on the bike. But here’s what happens: I’ll be riding along, or more likely bouncing up and down so violently on washboard that I can’t focus on the road, and one of the links will start to come loose. So I brandish my chain tool, repair the link and keep riding. 10 miles down the road, I have to do it all over again. And after the last time my chain snapped and sent my derailleur into my spokes, I’ve become deathly afraid of that happening again. I’m very diligent about the maintenance.

    But all of this is just a minor note in the torture of Bolivian roads. The road from Potosi to Tupiza is partially paved, but the majority is dirt and has been even worse than the road from Uyuni to Potosi. I didn’t really think that was functionally possible. But add large rocks, road spanning deep washboard, and grades that would make a Guatemalan road engineer weep with joy at seeing a job very well done and you get a good picture of what my colon has been up against. Now add to that an infuriatingly strong headwind that whips dust off the road and blows it in my eyes and you get the complete picture.

    Also, leaving Potosi I forgot to withdraw more money from the ATM, and so that left me with seven dollars to last the three days to Tupiza. Now, a hotel room in Bolivia generally costs around three dollars, and 2L water around 75 cents (since the rivers are all dry, there’s no water to pump). So my choice was sleep indoors on the one hand while I starve and thirst, or eat and drink survival rations while squating in my illicit camping spot. It was clearly time for more wilderness camping.

    The first night I competed with goats for space in a rock-strewn cactus patch, and clearing the rocks with my boots on still allowed for a few direct hits from hidden thorns. The second night I slept in a dried river bed behind a giant thorn tree, and that was wonderful. The advantage of both sites was that with abundant rocks, finding a hammer to pound in tent stakes was no trouble at all, and the ground was surprisingly easy to drive stakes into.

    The area leaving Tupiza was absolutely gorgeous, but the road continued in the tradition of all Bolivian roads and was absolutely terrible — and also under construction. In fact, because of the construction there was a detour that crossed a river three different times. Each time I had to take off my shoes and socks, roll up my pants, and wade through calf-deep water. The final time through the river, I got sick of doing this and just walked through with my shoes and socks on.

    While sitting on the side of the road wringing out my socks, a local on a bicycle told me that most locals just ride along the train tracks on the other side of the river from where I currently was. He also pointed out a wood plank which I could use to cross the river. He seemed to be talking a lot of sense, so I took his advice and headed on over to the tracks.

    And the first 10 miles were really great. While the main road scaled and plummeted down several hills, the gentle grade of the railroad tracks and the lack of washboard made riding easy. But then I came to agricultural land, and every 100 yards or so, I’d have to dismount, haul my bike over a drainage ditch, get back on and ride to the next ditch. And this continued on a long way. Finally irrigated land gave way to scrub and thorn bushes, and then the tracks became completely unrideable.

    So I took a 4x4 track back to the main road, and started back on that. Somewhere in thorn country, however, one of the bastards managed to pierce my front tire and give me a flat. So I changed that. A while later the the road started to pitch steeply upward, seemly determined to gain 1500 ft in as little distance as possible. And while grinding up one particularly sadistic grade, my chain snapped again — and I had just checked it! Luckily the derailleur didn’t fly into the spokes, but unluckily, I now had to shorten my chain to such a length that some gear combinations would no longer be reachable. Among them were some of my favorites for hill climbing.

    I now had to walk my bike up all the steep hills, so when the road crossed the train tracks again, I decided to try my luck with those one more time. Well, the steep grades went away, but the thorns came back and my rear tire went flat. I changed that tire and rode off, wondering why exactly god didn’t want me to reach the border town that day.

    That change didn’t seem to take, however, and an hour later my rear tire started to slowly go flat again. And being fed up with changing or repairing my bicycle all day long, I just inflated it with my pump and rode off. Of course, ten minutes later I had to do the same thing again. And again ten minutes after that. At some point I realized that it would probably be a time-saver in the long run to just change the tire again, but I was still pretty fed up with the whole business and continued on pumping up the tire when it got too low.

    And in this way I spent twelve hours riding my bicycle from Tupiza to the border town of Villazon, arriving just as the sun went down. Too tired to do anything else, I got a room in a hotel under construction, bought 2L of some citrus drink (Tampico citrus punch, mmm…) and drank it all, then fell asleep.

    In the morning I changed my tire, went over the whole thing with tweezers to pull out any thorns that still remained, found none that would have caused my second flat, and headed to the border. I saw a long line for immigrations, and went to wait in it. While waiting some military guy started to chat me up, and then he took my passport directly to the immigrations folks and had them stamp it, bypassing a half-hour wait. I remarked to someone that I had no idea why he helped me, and was told it was because I was white. Sometimes, as Travis remarked while we weren’t being heckled with do-it-yourself PC training pamphlets on the bus, there is an upside to racism.

