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"You cut like a girl, Rrrrrambeta!"
I roll my eyes and continue swinging the machete....like a little girl.
"RRRRRRRRambeta!" he taunts again with a smile.
"Yeah, yeah. Anyway, shouldn't it be Ramba?" I point out, hoping to inflict some damage, "RambO being the masculine...Or maybe even Rambita, for Little Girly Rambo?"
"I suppose," he says waving my comments away like another pestilent mosquito. "But...I like Rrrrambeta."

This was Charlie. Remonstrating against my efforts with the machete to cut through another stubborn bush on our return from a fruitless quest in search of Inca ruins. Charlie was all squares; square legs, square torso, square shoulders, square head, like a Lego man. I swing again, swearing the blade was blunt whilst also wondering if perhaps Charlie's Indiana Jones-like hat concealed a little yellow lump, reminding me that earlier he was calling me 'Indiana Jones Jr. the Third', for some other derogatory purpose no doubt, though what it was I'm not sure I know.



"Anyway, " I say stopping for a breather, "it wasn't me who landed us in the very midst of the one place we began by saying we should avoid at absolutely all costs. Remember? You called it the, uhhh....the...what did you call it again?"
"The **** Fest."
"Indeed. The **** Fest. And yet, here I am cutting our way through it."
"Be quiet Rambeta." he says turning to sun his face.

I do as bid, and swing and swing. The two dogs, Attenborough and Shackleton sit besides Charlie conversely patient and nonplussed, though likewise sunning their faces. Eventually we four escape 'The Fest', though my trousers now resemble a pair of colourless maypoles. Back at the car then and we drive back to Charlie's tourist lodge which sits on the very edge of Peru's Sierra Nevada, a prime location nestled between Peru's highest peak Huascaran and arguably it's most beautiful, Huandoy; a pointed slate of rippled cream, missing only a cherry.





Shackleton and Nick
(with a wet leg after 'the Shack' pulled me in the river!)


The next day I walked the trail to Huandoy's glacier and was sitting there trying to muster the saliva to consume some of Peru's balsa-bread, when a group of Indian males pop over the top of the glacier looking like they'd well and truly lost their corn crop. They bound down in their wellies and inform me that the ice has just avalanched and one of their friend's, as well as a few donkeys, are buried in the ice. The man stares, waiting it seems for me to provide some grains of wisdom, whilst the others dab something from small nail-varnish sized wooden vials into their cheeks, revealing brown stumps of teeth.

However, I have but breadcrumbs, and seeing this, the group begin to disperse, climbing back up the glacier to continue their search in their leathery felt hats and thick woollen sweaters full of holes. One turns back to me as he goes and asks,

"Do you have one of them cameras?"
"Eh?"
"You know....lets you look inside the ice."
I think for a moment before realising...."Ohhhh, a thermal camera! No, sorry. Just my bread and bananas."
"Oh." He says looking downcast.

When I walk up around the glacier I find the search abandoned, the group sitting on the banks chewing stalks of grass. Beyond them the mountain rescue team have arrived and are likewise sitting amongst the boulders eating sandwiches and a youth who was crying without restraint a moment ago, is now happily tapping his foot along to the music, a video to which is being filmed on top of the ice.....and, on top of the still cooling bodies....




"Hey gringo, you want to dance?"
"You call that dancing?"
"DAN-CING." she says in English, assuming I didn't understand or to prove her prowess in front of others.
"Urgh, No, thanks." I say, I can't dance, I never know what to do with my face, my facial repertoire consisting mainly of mocking and derogatory expressions.

Whilst I experiment with my facial muscles, I notice the singer's have tensed and taken on a glacial chill - I'll have to learn that one - and she projects this iciness adeptly through rapid speech. I'm not to sure what she says, but the certainty is that it was bad. Everyone, but me of course, is laughing now. I give a thin smile, shoulder my bag, and leave.

From Charlie's the road sweeps downhill, through sweet smelling eucalyptus and a fairly sour smelling pack of dogs with crazy glassy eyes and an appetite for things that move, down and down to the town of Yungay.

Before I can continue south I have to pop into my favourite little restaurant, run by a sad looking widow, who today looks particularly despondent; the hired help hasn't arrived and her son I see, is sitting incapacitated with a broken foot which he rests upon a chair.

