life @ 13

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck
the experiment in liberty must be photodocumented

pics up

sheet up

tuesday
first day cycling alone in a long time was from latacunga to ambato, 42 highly unintimidating kilometers. just to keep things interesting, someone pointed the wind in my face, put up a couple 150m passes, took away my shoulder for a while, and threw in lots of traffic. whatever. Ambato turned out to be much bigger than i expected...the guy who owned the hotel i stayed in lived in newark for 20 years and drove a truck. apparently almost all ecuadorians who go abroad to make money come back (i´m guessing a little here, but people from mexico tend to stay)

wednesday
left early in the morning, felt OK but not great...good breakfast of croissants and yogurt. climbed 400m just to get out of city. road never went down...but this was expected because according to the book the climb was to fourthree. my energy level was slipping rapidly..legs giving less and less. took a nap on the side of the road, which helped but not totally. i notice i'm short a spoke on the back wheel
stopped by little indigineous town, made coffee in a little farm house, decided to stay the night there because i was at threesix and any higher it would be cold. eventually a boy came by, shy, asked him if i could stay but he didn't really respond...later on dad came by and was very friendly and said it was OK to stay...boy came back with brother and more fam and asked for dollar. this would not happen in colombia, then again i wouldn't feel as safe doing this in colombia. an act of faith??
slept pretty well...almost cold but OK. crappy sleeping bag...NEVER wash nice down bags by hand.

thursday
left really early, spectacular morning. quiet road, started to get views of volcano chimborazo, felt much better, more climbing, practically next to volcano, great views, etc, etc, cross four, down to threeeight, through the altidessert, cross the pass at a little over fourone (thirteenfive).
downhill from there. descent starts off cold, then in really heavy clouds, then road gets worse and worse. first 1000m decsending are NOT FUN. then i'm below the clouds, still crappy road but i make it to guaranda in one piece. lunch, then i decide to keep going. something is drawing me to the coast. 5 weeks in the mountains and i want a change. my brain wants the kitch value of descending from 4100+ to 0 in the same day.
and so, with 80k and 4100 m of descending, you think this would be a pretty easy ride. hm.
the road goes down a little, up a little, down a little, down some more...ok with me. only 60k to the coast and 2600 to drop. climb 100m as the google terrain view predicted, then down to 2400. steep climb out of the town, 2500. notice that there is a wall of mountains, no pass in sight. screaming, raining, unhappy. there was nothing, NOTHING on the map that indicated a climb like this. only the deaf in San Vicinte did not learn a new word today. put on the pixies. climb to 2700. no pass in sight. can't see anyways. feeling incredibly strong (probably from the heavy air) and incredibly pissed. road turns shitty. 2800. lady says there is lots more climbing. 2900...in the clouds again, light rain, top of the pass finally. still can't see though. start descending. 11 degrees C, raining, i'm fucking soaked and pissed. road sucks, descending slowly, rain in eyes and can't see well, using every ounce of concentration i have to keep from hitting the big potholes. down to 2500, guy at gas station says it's all down from here, lady on horse says more climbing. unfortunately the horselady is right. mostly push bike to 2650, almost crying from extreme frusturation. down to 2400, rain and road get worse....in patches it is OK and others i'm descending a 5% grade at 15 or 20 km hr, using all my concentration and every bike handling skill i have. then back up to 2450 and now i'm in total disbelief...feeling very cold but just miserable, no real core temp danger. keep thinking that i need to descend at lesat below 1500 and dry off in order to be comfortable. finally, the descent i have been waiting for, 16k straight down to 800m, see sign for hotel, $5, done deal. mud everywhere, everything is wet. "the life of bees" is soaked, camera display is not working, "zen..." is OK, body not happy but in one piece, sleep 12 hours. 137k, 1250m up, 4100 down. hell of a day.