    Bolivia was a very difficult country. There was a complete lack of everything, and both the roads and climate were extreme. I’ll probably look back on it and be glad that I did it, but as I write this, I am so glad to finally be in Argentina with its paved roads, clean water and so on.

  • Central Peru
    2008-07-31

    The road south of Trujillo proceeded in the same manner as the road north. That is, strong headwinds and endless dunes. A mixture of dunes and rocks, and larger rocks, and then verdant irrigated valleys. The dessicated trees found further north had all disappeared.

    And the unexpected but entirely welcome kindness of Peruvians continued south. My second day out of Trujillo, after several hours of battling a wind that slowed me to 5 mph on flat ground, I pulled off to a restaurant in the middle of nowhere. There I met the owner, Clemente, and he fed me, gave me a bed for the night, and we had a wonderful conversation. Before meeting Clemente, I was prepared to nominate this day as one of the worst days of riding on the entire trip, but after meeting him, I was prepared to nominate it as one of the best. If anyone is foolish enough to take the costal route after everything I’ve written in discouragement, km 348 will be an oasis.

    And again a couple of days later, while in a restaurant, a family (the Cubras family) invited me to their table to talk with them. I gladly accepted, of course, since talking is one of my favorite activities. And when lunch was all over, they insisted on paying for my meal. And I’ve heard that Peruvians are unfriendly!!

    Sure they loudly observe that I am a gringo much more frequently than the Colombians (never) or Ecuadorians (maybe twice), but the hospitality I’ve experienced has rivaled that of the Colombians, and greatly surpassed that of the Ecuadorians. Maybe I’ve just been lucky… Who knows.

    At any rate, without wind I can manage around 80 to 90 miles a day. With this wind, I’ve been lucky to achieve 60. The race down the coast is nothing at all like I’d hoped it would be.

    Leaving Chancay I ran into a dutch cyclist whom I’d first encountered in Stewart, British Columbia, and then again in Bodega Bay, California. We road together for a while and caught up on everything that had happened in the intervening 8,500 miles. Before I met him, I’d suspected that my bike was slowly seizing up on me and that I couldn’t be going as fast as I had a year ago. But riding with him, I kept pace and that relieved me greatly.

    On the way in to Lima, I saw the opportunity to tuck in behind a truck and draft it for a long while. I took that opportunity and cruised into town for a while at an effortless 25 mph. Eventually it got stuck in traffic, and I darted out from behind it and into the hellish maw of hundreds of competing collectivos on the Panamericana Sur. I’d long since learned that the way to deal with latin traffic is never to yield ground, and to have absolute faith in your ability to survive. And by the continued grace of God, I found myself safe, but also having overshot the road I wanted to take by several miles. I cut through Chinatown (not too different from the ones we have in California), eventually found the road I wanted, and managed to piss off several hundred more collectivo drivers to my destination. So, add Lima to the list of latin capital cities I’ve ridden through (every one but Mexico City, which I bussed to).

    I spent an unexpected rest day in Lima when I woke up with a very sore Achille’s heel. The day was spent doing the usual: eating. The next day, the pain was still there, but I didn’t feel like spending any more time waiting around to see if it would go away. So I spent the day with one foot pointed downward the entire time, and the other foot doing performing most of the labor. That technique actually worked out very well, and I managed to cover 90 miles.

    While in the middle of a day dream about all the peanut butter I would be eating when I finally arrived in Cuzco to meet my parents (the reason I’ve been hurrying since Quito — to meet them on time), two Swiss cyclists pulled up next to me. After a moment of confusion as to which language we all spoke best, we settled on High German, introduced ourselves, and decided to ride together for a while.

    This was great news for me, since I’d been mostly alone the entire trip and was getting pretty lonely for company. And the fact that I’d have to remember a language which I hadn’t needed to speak in over six years was no problem at all in forging a bond of international friendship. We rode together all the way to Cuzco.

    So, leaving Lima we rode 90 miles, the next day we rode 100. I started to worry that if this was their pace, I would be in for some serious hurting later on down the road. But they had the same fears, and the following day we only rode the sixty featureless miles to a small village whose name I can’t remember. I do remember they didn’t have water or power until well after dark, and they did have an unusually large number of roaming dogs. But nothing else.

    We cut the pace back even further the next day, because 30 miles from that nameless hamlet was Nazca, and we all had a hankering to see the lines. In the area where the lines are, some enterprising Peruvians decided to build a viewing tower, and we had the option to climb it for 35 cents to have an oblique look at some of the lines. So we did, and I managed to get a reasonable picture of a giant bean with even larger hands. We quickly got down from the tower when a busload of German tourists decided that the capacity limits didn’t apply to them, and I felt that the structural integrity of the tower was at risk.