It took several visits to the restaurant before the suspicion faded or even a word was spoken to me. Not so now, smiles all round and invited to sit with the son next to the table-sized plasma television showing a psychedelic Latino cartoon, upon which all eyes are fixed, despite the clientele being mostly fifty years older than the target audience.

We chat for a while, in which time the invalided son discovers that English people speak English and so he goes on a well-meant channel hopping spree in search of English programs, or the Olympics. All eyes move simultaneously to me, narrowing as they do so making me sweat more than my hot soup. Luckily no English TV is found and peace resumes when the crazy coloured Latino blob returns shouting on the screen. But no sooner and all eyes are on the move again, mine included, this time to a pretty girl walking by, parting the crowd, her long ink-dark hair flowing behind in her wake, leaving behind an invisible but almost tangible something. She catches us looking and smiles towards us....before slicing her finger sharply across her throat.

"I guess that means NO, then!"

But, I like her already.


************************************************** ******************************





Blackadder III

Screaming. I'm finding it hard to see. My spectacles jump on the bridge of my nose make the road too bounce like a jumping film-strip.
A rut. Must be more than 35kmh. A rock. In first gear. Oop, Jesus. A curdling scream. Can't keep this up. BRRRRRAAArrrrrrmmnnnn agrees Rodney, with a descending engine note....like a chainsaw dropped into water. NO! COME ON! COME ON! NO! NO! NO! No chance mate. My head drops with the rev counter. I could curse the machine, but it's pointless and I just give my most inexorable Blackadder face, Rodney will feel much worse I'm sure.

I slip from the saddle and start pushing.




I reach my destination eventually, Laguna Llaca and at the end of the rough trail I find, unsurprisingly, a taxi and a minibus, as well as a lone park guard. The guard stares up to the snowy peaks wistfully, a thick silvery stubble on his small round face as if he's been staring up for several days, and amongst the stubble too a feint but happy smile. He likes it here. There is an air of calm about him and, as if he were expecting me, turns his smile to me and says, "You want to camp?"

"Urgh....Yeah, if I can."
"You can camp here on the grass if you like." he says sweeping his hand across it before returning it with the other behind his back.

He's far from being a wizard, his woollen hat not quite in keeping for that. But he looks....he looks like....well, how does he look? If I stuck a light-sabre in his hand I dare say he'd look quite a lot like that little Yoda fella in a woolly hat....just not green.

Very poetic.

Alas. I suppose if I read more mythic tales I'd be able to conjure up some magical comparison, but as I think they're full of well, myth (LIES I TELL YOU!) I'll have to stick to my (photon) guns and go with the green fella.

"Umm," I say pondering, weighing up the grounds, thinking I've got a good face for this one. I'm not thrilled about the view, the car park, the refuge and the outhouse, especially having made such an effort to arrive, optimistically I had my hopes set on actually seeing the lake. I tell him as much, but he informs me that it's not permitted to camp at the lake. However, after a friendly chat, and a devilishly tricky light-sabre battle, he tells me that "okay, you can camp at the lake"....now just to lug all my gear up and over the tidal defences. I trot off, duffel in one hand, tent, water, stove and food in the other, on my way grabbing a gift of toasted maize kernels from someone else I'd been chatting to, then dash up the steep loose dirt before being reminded quite forcefully, that no, one doesn't dash at 4500m. Well at least I don't. Crawling over the lip of the bank, legs kicking in the dirt, dribbling a bit, dragging and pushing the now dusty bags I heave myself up to look around, finding before me my favourite spot in all the Andes. What a place! A formidable lake, which runs straight to the very edge of the thick blue glacier leading up to the huge razor sharp ridge of rippled snow and the pointed peak, Ranrapalca, at 6162m. I get a few quick pictures of the tent as the sun sets but, with a paralysingly cold wind blowing cunningly straight up my shirt and out through my sleeves, taking all my warmth with it. I am forced to jump into the tent, and then the sleeping bag, where the wind tries it's best to jump in too.





Spot the tent


Settled in, all clothes on, woolly hat tied tight around my ears and my hands wrapped around my steaming tea, I let out a sigh of relaxation, alone at last....Then, outside, something. A whistle. People, and the whistle tells me they want my attention.