friday
wake up late, warm and still a little wet. hung up all my clothes in the room last night and in the morningnone of my ultra-drying synthetics are dry in the least. pack up, using much more plastic to keep everything dry.
really crappy descending the next 800m...unfortunately did not tie down my cycling shorts and the are gone with the wind and i'm still too pissed-hungover from yesterday to care. 35 flat, flat, flat k to the next town Babahoyo where i eat and charge the ipod and start sketching the blog post in shorthand....much of which i left in shorthand. the sign says 70k to Guayaquil, the biggest city in ecuador, not recommended by any guide book or person i've met, which means my interest is piqued. the road there wasn't bad...busy but mostly with a good shoulder. i haven't cycled without shorts in a long time and it's bitingly clear why.
still not feeling great and haven't eaten much in the past few days so i'm not entirely sure where my energy is coming from, but i'm able to hold around 23k/h for a few hours. cross over two massive bridges to enter the city....lots of traffic but for me it was much easier than quito.

saturday
i LOVE the city right from the get-go. to me, most people here on the coast have a certain gusto that was mostly lacking in the andes. entirely different people. there are very, very few tourists in the area, a huge plus in my book. My guide book sings highly of quito and damns guayaquil with faint praise (and very few pages), probably because there is "nothing to do" here, but, for me, this trip is intentionally very light on things to do (not counting the bike) and heavy on trying to get under the skin. guayaquil feels even more citylike than medellin.
the way i speak and understand spanish is improving too. very few improvements to grammar and vocab, but i'm speaking and asking questions with much more confidence, and ignoring the fact that my pronunciation sucks, because it changes so much from place to place there really is not much of a center to adhere to, anyway.
a day or two here, errands and things (definitely new shorts), then off to the pacific for a day or two....i've been pining for a swim there for weeks now.