    At Nazca we decided that it was a very good idea to cram as many calories into our bodies as possible, for the next day began a 11,500ft climb. And here I need to give the Peruvian road engineers a lot of credit: whereas in some countries I’ve been through, the road would take the steepest path up the hill that pavement would stick to, the Peruvians never made the road steeper than 4 or 5 percent, except when it was obvious that there was no other option.

    Anyhow, we managed 35 miles of climbing the first day, and slept under a clear sky at 10,000ft. The air was cool, but not cold, and still breathably thick. I remember this night in particular, because it was when I decided that my habit of brewing tea needed to be upgraded from habit to institution. So every evening, morning, and lunch break (Mittagspause), I’d make either herbal or coca tea. It’s nice to feel civilized every once and a while, and even though my face and hands were black with dirt, and I stank so bad that female animals would flee and males would make their challenges, I still felt like I belonged to an ordered world. Civilized.

    Leaving camp the following morning, I saw a trail which I felt would save me considerable time and effort over taking the regular highway. Of course, it cost me both. The trail eventually met up with the main highway, and I quickly put that whole ordeal behind me. The road continued up and up to the pampas (rolling plain in English, perhaps). We had our lunch, and after a little while finally reached the pass. There followed 3,000ft of screaming descent, and then more climbing and descending to the village of Puquio.

    The locals in Puquio seemed to be in the middle of satisfying a village-wide curiosity about how bad they could make a road before it became unpassable. They succeeded in that task as I pedaled up a particularly steep, potholed, and sandy section. I started to fall backwards off the bike, and only quick acting saved me from severe testicle injury.

    Leaving Puquio, we noticed signs on the highway saying not to destroy it or take pieces from it, and collectively wished that those signs were posted on the streets of the town as well. But the folks this side of town obeyed the signs, and the highway was in great shape. We climbed and climbed and climbed. After a while, I noticed snow in the shadows and I started to see more and more alpacas munching away on the hills. The road finally leveled out at 15,000ft.

    We rode hoping to come to some sort of pass before nightfall, because we knew that the air 15,000ft would be bitter cold after the sun went down. But instead of the pass, we encountered hail. So we rode as fast as our lungs would allow us (not fast), and by 4:30 we managed to ride out of the storm and into a broad plain of dejecta from an extinct volcano. We made camp, quickly set up our tents and cooked dinner, and ate as fast as we could.

    The sun went down, the temperature got down to around 15 degrees, and I shivered in my once-upon-a-time 20 degree bag with all my clothes on. When the sun finally rose, I thanked God for my survival, beat the frost off my tent, and laid it out to melt. All my water had frozen solid inside the bottles, and so was useless for cooking breakfast. Luckily my Swiss friends were more experienced with the cold, and had enough liquid water to pour into a pot to cook oats.

    We spent nearly the entire day on the broad plain above 13,000ft and had to climb to over 15,000ft several times before, glory of glories, the ground opened up and we were met with a 3,500ft descent off the cold plateau and down into a wonderfully warm river valley. We spent the night in a small town and bought six pounds of mandarin oranges with some of the highest seed counts I’ve ever seen.

    Anticipating a 70 mile gentle downhill along the river to the city of Abancay, we brought nothing else with us in the way of food but those oranges. And for the majority of the distance, say 55 miles, it was exactly that: a gentle downhill along the river. But oh god, those last 15 miles of uphill without any real food in my stomach were absolutely brutal. My two Swiss companions cheated by clinging on to the back of a slow moving truck. But I was more principled and less talented at it than they were, and chose to ride the entire thing. When the wind was at my back, I sweat incredibly, and the biting insects swarmed my eyes and nose. When the wind was in my face, the insects blew away and I crawled upward.

    We finally got into town, regrouped, demolished a local Chinese restaurant, rested, and then demolished a pizza parlor. On the map Abancay is tantalizingly close to Cuzco, but in reality it is 6,000ft climb, 6,700ft descent, and another 5000ft climb before the city limits. This took two days, and my first two flat tires since leaving Quito. But after all of it, I rolled into town, found my way to my parent’s hotel (a day late), and was greeted with a hot shower, hugs, and 8lbs of peanut butter.

    The next evening, I met up with my Swiss friends again, and with them, we went to a pizza parlor known for its giant portions. We asked the waiter to show us the pans for the various sizes of pizza we could have, and against his advice, ordered a pizza “large enough for 15 people”. When it finally came out, the three cyclists in our group burned through it, leaving my parents (and us) still hungry for more. We ordered a “family sized” pizza, and did the same to it. We finally left, but in my heart and stomach, I knew I still had space for a medium pizza…

    I spent the following three and a half weeks variously honing my flirtation skills and travelling with my parents. Two weeks into my rest I developed a new form of sickness where my throat got so dry it would bleed when I woke up in the morning. So it was with a three and a half week break from the bike, plus an illness that I greeted my friend Travis.