Bugger.

I wonder if I can just wait in my tent, maybe they'll get tired and leave. Or freeze to death. But I know they're just intrigued, and I don't want piles of frozen corpses in my sunrise photos, and I mustn't be nasty and so I start unzipping myself from my feathery sarcophagus. Outside, two men, carved from wood and dressed in fatigues; Peruvian Commandos. Their handshakes are like a couple of nutcrackers and I tuck my cold cracked hands in my armpits and step from foot to foot as we chat, though these two tree trunks stand rigid, little effected by the cold despite their measly fatigues. They tell me that as well as not getting cold they don't get paid either, just free room and board, but one can understand the perks...and the peaks. They tell me that they just came over "that" pointing to the lethal blade of ice that bridges the two formidable peaks at the far end of the lake, surely over 5600m, 59 Commandos, with 30kg packs, and the Captain is 50 years old. Jungle though, they maintain, is far worse. I bid them good night, open the icy tent flap and get into my now chilly sleeping bag.

By morning the tent is thick with ice and the sleeping bag damp with cold breath. Once the sun is up I head off around the lake towards the morning's target; the glacier. Approaching it through boulders, pools and chunks of melting ice I can make out the glacier's jagged translucent blue flakes, curved humps and hollows, arches, tunnels, caves and overhangs. But when I arrive at it's edge, it's not the sight so much as the cacophony; dripping water, hissing sand, dropping dust, tumbling boulders and beneath it all the generator-like hum of a huge thrust of water, flowing somewhere below. The roof of the glacier is hidden below a layer of dirt and mountain debris like moon dust. Rocks teeter high up on the brink of the glacier or jut out of the ice face in rows like jaw lines of teeth.





I sit there for an age, next to a huge overhang of ice, watching the mountain move and wondering what might happen if that overhang should fall into the lake....I move to higher ground to a solitary mound of fine sand in the midst of the boulders and from my new vantage point I notice a large hole, which, under closer inspection, I see is an ice cave. Still, it could fall any minute, a horrid death, premature I feel, alone for certain. No, a beastly demise. I return to my hump. I watch the opening, enticing me to enter, watching the ice drip and drip, as my mind it ticks and ticks. I go back to the cave. As I get near a large pile of debris, rock and sand falls with a nasty clatter. Mmm, perhaps not. Back to the hump. But then I decide I can't be a coward, if I'm really quick, once inside I will be safe.....from rocks at least. I dash in before I have chance to change my mind and find myself standing on a layer of the finest sparkling white sand, beneath a low ceiling of bright bubbly blue waves of ice. I give it a punch, solid as rock, a fact confirmed in that glacial ice is actually a metamorphic rock.

I walk to the end of the blue tube and look back over the lake, back to my hump and stand in wonderment! What a treat. What more can one person want. What else is there. A solitary man, in a tube of ice. But before the tube was no longer a tube I nipped out, back to my hump.






************************************************** ****************************

I crane my neck back. My throat burns like searing bacon. Up above a pair of black dots separated by one red dot. Each time I look to them, they are no more ahead of me but make the summit seem so much farther, they hardly seem to be moving. But I suppose that means that likewise, I'm not moving either. But my God, it's steep, and loose. All I see is the black and white of dust and stones, like trying to climb bird-shit on a window pane. The heavy pack pulls me backwards, and its straps cut into my shoulder like shiny-sharp cheese-graters. I swing my head round and down, more coloured dots below, they're not catching me at least....is anyone moving? A chunk of the Siula glacier tumbles down the face turning to dust before hitting the creamy lake below, my camp spot from last night. And I smile, what a spot it was. I twist my head back to the trail, which splits in two here, but my head is heavy like water. Or vinegar. Pickled. I just can't decide which to take, though they rejoin each other in several meters. I just look from one to the other. Spot the difference. Seems awfully complicated. Then I hear something. Blast and darn it! The girl has caught me up, and now the summit is even farther. She looks up to me in anguish, a face not unlike Joe Simpson's on the cover of "This game of Ghosts." Funny, he's the reason I'm here.





I shake my head in mock mirroring anguish and laugh. "Steep, no?" I ask.

I've picked up this silly habit. In Spanish 'no' is said like a verbal question mark, one can put it on the end of just about any sentence, and one can even say "Si, no?" See?