learning and sleeping

we left off in quito, right? originially i wanted to leave friday and julian monday, but he moved his day up to saturday so i stuck around to ride out with him.
we did a fairly good job at one of the harder parts of the trip (for me)...getting up early after several city days. the good news was that the only way to beat the crazy quito traffic is to leave before the sunrise, which is more or less out of the question on the bike -- so we got going a little after 7. once we got away from the center there was a well-graded road out of the city...only 300m, which doesn't register as a climb around here. the andes in our legs? anyway, shortly after lunch ran into a swiss lady who was cycling the other direction...very friendly lady, who was clearly a lifelong traveller and sportswoman and just had a very good air about her. she let me take pictures of her nicely detailed peru and south ecuador map.
kept going...knew that the top pass was 3500 from our low point of 2700. nice 1% grades up to 3100, then we got some steady rain, the grade increased, and our shoulder disappeared for a while. at arond 3200 i started feeling the altitude (a little strange....i've been much higher without feeling it). anway, it's happened before and i know that if i take it very easy for 30 mins i will return to normal, which i did. got some spectacular views of the 5900m volcano copotaxi just at the top of the pass. one of the most rewarding descents of the trip...first 300m down were steep and straight and i stayed above 60 km/hr for 5-10 mins. then the grade drops to .5-1%, which allows you to cover spectacular distances very quickly. on flat ground i average about 24-25 km/hr, but at a 1% descent this goes to about 38.
Anyway...made it to Latacunga really early, even with a long stop talking to the swiss woman. not too much to say about the town...it's seemingly engulfed by a large market, where i got hat #4, pictures to come. Julian was to climb the volcano the next day and i was planning on splitting, up and over the mountains and then down to the coast. but met a couple kids in the hostel who were going to a volcanic lake Quilotoa and decided to tag along for the day.
The lake was very cool, pictures to come..only drawback was one that i have noticed quite a bit in ecuador, that the locals tend to look at you like walking money and treat you as such too. i sympathize, but that doesn't make it much less annoying. this was almost nonexistant in colombia. One of the kids, Eli, was planning to hike the next day...which goes halfway around the rim of the volcano then descends into the local towns. i decided to tag along. we stayed at one of the little guesthouses at the top of the volcano, but didn't sleep entirely well at 3850 (12, 500).
started off early the next morning, and the big challenge of the day was instantly apparent...we were in the clouds, and couldn't see much more than 20 fet in front of us. the other big challenge was that the main path was not entirely clear...sometimes the side paths were bigger and more worn. and, to top it off, it _seems_ that someone removed all the signs from the signposts, which _may_ be related to the fact that everyone you enconter is offering to guide you for a price. anyway, we got a little lost, found our way back, etc, etc...but missed the main turnoff that would lead from the top of the volcano to the next town. we got a break in the clouds, could see a fairly clear descent into the valley, as well as a road, and jumped on it. but because we had walked to far around the rim, after descending the mistake was amplified....to keep this short, what was supposed to be a 4 hour 11km hike turned into a 9 hour 23-ish km hike with well over 1500m of vertical. the good news was that after the town on the rim, everyone was very friendly, giving us shelter from the rain and good directions to the next towns.
Found a good hostel in Chuchilan, dried off by the fire, ate our first meal in 11 hours, and enjoyed some beers (i, um, realized that it was just a couple hours to my, um, birthday). woke up at 2am to catch a ride back to Latacunga with the hostel owner...quite an interesting experience riding in his large delivery truck, with your face right up against the front of the truck, driving in the dark, in the clouds, with debris all over the road, mud, sharp curves, narrow passes with oncoming traffic, etc, etc. my kind of fun.
said the goodbyes to julian (again) this morning...heard about his conequest of the 5800m volcano and all that good stuff. he's got a damn good plan...descending today to a town at 1800 with hot springs, then a few days riding in the amazon region, and then taking a boat for 5ish days, crossing into peru. we made a pretty damn good riding team, and the first couple days will probably be a little strange. one thing that made him different was the fact that he was not at all a cyclist before starting his trip. we balanced each other out...i helped him with tips and tricks about efficient cycling, and he helped remind me that the trip is not about the bike.
i'm going to Ambato this afternoon, a short 40 k. then, what should be an interesting day...climbing (with ups and downs) from 2600 to 4300 (above 14!), around Chimborazo (6300m) and, according to my book, about 30k of alti-desert.
as always, pictures soon.

Leg 1 -- Cartagena to Quto -- Welcome to the (alti-) Jungle

final colombia pictures are updated

created a new album for ecuador pics..also updated

sheet is updated.

thoughts on leg 1 of the trip a little later, then off on a "vuelta de cuencua" tomorrow, most likely without company. curently bleeding money in quito, the first and last good chance for a while to buy gringo-style and -size clothes, shoes, camping gear.

south of the equator, and then some

sometimes i wonder if travelling like this is entirely selfish -- it's a feeling that's hard to resist after spending most of your life in school or working. maybe it's because most of us are so used to being in some kind of structured environment, working as a group toward some kind of progress or goal. when you're travelling there is no such goal -- all your time is clearly your own and your time is entirely what you make of it.
but the past week helped remind me that, quite possibly, it's the other way around, that not only does travelling tend to augment the individual, but it's a pretty damn good way to enhance the group as a whole.
anyway, the past week or so was well spent. for me, it was lots of good food, good sleep, good spanish practice, and more than a little glimpse into an entirely different culture. in exchange, i made lots of food for lots of people, helped watch and entertain 5 kids, did some typical household and bike repairs, played some violin (so far nobody i've met has heard a solo violin), and provided the best glimpse i could (in broken spanish) into life in the US.
i can't remember too much detail off the top of my head, but when i update the pictures later today or tomorrow i'll give some narrative in the captions

to quito was a good long day, over 100k and 2100m of climbing. we started as 4: me, julian, claudio, and enrique (the father). enrique rode with us up the first pass, from 2500m in octavalo to 3100 at the top...pretty impressive for someone who usually just bikes around a farm. claudio wasn't feeling great so at the top of the pass he let me and julian go ahead. the road descended down to 2000m, up to 2300, down to 2000 again, then up to 2850 into the Big City (as always, there are dips in the climbs). we ran into the owner of a bar we visited twice in octavalo along the way. with a week off, it took the heart and lungs an hour or two to get back into the swing of things, but once they did the body was in full force, flying up the climbs a good 1.5-2 km/h faster than usual -- aided by spectacularly temperate weather and cloud cover all day.