    I wasn’t about to let a little thing like a bleeding throat stop me from riding with one of my good college buddies, so shortly after he arrived we partnered up with two new Swiss and one French cyclist and made for Puno. I rode like I remembered being able the first day, but my apetite was nowhere to be seen. The second day, my apetite was still depressed from my illness and my carbohydrate debt was mounting. I went even slower.

    During that second day, we took a break at a hotsprings to take in the rejuvenating waters. I had high hopes for their curative powers while riding toward them, but the color of the water and the presence of testicle-exfoliating men at the other end of our pool quickly diminished those hopes. I rode away from the springs uncured.

    The next day we finally made it to the Altiplano, which ordinarily would mean luxury cruising all the way to Lake Titicaca, but my weakness continued to piss me off and, embarrassingly, the group had to wait for me several times. We ended that day in Juliaca, and through some shrewd negotiating on the part of the Swiss, we ended up with two beds for five people, and having to pay for hot showers. But it only cost the bedless (myself included among them) five soles, so I view it as a win.

    Finally after Juliaca the group parted ways. Travis and I arrived in Puno, and set about devouring the best pizzas the city had to offer. Machu Pizza was a particularly good example. Travis also toured the floating islands, while I hunted down mini-bananas and washed my underpants.

    The day after Puno, we rode along Titicaca to the town of Pomata. The ride was nearly uneventful, until we rode through a patch of freshly laid tar, and were nearly completely covered. This was quite inconvenient for us, and Travis got pretty well pissed off about it. As I write this, I still have tar on my hands (the damn stuff just doesn’t come off!).

    Pomata was a nothing town, and had I known what it would be like, I would have stopped well short at Juli. But we had no idea, so we waited in the center for well over three hours until either the owner of one hotel returned to rent us a room, or the owner of the pharmacy across the way decided that he would rent one of his rooms to us. When the owner of the first place hadn’t still come back by 7:00pm, the pharmacy owner finally rented us a room at five soles a bed. That would have been an excellent deal, if the toilet weren’t so disgusting that I would have prefered to crap on the ground.

    The next morning, planning to go only the short distance to Copacobana, Bolivia, we woke up slowly, took our time cooking breakfast and rolled out the final 20 miles to the border. Leaving Peru was no trouble at all, and so ended two months in a country that continually baffled me, but that I loved nonetheless.

  • Northern Peru
    2008-07-17

    On other side of the border bridge were people selling cheap Ecuadorian gas, and hundreds of mototaxis. I made my way to Peruvian immigrations and fended off money changers (I had no intention of surrendering my American dollars, which are used for the currency of Ecuador). The immigration officer asked me how many days I wanted and I told him at least 60. He gave me 120. This increased my belief that the Colombian immigrations officer had no sense of humor, and punished my hilarious jokes with 15 days way back when…

    A few miles south of immigrations, the land turned ever more dry, and instead of rivers flowing with polluted water as I found in Ecuador, these rivers didn’t flow with anything at all. Eventually I made it to the town of Tumbes, withdrew of nuevos soles from the ATM, and used them to get some cheap lodging. And so ended my first day in Peru…

    Well, nearly. In the evening, while taking in some of the local sights, I was approached by a desperate Austrian man, whose trusting nature had allowed a taxi driver to drive away with his luggage still in the vehicle. He asked me for some money, and when I only gave him the dollar (3 soles) I had on me, he critized me for not giving him more. What the hell? That’s the last time I ever admit to speaking German at night in Peru…

    The next morning I made my way south, to the costal resorts, and then costal desert to be found south of Tumbes. On my way I stopped to lend the use of my bike pump to a motorcyclist who had a flat, and his graciousness made me feel partially better about my charitable nature. Continuing on, I became increasingly bored by the landscape, and nearly fell asleep off my bike more than once.

    So it was a great change of pace to meet a couple of Argentine cyclists on their two year global tour. After a bit of chatting, their continued north as I continued south.

    And around the next bend began the headwinds. Why didn’t they tell me about them? As I went further south the winds built and built, and I found myself infuriated and nearly defeated. I ended the day near an oil derrick, about 75 miles south of where I started the day, too tired to be angry and too exhausted to cry. I lay with my head out of my tent staring up at the unfamiliar southern constellations for a while until the full moon outshone them all, and then slid back in and fell alseep.

    The next day the winds returned, and I must have competely zoned out the entire time. Because after several hours of riding through featureless desert, with the occasional dog chase and ever-present headwind, I found myself in an irrigated valley near Sullana. I made my way to that city, got a room, got some food, and washed the dirt and cooking fuel off my hands. I’d ridden 85 miles, but now have barely any memory of it at all. Oh, while brushing my teeth on the side of the road, I accidentally spit toothpaste on my shoe. I laughed at that.