She let's out another groan, looking down at her feet like they were some Chinese appliances, so oddly disappointing.

"You know," she says as we move off, "we have a name in my country for people like you?"
"Oh yeah. It's not the same as in my country is it?"
"I don't think so....We say," she pauses, forced to take gulp of air, "We say that you're stronger than vinegar."

Another fork in the trail it seems, does she mean I have an acid personality or that my strength is about 6 on the ph.scale? I can't figure it with my pickled egg head, vinegar on the brain, so I just ask, "What's it mean?"
"I don't know. It's just what we say." So, I'm stronger than vinegar.





Looking back on a fine camp, besides the second lake.


We reach the top together, though we've left the best mountains behind and the view over is actually a little disappointing. It's one of the few points about Huayhuash, the main range is small and as well the main trail far from them, often out of view. It necessitates therefore that one walks the lesser, more difficult trails, like this one, though the rewards are great.

Sat on the top, a half dozen other walkers, the red and black dots finally reached. As well, two children, locals selling cola from a plastic paint bucket. They'd passed by my tent in the morning, despite the trail being a few hundred yards away.

"You want a coke?" asks the boy.
"No thanks." I reply, finally removing my pack, damp with sweat. "I saw you this morning, no?"
"Yep."
"Here then," I hand them a pack of biscuits, "you must be hungry."
"Thanks!"
"No worries."
"That bag is very heavy!" he says.
"It is today! I thought it would be lighter after four days and I would be stronger, but it seems to weigh more and I'm weaker! How are the biscuits, good, no?"
"Mmmm." they both say with happy grins.
"What are your names?"
"Fausto." says he.
"Margarita."
"I'm Nee-ko-laas."

Someone else asks how old they are, Fausto is ten and his sister is only five.

I don't really feel hungry, though I must be and force down a bag of peanuts whilst chatting to the others, telling them of the fine spots they have to come, as they're heading north. After a while, I heave up my pack onto tender shoulders and start downhill, Fausto and Margarita decide to join me, and this in itself is one of the other benefits of trekking in Huayhuash, the locals. Whilst Huascaran is a National Park, Huayhuash is a community owned park. The downside is that the "communities" all require you to pay, and it gets expensive, to the point that almost everyone you meet asks if you've paid, "What, again!" and I was a bit tired of "communities" of two huts asking me pay for a camp spot next to a lake surrounded with turds and toilet paper. They'll tell you the money is for security. Which of course means you are paying the thieves.





Fuasto and Margarita selling colas at the top..


Luckily Fausto and Margarita didn't want paying, or maybe they were just after more chocolate biscuits, but I don't think so. In the valley I meet their mother, a lovely lady in a floppy felt hat fetching cow pats for the stove. She seems impressed I deduced what they were for, though she wasn't impressed with her son and she gives Fausto a good clack for not selling the last coke to a group now on the summit. "Israelis." he says pulling a face out of my library, adding, "they're really dirty!"

The two children invite me to camp at their house, but with mum saying little to that effect and me being absolutely dog tired, I continue on down the valley to the lake, though Fausto and Margarita cling desperately on!

"Do you sell coke everyday?" I ask Fausto.
"No, only on the weekend."
"So what do you do with the money you make?"
"We buy more coke!" he says as if it were obvious.
"Oh, right, of course. Well, what do you do the rest of the week?"
"We have school."
"Where's that?"

I can tell you it is in the same place as my motorbike, which I will not reach until tomorrow afternoon!

As we go we spot some huge white beast farther down in the valley, in the fraction of a second before it spotted us, I thought we'd stumbled upon a very lost polar bear, then spotting us, it turned it's huge white rump and scarpered in polar bear like fashion. Fausto maintained it was a fox - some effing fox - that likes ripping tents open in the night in search of chocolate biscuits. I told him that it wasn't very funny. He said it wasn't very funny either.





A Polar Bear in the Andes


Fausto's back at the tent in the morning and we have a nice chat. I wonder if I'll go back one day, when I'm older, and find Fausto in the same hut, walking up the mountain to sell cokes....he'll have his work cut out with his current work scheme, he'd have millions of cokes by then......one day perhaps.