still not entirely sure how long i'm going to stay in quito...might be just a couple days or i might stay through the weekend. as i'm sure you've noticed, there hasn't been a whole lot of biking recently....but we here have decided that if all you care about is the biking, you might as well just stay at home, away from the microbes. (PS despite some opposition to them, i must admit that modern antibiotics are pretty damn close to a miracle drug)

octavalo

so, not 10 minutes after the last post, i (we) ran into yet another fellow travelling cyclist freakshow...Claudio from Modena. we stopped at the gas station, filled up the stove bottle, made some tea, then decided to continue on together to octavalo, just 20k away. and then, not 10 minutes after that, we ran into another freakshow...didn't catch his name, but he was a big dude from switzerland who had been travelling around s america for 3 years (and looked it). he was going the other direction, so we just stopped to chat for a few minutes about this and that.

the last few days, the three of us have been living with the indigenous family that we met in cali. so far, a very cool experience. i'll write some more about them later. it's been very good for my spanish, because that's the only language everyone understands. we're planning to spend the weekend here, ride to quito monday and, for me, find all the crap that i didn't get at home or have already lost or destroyed.

sombered

back to posting on the road. in ibera right now, going to stay with a family in octavalo tonight, just 25k or so away. tomorrow to quito.

yesterday....woke up early. still not feeling too great, but after 3 days rest it was time to move on. leaving colombia was quick, only 5 minutes wait. not quite the same for ecuador...waited almost 4 hours to get our entry stamps.

ecuador was off to a very bad start. slow border, shitty police asking how much money we had a few k later, a cold cimb to 3200m, and no decent food on the road.

but after lunch things turned up, some nice decents for a while, then rain, then up a little more.

once we climbed back to 2800 the scenery was as spectular as anything. huge valleys, open roads, good weather, spectacular light (you'll see in the photos later), and 1300m of descening (video of this later too). at almost the same time, we both blurted out ´this is freedom!´saw some strange dioramas of mammoths, saber tooth tigers, and snoop dogg. ecuador, fuck yeah!

so what was going to be the story of a shitty day turned great eneded very quicky when we were going up a little climb, heard a siren behind us...around the next corner there was a crowd of people, streams of blood, and a body with a blanket over it. we only stopped for a few seconds, not really wanting to find out what happened (an accident, somehow). a very quiet next half hour riding. i guess as travelling brings you closer to life, it also brings you closer to death (philosopically speaking)

anyway, descended down to a little town (everyone was black, a little surprising for ecuador), couldn't find a hotel..but 5k later found one, chilled out, ate some spectacular grilled chicken, and slept.

comments, cool.

so i had all the settings right before, but apparently i had to change the template in order for the link to comments to appear. originally, i picked the one most likely to induce seizures -- white text on black -- but in the end i had a little mercy.

y blah blah blah....

shit (pictures updated)

the curse of the blog. if it's not updated regularly, not only do people stop reading (ok by me) but if lots of stuff happens then you have to make a very confusing and slightly epic post. so this is what we're going to get. deep breaths.