    As I was preparing myself for the desert the next day, I decided it was time for a break. I pushed on 25 miles to Piura, arriving at 10:00am and set in for the day. The desert could wait another day.

    In the morning before I set out to tackle the desert, I brewed myself my first batch of coca tea and loaded it up with sugar. I figured with the combination of cocainoids and sucrose I’d fly right down the desert and possibly —just possibly— cross the entire thing in one day.

    As it turned out, no such luck. The now-familiar headwind was in top form with nothing at all in the endless expanse to stop it, and it pushed me constantly. I still managed to roll out a cool 85 miles that day, and I can’t decide if I should credit the coca for that result; my careful two sandwiches and a banana every 25 miles regimen; or the fact that I devoted eight straight hours to riding that distance.

    In any event, I ended in the middle of nowhere, hidden from the highway behind a thorn tree-covered dune. I cooked up some oat/quinoa porridge, shoveled it into my mouth, and stared out across the dunes as the sky slowly lost its light. The wind howled throughout the night, but in my tent I was warm and secure.

    The next morning I cooked up more porridge, demolished a roll of ritz cracker imitations, produced some food for the local fly population and set off. The wind was already strong. But after around 10 miles the land started to green and I saw huts along the road in increasing density. Clearly I was near some sort of population center. Sure enough another 10 miles down the road I came to a town and to the end of the depopulated expanse of the Sechura desert.

    In Chiclayo, I went into a diner and saw couple with a half finished plate of thick-cut french fries. Not knowing it was half-finished, and thinking that it was just delivered to their table, I ordered one for myself. What came out can best be described as a moutain of french fries. I did my best to eat them all, but eventually the grease and salt started to give me a headache, and I went from delicious feasting to wincing with every bite. At that point I threw in the napkin and admited defeat.

    The next morning I rode through a stretch of desert even more featureless than that which I’d just spent two days in. Flat sand forever. Well, and the occaisional sign saying that this was a military testing zone and that there were live explosives, so don’t enter. I took them at their word.

    But eventually hills started to rise off on the eastern side of the road, and became larger and more sublime as I continued southwards. And so I spent half my time watching the road for potholes and the other half watching the hills grow larger and closer. I would choose a hill on the horizon and guess how far away it was, and then perhaps 45 minutes later, I would discover that my guess wasn’t even close. In this way, I was able to cope with the wind and desolation all the way to the beach town of Pacasmayo, where after some hard negotiation and playing one hotel off the other, I got a room for $4. The management wasn’t very friendly with me after that, but I wasn’t about to pay more for a cold shower (which I didn’t take) and a bed which I never slept on (I prefered the floor).

    The following morning I got up very early, and mentally prepared myself for riding through the thieves nest of Paiján. I first heard about this town in Colombia from a pair of Spanish cyclists travelling north, and its reputation grew in my mind to such a point that I was sure that I’d be robbed naked and blind shortly after passing through.

    After thirty miles in the desert, I came to the town limits. I set my body to maximum adrenaline rush, and pushed on the pedals so hard it felt like angry dwarves were kicking my shins with each rotation. I made it through town without issue. But everyone had, the real action took place in the sugarcane fields on the other side of town when the thieves would supposedly come in their mototaxis and attack. The dwarves put on steel-toed boots and I continued on to the next town five miles down the road. Safe. I still raced through that town and to the next one. Safe. And then into the desert again. Safe. Finally 15 miles down the road, I relaxed a bit and let my tunnel vision expand back to normal.

    The rest of the ride to Trujillo was spent thanking god and cursing the wind, and in Trujillo I called up Lucho. He met me, and took me into his home for a few days of chillaxin’ in the first cyclist friendly environment I’d been in for ages. What a perfect way to take some time off!

  • Ecuador
    2008-06-22

    I spent a while at the Colombia-Ecuador border chatting it up with the money changers before I left. They were a good source of information on the road ahead, and were curious about my trip on a person-to-person level, rather than the series of rapid-fire questions level. God knows I love to chit-chat, and it was a good 30 minutes of shooting the breeze between getting my exit stamp and crossing the small bridge to Ecuadorian immigrations.

    In light of my experience with Colombian immigrations, I decided that joking was not in order, so I listed my profession on the immigration form as the relatively tame “fighting-cock breeder”, rather than the usual “international jewel thief” or “organ trafficker”. Apparently, “fighting-cock breeder” is a high-demand profession here, as I was granted a 90 day visa. And so after enjoying a 35 cent cup of coffee, I started the climb up to Tulcán.

