life @ 13

hiatus #2....slightly more permanent....

bang!

from the top...

pictures are up

the ride to Caraz was what i expected more of this trip to be like...lots of mountain roads, getting guards to open gates, safe camping on the side of the road...ramen noodles and gallons of water as fuel. what i hadn't expected before and what i have come to overuse is other biker's journals...not only are the roads and distances between towns described to a T, but for most of my recent rides i even have accurate elevation profiles. this does kill a small amount of the fun of discovery, but i can't imagine what kind of trouble i would get myself into without them.

briefly...left chao not so early (8:30ish) due to a flat in the rear...a hole in the middle of an old patch and nothing in the tire. strange. 15k on the panamerica, then i turned off into the wild on a private road which cuts a good 40k off the trip to Caraz. the road is unsealed but in pretty good shape...i was able to hum along at 16k/h without pushing much at all. there are a few climbs along the way, but from chao to caraz is about 160k at a steady 1.5% grade...as is to be expected when climbing up a river valley. on the private road there were a total of 6 cars in 3 hours. beautiful scenery (look at the pictures, as usual they tell a better story).

after the private road, a few k on the pavement, a little town to stock up on water and food, and then the road gets about as bad as they come for about 70k. or, at least, the worst i've done without a mountain bike. riding a road like this is, in fact, a lot like mountain biking. not only are your legs always spinning at a furious pace, but you have to use a considerable amount of upper body strength and stay completely focused, else you lose your line and thus your balance and thus the bike. when you hit a good line it feels great, when you miss and the bike skids and you have to put a foot down and start over, it's incredibly frusturating...amplified by the 70lb bike and 90 degree sun.

the first day i made it about 15k on the crap before i was completely worn out...found an excellent camping spot by the river and slept pretty well....the river is so loud you can't hear anything around.

next day was uneventful...50k in the crap, lots of heat, only a few cars an hour. found another good campspot on the side of the road just a few k short of huallanca

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taking a brief aside...it occurred to me earlier in the trip that people with UC probably, typically, don't do these kind of things. it's not really the kind of problem conducive to being out in the middle of nowhere with poor sanitation and spotty medical services. i was well aware from the beginning that this could potentially be a problem but i tend not to heed these kinds of warnings, internal or otherwise

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woke up the next day feeling ungreat. spent most of the next 3 hours staring off into space and pedaling the last few k into huallanca. i knew that i had a little more rough riding, then 25ish k of smooth road into caraz....so i decided to continue staring off into space until a little after noon, then i bucked up a little, shut my brain off, and finished off the leg, knowing that the end was near. Caraz was a pretty little town, unfortunately i didn't get to see much of it. made friends with the local firefighters, though.

i'll probably give y'all one more post with some thoughts after i get back. right now i'm surprisingly content with the decision to return. i mean, it really wasn't much of a decision...some decisions are just too obvious to be called decisions. would have very much liked to keep going, both for me and for any entertainment i might have been able to provide. but i'm looking forward to feeling better, eating all the things i haven't been able to eat, and hanging out with y'all gringos.

finger on the trigger...

made it to Caraz, no major problems, but i'm completely wiped out. lots of pictures and a real post soon.

atrophy

apparently, for a brief moment, i was a wanted man. i managed to evade capture and would have gone on blissfully unaware had Lucho not told me that when i was making my second pass at Paijan (the cyclist's black hole) the police were looking for me, as apparently they feared i would wind up robbed, kidnapped, or killed. but at that time i, slippery bug that i am, slipped onto the cheap yellow bus and was dozing off, staring at the scenery for the second time.


i had the casa de ciclistas pretty much all to myself for a few days while Lucho was on his little vuelta with Abuelo, our 68-year old chilean friend. not much happening...just more bulking up (more later) and reading. Went to a fancy Trujillo wedding with Lucho where he was playing drums in an 11-man-1-woman band...good times, but my plans to leave the next day were squandered by free food, cerveza pilsen, and staying up till 5.


i generally try and keep these things to myself, but in all fairness and honesty i should say that i was quite flattered by the women of Trujillo. eventually i figured out that i had done nothing in particular to attract so many stares and so much attention (a nice reversal), and that many peruvians are looking for a ticket out and, so they think, up. i now understand, in part, what it feels like to be a women walking by a construction site.


anyways...after 5 weeks of rest and some spectacular hospitality at the casa, it was time to go. last night i threw a new tire on the back wheel...a schwalbe marathon....something a little wider and more durable, in part for the crappy roads ahead. i also find myself quite a bit heavier...not just in body (good) but in luggage (good and bad).