Cali

we all really, really liked Cali. Medellin was like a bone-crackling puppy, growing and developing at a seemingly stupendous rate, not entirely full of culure but flush with interesting people and felt like a "real" city. Cali was the opposite, fairly quiet, seemingly stuck in the past, and seemingly devoid of city people. but it had a great vibe, great music, great clubs, very friendly locals, and a coolness matched by few other places.
we made the mistake of not making reservations at a hostel, so when we got there every hostel and hotel was booked (except in the very undesirable center of the city). we ended up talking our way into one of the newer ones...which has the potential to be a great place, but the owner was more than a little batshit crazy and there were more than a few tense moments.
anyway, we passed the new year there, had a couple of really great days with lots of alcohol and dancing and meeting people from all over (including some ecuadorians we plan on staying with in a day or two). fabian and i met quite possibly the craziest man in Cali and left some good english and german quotes for him to dwell on. if you scan through the pictures, you'll see that we even made it into the local newspaper. etc etc.
so fabian continued on his quixotic way back to medellin and up to venezuela. julian and i left early in the morning, hoping to make the 130k to popayan. leaving the city was pretty easy, fast and flat for the first 50k, but soon after the road turned up, and the new year's residue began to make itself known. unbeknownced to us, this was the beginning of the endless (ENDLESS) ups and downs..up 100m, down 100m, up 150m, down 120m, up 75m, down 50m, etc, etc etc. mentally unfun. took a long nap in the middle of the day, so by the time we got to piendamo about 105k from cali it was already getting dark, we had climbed 1500m and were ready to stop. stayed in a gas station with a very friendly and businesslike owner.

piendamo - mojarres

one of the things that most anyone who has spent an entire day riding a bicycle notices is that when you have a good, long day it feels like you get to experience a miniature version of your life within about 12 hours. extreme highs, extreme lows, love, sadness, infinite happiness, unforseen problems, new friends, new enemies, etc, etc. this was one of those days. 161k with 8:15 on the bicycle and over 2000m of climbing. left really early in the morning knowing we were in for a long day...we were feeling whipped just a few k into the day by the ENDLESS ups and downs...after 20k these calmed down and we had some really, really great cycling descending to and around popayan. good roads, nice grades, a seemingly infinite number of cyclists. leaving popayan, already a couple hours into the day, the sign said we had 121k to go. more of the ENDLESS ups and downs for 40k, then down to about 1300 (from 2000?), and a climb back to 1800. i stopped at the top to wait for julian but he must of passed while i wasn't looking...after 20 mins waiting i couldn't decide if i had really sprinted up the climb or if he was ahead of me. after 3 people concurred that there was in fact a tall cyclist with a black shirt in front of me (one lady said one hour in front...) i realized i was goign to have to push pretty hard the next hour or two to catch up (still not entirely sure if he was in front or behind). a big descent down to 900m, then a hot, shitty climb up to 1300 to get out of the valley.
eventually caught up with julian along the way, there were another 25k or so of ENDLESS ups and downs. stopped in el bordo about 45k short of mojarres where we ran into a group of 10 cyclists (and these people were REAL cyclists) from bogota cycling to quito. took some pics, exchanged the typical chit-chat, then decided to ride together to Mojarres...our final destination but they planned on going furthur. was lots of fun pedalling with them...got to lead the group for 8 very fast km. then our weight and long day caught up with us and they were all pretty far ahead of us...however they stopped near a scenic river and i played some violin for them and took some more pictures. they pressed on...we searched for water and juice (funny story, somewhere in the picture captions). but as it turns out, they decided to stop in mojarres too. all had dinner together, stayed in the same hotel with a well-negotiated price, and drank a few of the best beers of the trip. a very memorable day