    And I immediately thought that the drivers here were all nuts! The northbound traffic had completely blocked the southbound lane, and so I had to ride against speeding traffic all the way to the outskirts of town. There I realized that there was an entirely different road for southbound traffic, and it was I who was riding in the wrong direction.

    In town I didn’t see anything to compel me to stop, and so found the road south and took it. While still in town, I got a flat rear tire (my second flat in South America). I commandeered a section of the sidewalk and changed it. And then rode on.

    Leaving town, there was a 1000ft or more climb to deal with, with views of nearby volcanoes and dark clouds speeding towards me. The clouds never caught up, thank god, because at my altitude that would have been some really cold rain. It turned out that the climb was just up to a pass, because I descended towards a valley-like area after a bit and ended my first day in Ecuador with another flat rear tire as I rolled into the town of San Gabriel.

    There I took a $3 room at the local residencias and went on a $10 shopping spree at the local supermarket. Considering a bag of milk only cost 60 cents, and a one lbs. bag of quinoa (!) cost a dollar, you can imagine just how much food I bought. I spent the rest of the evening stuffing most of it into my face and then feeling pretty sick after imbibing triple milk rations.

    What remained of the food after my gluttonous frenzy fueled me for the next day down, down, down to the Chota valley and to a town of purely African descendants (I’d never encountered any sizeable African population at this altitude before, so I was curious about how it came to be there, but not curious enough to stop and ask). The Chota valley was warm and dry, and since I still had a good amount of food left, I saw no reason to stop as I rode through it, except to occasionally convert food to fuel. The road down, however, is worth special mention because as I turned a corner leaving San Gabriel, I saw my first giant snow covered volcano. That stayed in sight as the road followed the edge of a canyon which as far as I could tell was bottomless (I believe that it is bottomless). While still high up in my descent, farms descended down the hills to the event horizon of the canyon, and I found them all to be beautiful. Down lower, it was too arid for that…

    After a while of flat or rolling riding through the Chota valley, I saw a road switch-back up the hill, and a little later, realized that it was my road. So I went into the lower gears for a while, and summited next to a fragrant landfill, and finally descended into the town of Ibarra (birthplace of the last great Inca resistance leader, I think). I rode through Ibarra up and along the hump of the local volcano, all the while enticed, but not seduced, by signs for delicious grilled guinea pig. The road took me through a sort of low point between three large volcanoes, past a lake which looked like Lago de Atitlan, Jr. and finally up, up, up and then down, down, down to the town of Cayambe. There I quit for the day, and wandered around town while Ecuadorian teenage girls giggled and cast furtive glances my way as I walked past. After a week of hard riding without a shower, I can’t imagine I looked or smelled particularly good, but who knows.

    I woke up the next morning to rain. Dang it. I took longer than usual getting ready hoping it would stop, but it didn’t. And so I headed down out of town freezing until I surrendered bit by bit, and put on my cold weather gear. I guess I was pretty high up after all…

    And after a shorter while than I expected, I saw a town which seemed somewhat out of place, and realized that I’d just crossed the equator. So I went over to the monument, took a couple of pictures, and got back on the bike. I’d just ridden for a year, down 70 degrees of latitude and east 70 degrees as well. Somehow what that meant failed to impress itself upon me at the monument. Maybe it was the rain…

    The rain did stop eventually, and I began the long slow climb (my legs were pretty dead after riding from Bogotá to Quito with just one rest day and several bucket loads of climbing, so when I say slow, I really mean “slooooow”). Eventually I made it, and did what I always do when coming into a city.

    After over two weeks of waiting for my tires to clear customs, and also having three different conflicting responses as to the status of my package from UPS depending on whether I called from Quito, my mom from the US, or the tire company called from wherever they are, I decided to just go down to UPS and see if some physical presence could produce the package.

    Sure enough it was there, and by some crazy coincidence UPS had only received it from customs earlier that very same day…

    My time in Quito was spent waiting around for the package, and I regret that. The next time I’ve got an unknown wait for something to come, I’m just going to take off exploring via the bus, and come back when I know the package is ready for me to liberate it. Right now I’m pretty pissed off at UPS for the way they’ve handled things, but at least they didn’t charge me any customs duties. Actually, I think they meant to, but in a moment of confusion, I took the package and ran off.

    So I finally got to get back on the road, and after an eternity riding south of Quito, finally left its orbit and made it out into the country. And into the rain. My legs began to complain, I got soaking wet, and said “Nuts to this, I’m calling it a day!”. So I stopped at the junction town of Aloág and took shelter. The rain continued to pour through the night, and the clouds were there thick as ever the next morning. Normally this wouldn’t bother me overly much, but they completely obscured my view of several giant snow covered volcanoes. Their threat of rain on this day never produced more than a drizzle, and so I stopped short again in the city of Latacunga, hoping for a view of the volcanoes the next day.