Lucho escorted me to the edge of the city, where he left me to go pay his water bill. I forgot that the first hour after a long time off is a little, well, scary -- realizing that the comforts and conviences of a city and good home are being left for the uncertainty of the road. i found my legs trembling a little, however i have to chalk this up to the 5 weeks of doing absolutely nothing active, save the vuelta de paijan. for a while i was thinking about our friend Lance A., whose rise to the top was supposedly aided by his little vuelta de cancer, where he was able to rebuild his body in the image of a tour de france champion (and not a whole hell of a lot else, really...although he's put his texan mouth to a good cause). however, my body has been rebuilt in the image of someone of a much greater body fat percentage, as is what happens when you eat for two and excercise for none.

the ride today was dominated by strong coastal headwinds, the heat of the day, and the desire to ride as slowly as possible. 67 flat k in 4 hours. i'm very content. tomorrow i turn off the panamerica and on to 200k of almost entirely dirt tracks up to the cordillera blanca. there's no internet in the middle of nowhere, muchachos.

back.

peru pictures

not surprisingly, it's easy to lose track of the days when you're travelling. recently i've been quoting my time off the bike at 3 weeks....however looking at the blog, damn, it's been a month. more on the fix for that below, but first where i left off.

south peru was good. having company was excellent. learning the true meaning of tours and tourists...well...was educational. the sky of the altiplano is spellbinding. the south coast is like nothing else...desert sandwiched between mountains and endless ocean. had some classic peruvian travel experiences: bus breaking down in the mountains in the middle of the night, bus trying to leave when your friend is in the station bathroom, being told to get off the beach because it's too dangerous, train to maccu piccu is not running, hopelessly lost in towns where the street names change every block, sunburn after 20 minutes outside, cab drivers changing the price, etc, etc. experienced the other side of lima, miraflores, where all those of means have relocated to over the years. damn, the food was good there.

decided to eschew the $4 cab ride to the bus station in lima (the bus to trujillo was $10...$4 seemed extravagant to cross town) and took a local bus. when i told the driver and conductor where i was getting off, one laughed and the other made the point-finger-gun-at-head-and-shoot gesture. apparently the bus station was not in a great part of town? turned out to be one of those parts where you're OK as long as you don't make the wrong turn.

now, back in trujillo, with the casa de ciclistas all to myself. Lucho and Abuelo (a 68 year old cyclist from chile) headed north to Chiclayo.

to make up for all the road i skipped to get to trujillo, i decided to ride with them for a little while...in the opposite direction of my trip. first time on the bike in an entire month, and it felt great...at least until my insufficient eating for the day caught up to me. no big deal. did 45k in about an hour and a half, helped by some kind of massive tailwind. the bad news is, this will be a massive headwind when i leave for Huaraz/Caraz in the next couple days. the good news is, it's only for a day. not only did i ride with them TO Paijan, the most infamous town in peru for cyclist-robberies, i rode past it, then back through again (at almost half the velocity), then stopped right in the middle.

i guess the most salient news is that for the first time in damn near 7 weeks i'm feeling 100%. most importantly, i've decided that whether i like it or not, my body is apparently not capable of fighting off little infections that the locals all resist and most all travelers grow to resist. this in and of itself does not bother me much...it's the fact that i have to be the whiny white kid who is always telling restaurants to leave things out, not eating/drinking anything remotely suspicious, and worst of all turning down offered food. but, this is. much better than sending myself home.

still trying to decide how to slice up peru. first i'm up to the cordillera blanca and huaraz. from there, i either stay in the andes all the way to cusco...a very, very slow but probably highly rewarding trip...or i descend back down to lima (could spend a lot of time there), zip down the coast for a while, then take some good paved roads to cusco. from there, i have much gana to hop over the andes again to the amazon-ish region, cross to bolivia by boat, and high-five all the people descending the "worlds most dangerous road" on their downhill bikes as i work my way up to La Paz.