I continued to meet people that day in Huayhuash on my return to the motorcycle, and didn't walk alone for any of it. First Fausto, then a man whose name or photo I didn't get and all I remember are his horse's pointed feet for they were without shoes. Then, Rosa and Jorsten. She too was out collecting dried cow pats, and her red cheeked nephew was helping, he wanted to one day be a pilot, he looked a bit 'Biggles' in his woolly hat. Then two girls who asked me why my feet were soaking wet,

"Because I crossed the river there." I say exhausted,
"We normally take our shoes off, otherwise it's very cold." they say with infinite wisdom. But I was too tired and now wondered if I'd regret this laziness later on the bike. The two girls go on to ask with lovely intrigue the names of all my family members, then all their ages,

"My great grandmother was 100 years old!" I tell them.
"My auntie is the oldest in the village." she confers with her sister, "She's 48 I think."

Then it's the sheep herder who asks what happens if a black person and a white person has children.
"Pint of guniess!"
"Eh?"
"Oh...half and half. You know, black legs, white body. That sort of thing"

He seems a bit confused, it's just not funny, "Not really," I say, "you just hope he has a black penis....."





Rosa, Jorsten-Biggles and cow pats



************************************************** ****************************

I see my first grey cloud in Peru, a large solitary one, beneath which reside the bleak mining towns on the road that runs to Junin. Here, in the market, murdered meats hang bleeding, the blood runs in the grooves between the tiles mixing with water which drips from the suffocated fish and plucked chickens glare with Monet screams. Herbs wither, bread dries, vegetables and fruit soften into palpable rot and amongst it all the vendors who sit gloomily surrounded by or beached on their produce, their self-made prison, counting down days perhaps, until they can escape, to wither and die. Between it all a small space for feet, where piss and roam the dogs. Flies are the pigs in proverbial and real, shit.





Bit of snout anybody?


It's not all bad of course! Here in particular I'm lucky to see the indigenous mountain dwellers day-tripping to the low lands to sell and to buy. The women wear the usual firm felt hats, but decorated with rather ludicrous amounts of tinsel, of all colours though non that match the rest of their attire, turquoise leggings, yellow cardigans and pleated 'crepe paper' skirts. Somehow, as ever, they pull it off and look fantastic! It's a friendly place too, and encouraging calls of 'gringo' come from all sides offering sugar cane juice, chicharron (pork rinds), or jellies with custard, or otherwise tugged by the elbow to inspect a cloth laid out on the floor neatly arranged upon which are broccoli, peppers and oranges, and so nice is she that it's hard to resist buying a little something.





Easy on the tinsel love.


Camp is beautiful, the men and women - wrapped up against the cold, skin puffy, smooth and red like wax - return late with a their fattened herds of sheep and lamas. They're back again early the next morning after the bitterly cold night and I'm glad to find the road heading downhill, beyond the high barren pampas, down through wild valleys of black mountains and blue lakes and, warmer now, the women sit in the sun spinning and weaving wool. Farther down, the valley is neatly cordoned by stone walls, probably home to one of Peru's 2000 potato varieties. A lovely solitary route leads to a HEP plant, beyond which the weaving black valley changes to the warmer pastel shades of a deep desert canyon. Roads fork off left and right and I can only hope that I’m on the right path to my destination, as recommended to me by a friendly local Peruano; the coffee district of Villa Rica. But the confirmation signs are soon there, neat wooden frames supporting plump green avocados, which they call “palta” in Peru, and later the neat rows of musty sweet smelling coffee. It wasn’t Villa Rica I had reached though, it was Oxopampa.





Oxopampa, my favourite town in Peru


The first thing that I notice about Oxopampa is that it is clean. The street is spotless and wide and lined with neatly trimmed and thick, rich, green grass. A woman is sweeping this grass. No tooting horns at the traffic lights. On every corner a pair of rubbish bins, one of which for recyclables. Houses have grass gardens which are otherwise unseen in much of Latin America and the clapboard houses and shops look like old-time America, especially with their Peruvian banners fluttering on the porches. The main square has a church of stained wood that looks like a barn. Shops accept Visa.





Fitting a new tire in Oxopampa's clean street

Despite trying in all the cities and bigger towns I’ve visited for spare-parts, I am certain that this is the place that I will find them. And I do. New wheel and steering bearings, a new front tire, oil change (I also greased the side-stand Adam) and no trip to a parts shop is complete without another box of….tire patches!