    No such luck. Thick clouds again hung low in the sky and obscured my view of Chimborazo (a 20,700 ft peak) completely. The only way I could tell I was near it were the signs pointing in its presumed direction, and the absolutely breathless altitude I had to climb to (12,000 ft) to get to the city of Riobamba.

    Again I hoped for a view of Chimborazo the next morning, and again clouds completely covered the sky. My climbing for that day topped out somewhere past the indigenous town of Cajabamba (“bamba” is qichwa for valley, so whenever I see a town on the map with “bamba” in its name, I know I’m in for more climbing). And although I was denied a view of every major peak in Ecuador except Cayambe, I did get to see something I wasn’t really expecting to see at all —quinoa being cultivated in the fields. I’m a pretty big nut for gardening when I have access to land, so seeing quinoa triggered an euphoric geek response that made the rest of the day fly by.

    Well, relatively. First I had to descend through some dense fog into the town of Alausí. But with that accomplished I took a contemplative stroll around the town, reflecting on quinoa and other indigenous crops in the new world. I also reflected on the fact that I haven’t seen a llama in the fields yet, and am getting pretty impatient to see one.

    From Alausí the road turned for the worse, and I was sliding over loose rocks uphill to the town of Cunchi where the good pavement finally returned. At a restaurant just outside town, I met a guy named Nacho who used to live in New Jersey. He was originally from Ecuador, but his parents live in New Jersey now. We talked about some of the differences between Ecuador and the US, and he was grateful for the opportunity to speak English with someone (my Spanish is such that it’s usually just easier to speak in Spanish).

    The road from Chanchi climbed through the fog. As it continued to climb, the fog began to lift and rain began to fall. It started to fall harder and harder until on every slight descent the drops of rain felt sharp in my eyes. In these conditions I continued to climb and descend to the junction town of Zhud. Beyond there the rain doubled its force, and the fog returned. The road became the worst I’ve seen in a long time (I find bad pavement to be worse than bad dirt, and this road was perhaps the best proof of that).

    Finally as darkness was coming on, I pulled into the town of Tambo, frozen cold and starving, and took a $4 room at the local residencias (“Residencia” is the magic word for dirt cheap accomodations in Ecuador). After stuffing my face with some bread and milk I found, I crawled into my sleeping back and passed out shivering. But for all that, my spirits were incredibly high that day. The day before I was overwhelmed by a sense of lonliness, the first which I’d experienced in several months. And so the swing in my mood by the next morning was unexpected and very welcome. I didn’t mind the dirt I had to ride on, I loved talking with Nacho, and the road to Zhud was downright pleasant to ride on. It was only after Zhud when altitude caused the trees to disappear from the land, oxygen from the air, and strength from my legs that I started to feel desperate and cold.

    On the next morning, I was greeted with a cold headwind and a climb back up to 12,000ft. Devoid of oxygen and full of agony, I slowly climbed over the pass. Finally at the top I was saved by a 3000ft descent which banished the cold wind and brought oxygen back to my legs and lungs. It did nothing to relieve the soreness in my legs, however. And so, I followed a rolling road the remaining 20 miles into Cuenca, and decided it was time to take a day off.

    After my day off in Cuenca, I orienteered my way out of town and onto the road leading south. The road led through more pastoral valleys with pine and eucalyptus climbing the hills. In one town, I saw a procession of faithful carrying a statue of the virgin Mary complete with marching music. Overall, the road was nearly flat and the weather was pleasant and the miles rolled under my tires.

    I eventually came to an intersection which led on the one hand over another 12,000ft pass from my current altitude of around 8500ft and up and down to Loja, and on the other hand to a 8500ft descent to the coast. On a whim, I decided to burn 8500ft of hard earned elevation and see what the Ecuadorian coast had to offer.

    Well, I never quite saw the coast, but here’s how the climate changed as I descended: lush grass and cool air, to warmer air, to scrub land, to wind-swept badland, to scrub land, to tropical, to really humid and more densely tropical. The road didn’t descend the whole time; no road in Latin America can be that kind. And the wind-swept part of the road was more wind-blasted-in-my-face-so-I-had-to-pedal-to-descend-a-five-degree-slope. Also the road sucked and I had to be ever vigilant for potholes.

    But I made it down to the dirty town of Pasaje after 95 miles of riding, found a cheap hotel and a cheap chinese restaurant and set to work relaxing for the night. While in my room, deciding what I was going to do for the day, I realized that I was really close to the Peruvian border. Before taking the route to the coast, I was still about four days off, but suddenly, I found myself with 45 miles of Peru. So I set out to find the exchange rate, read up on the border crossing and generally inform myself as to the situation I would soon encounter.