mojarres was at 600m, so we knew the next day would be hot. ok, fine, we leave early, we know there is a climb around 35k so as long as we get above 1200m or so by 9am we should be fine. and we were doing well, until we realized that we had very little cash...and it was sunday morning in the desert and there were no stores and nothing was open and we had little food and water. after 8k on no breakfast we stopped at a tiny pueblo with no stores, but somebody let us in their house for water, which we filtered to drink and cooked up some pasta for breakfast. really, the biggest problem was not that we were still hungry afterward but that we were losing time, it was already 90 degrees at 8:30 and it was going to get worse.
more ENDLESS ups and downs for 35k, stopped in a town that finally had food, spent some of our rations on lunch (but filtered water from the tap), and began one of the shittiest climbs yet...starting at 500m and well over 95 degrees with a 7% grade, it was a very slow and water-intensive first hour or two. bought some more pasta to cook along the way (cheap empanadas for lunch), climbed to about 1600m and descended down to about 800. ever since we left cali, the people have changed almost completely...almost everyone we see on the road is of indiginous descent. lots of them sitting on the road asking for money (people throw coins from cars sometimes). they were very bitter and verbally agressive with us...really the first time I had experieced this sentiment in colombia.
anway, climbed back to 1200m, knew there were no cities around which was OK because we didn't have anything close to the money for a hotel. camped just off the main road, overcame stove problems to finally make some dinner, crammed into julian's tent when it started to rain, woke up to nice mountains and questioning sanity...the campsite was less than 2 feet from a pretty sheer drop.
next day to Pasto was a climb all day from 1200 to 2700. met a local cyclist on the road who was really friendly and talkative...invited us to his sister's house near the highway for juice and coffee. me the whole family, hung out for a while, and of course, played some violin in exchange for hospitality. the rest of the day was uneventful, except for the fact that we were completely wrecked from the past few days and the end of the climb was not technically difficult but a little bit of a mental challenge. rain near the top, temp dropped to about 50 degrees. descended about 300m into pasto leaving victory cries in our wake. greeted by some friendly but aggressive festival-goers who promptly sprayed us with "snow in a bottle", threw powder in our face, and painted us black. pretty endearing, really.
the rest of our stay in pasto went pretty much like that. we were there for the last couple days of the festival de blancos y negros, quite possibly the greatest party on the planet at the time. lots of drinking, dancing, random spraying and face painting and powder throwing. stayed in a nice but expensive hotel ($12 each per night). helped a randon guy on the street who was fairly brutally assualted by a taxi driver. ate something i shouldn't have.
leaving pasto, i knew it would be an interesting day. i was feeling 80% at best. two flat tires on the way out of the city for me. my legs felt good but my body not so on the climb from 2400 to 3050 out of the city. very cold on the descent...julian got pretty far ahead because i kept stopping. by the time i got to the bottom of the descent at 1700m i realized that my chances of making it up to ipiales at 2900 were nil, as i couldn't eat anything and could barely hold down water at the moment. took a nap on a restaurant table over a little bottle of water. woke up a couple hours later feeling a little better, worked up the motivation to unpack the bike, stop a bus, and ride about 40 mins up to ipiales, shouting at julian when the bus passed him.

so ipiales is where we are, a pretty cold city at 2900m, but it's a good size, nice and cheap...the perfect place to take a few days off to get better, reflect on colombia (a fairly big task) and plan for ecuador. in the hostel in cali we met a really friendly and fun dutch couple, Loes and Joop, who we also saw in pasto and ipiales, who just left for quito this morning. lots of good times with them. don't have my camera with me right now, but went to one of the most spectacular churches just a few k away from here...pics coming...eventually (maybe not till quito).

we're going to leave sunday morning with the hopes of an easy border crossing (heard some horror stories of 12+ hour waits), going to stay with the ecuadorians we met in cali for a night or two, and should be in quito by the end of the week.

one last thing. (i'm getting a little tired typing this much....unless you're desperately bored at work i'm sure you're getting a little tired reading too. check the pictures, they're more interesting anyway.) i'm going to leave most of the numbers out of the blog and use this instead, mostly for me (i can't imagine why anyone would be that interested) but also for you number freaks out there. reading over other biker's travelogues i'm realizing it's easy to slip into a fairly uninteresting narrative of distances, terrain, and cities. not entirely sure how i'm going to counteract the tendency, but at least know that i'm thinking about it.

mark.
lots of cycling, scant internet, ran out of cash, having too much fun at the greatest party in the world, etc, etc. post and pictures soon.