    Well, the news wasn’t good. My guidebook repeatedly said that this crossing was the most dangerous of all the crossings into Peru from Ecuador, and that I would surely be a victim of some foul crime. But what the guidebook didn’t account for was that I was stinky, uncaring, and most importantly: I had a bicycle.

    And so the next morning, I left Pasaje through banana plantations and drizzle. The drizzle stopped, the plantations stopped, and the tropical foliage became more scrub-like as I went south until at the border town it was more savanna than forest.

    I passed immigrations, and by the time I stopped to ask someone where the office was, I was informed it was two and a half miles back the way I came. Dang it! I turned around, trudged the two and a half miles, got my exit stamp, turned around again and trudged the two and a half miles by to where I had to turn around the first time. From there it was another half mile to the border bridge, through street stalls and a mass of human traffic and into Peru.

  • Colombia
    2008-05-15

    The Darien Gap presented me with a difficulty. Here was a stretch of land without any road, but populated with poisonous varieties of any animal you can imagine, infested with all manner of disease and also with people who would be just as likely to shoot me as not. And so starting in Honduras, the contemplation of this physical barrier caused it to burrow into my mind, seperating my trip into everything before the Darien Gap and everything after.

    And the problem of how to cross it was not easily solved. I could hire a tour and march through the Darien, I could take a boat from near Colón to Cartagena, or I could take a flight. Now as you may have guessed already, I am not the adventurous sort, so crossing the Darien by land was out. That left the boat and the plane. At first I was all gung-ho to take the boat, but as I looked into it, the problem of actually getting a boat with a captain who wouldn’t abandon us in the middle of nowhere nor be raging drunk the entire time was greater than I had imagined. And all the reputable boats would be leaving nearly two weeks after my original arrival in Panama City. Since that city shares the same insta-sweating quality as Puntarenas, I was somewhat eager to make onward progress.

    So I took a flight to Cartagena. This had the twin advantages of being faster and cheaper than a boat, and the bonus advantage of heart-stoppingly sexy stewardesses. Being a modern man I normally use the word “flight attendant” when talking about that profession, but these women were so classy in a 1960s sort of way that “stewardess” was clearly what they were. They were also, to my wonderous delight, typical of nearly every Colombian woman I would see. But I digress…

    With me on the flight were a Swiss, a German, and an Australian. We formed a confederacy and took a taxi from the airport to the old town, realizing when we arrived after only a distance while that we’d paid far too much for the ride, so it goes. I joined in on the taxi, because I wasn’t confident that my bicycle would survive the turbulent flight intact, and I had no desire to find that out in the airport (it did, thank god).

    And how to describe Cartagena? The old town is surrounded by a thick and fortified wall, built after the town was razed several times by English pirates (Sir Francis Drake among them), and within this wall is a collection of well-preserved 16th and 17th century Spanish buildings. Outside the wall on three sides is the sea and the forth is a hill with an impressive fort. So in summary, Cartagena is gorgeous. The city is also not insufferably hot, thanks to a continual breeze coming off the sea, and I am glad to have had it as my introduction to Colombia.

    It felt somewhat weird to be on the road again after leaving Cartagena. Everything seemed similar to every other latin country I’d been in, but of course, this is the country with armed revolutionaries in the hills and para-military drug-smuggling kidnapping-for-ransom bad-asses everywhere else. But still the road felt as safe as anywhere, and considerably safer than in some countries I’ve already passed through. I guess either my perception of reality and reality itself were at odds (I certainly won’t discount the possibility at this stage in the journey), or the strong military and police presence everywhere made it feel quite safe.

    In Curumani, I finally picked up a pair of sunglasses. I was tired of feeling like my eyes were being rubbed with sandpaper after a long day of riding, and of riding with one eye closed while I tried to fish out whatever insect decided to kamakazi into my eye most recently. So, I finally have sunglasses again after my last pair broke outside of Guanajuato. ¡Qué bueno! Now if I can only get some pants to replace the ones whose seat was stained black, I’ll won’t feel embarrassed to walk around in public…

    People have started to ask me if I’m from Argentina. I guess here, it’s more likely that a white person on a touring bicycle is from Argentina than from the US, so that’s the logical conclusion. During those times where I take the effort to explain that I’m from the US, they don’t believe me. They don’t speak Spanish in the US, I’m told. I usually respond to this with the equivalent of “well, there it is…”

    Shortly after passing through the town of San Alberto, I began a series of climbs that put my legs through the paces. I would climb and climb, perhaps for a thousand feet, and then descend down nearly all that distance. This repeated itself five times before Bucaramanga, and ending with a final long ascent up to the city itself.

    But before arriving in Bucaramanga, while stopped at the town of Rio Negro to do some exploring, I met two Bucaramangans (Mauricio and Sergio) who were in town to wash Mauricio’s scooter in the river. We struck up a c