Chatting with the locals it seems they all have two things in common; they are happy and they are riding old Honda 250cc Bajas. “The new Hondas," they tell me, "are crap. Made in China.” Quite right, and the old 250s still hold their price costing only a little less than a brand new, made in China Honda 250. Another guy does have a Chinese branded bike, which is currently having new piston rings installed, "it's the law!" he says, with reference to Chinese reliability.

A popular route for weekenders from Lima is to a village near Oxopampa, Pozuzo. Limons, as I call them, are possibly weekending from further afield, Mars perhaps. They arrive in exploratory probing clans in two, three or four 4x4s. Debouching en masse, photographing every angle, posing with smiles copied from the latest billboard, before grabbing bottles of Inka Cola, armfuls of ice-cream, and bags of toasted maize kernals to fuel the sitting and smiling, or the boredom, and then – still ignoring me, waiting patiently - jumping back in the convoy and flooring the accelerator pedal. I must follow behind in a thick cloud of dust. At a viewpoint I get to talk to them, they ask some funny questions between mouthfuls of food, “Shoh…” chew, chew, “what boike are uh roidin?”
“You mean the one I’m sitting on?”
“Yohhh.”

I look up and notice that from the pickup someone is filming me. He asks me to give him a peace sign. I think about giving him the finger. Luckily though, with them buying more snacks, and taking photos of themselves holding snacks, I’m able to sneak off before them and have a cloud free ride….and what a ride! Through the Yanachaga canyon, passing some spectacular waterfalls on the way, that carve out through sandstone and pass right by my shoulder…





On my way to Pozuzo...! :-O


The trail is smooth and fast all the way to the village of Prussia, where I pass signs for Schmidt Alberge, and Herr Schlaksig, and Frau Bruste and soon arrive in Pozuzo (How's your German dad?). Born in 1859 when a group of 300 Tyrolese and Germans finally arrived after a two year slog from home, Pozuzo is the only German Tyrolese settlement in the world, and a lucky find for me as I only came to watch some Independence day moto-x having seen a poster in Oxopama. I have so much fun looking at the architecture, houses with tiles, kitchens with cupboards! toilets with seats, and the menus with wienerschnitzel, that I end up skipping the moto-x. I was hoping to blend in here, and was even asked if I was German by Limons, but the general theme continued and most people smirked at me and I was still far outnumbered by mixtos. Then I started to notice the bad side of things, stray dogs humping and the nice, previously German homes now falling into disrepair under their new owners, peeling paint and piling up junk. So, before I see too much more I head out hoping to maintain my positive view of Pozuzo, and it was a magic little palce, and anyway, I was all too happy to head back, towards my favourite town in Peru, Oxopampa.





Hans Kohels house


I nip through Villa Rica, with a short stop to buy up some of their fine organic coffee on my way to Satipo, which lies out towards the jungle. From here I would head back inland up on what looks to be a fine day's ride, judging by the map at least, which shows the trail rising up from Satipo, only several hundred meters above sea level to above 4500m, and back down again to come out at Concepcion, near the city of Huancayo.

A barrier across the trail and a woman runs over, just to sell me oranges, followed by two men holding antique rifles, they look more like man-sized wooden toy stencils.

“Why the guns?” I ask, buying some oranges.
“Ah, sometimes there are robbers, bad men.”
“Oh, those guys…is it safe to camp?”
“Oh yeah, perfectly safe here.”
“Umm, okay.”
“Just be careful of tigers!”
“OK, I’ll make sure to leave an orange outside the tent!”
"What for?"
"So he'll eat the orange! And not my stash of biscuits!"

I find camp overlooking the village of Mariposa at an old mine, and new rubbish dump….and the local recreational and procreational spot for the village youth who turn up on their motos at night….so sadly little chance of tigers.







The Lost World

From the lower reaches here, lush green and as well the burning brown of smouldering forests making way for crops of yams, and as I progress up the fabulous valley, gaining altitude all the while, the green changes to silvery green and then thickens out to jungle green where every tree and plant seems unique with not an inch to spare between them and I feel like I’m in Conan Doyle’s Lost World with this thick forest rising up steeply to high ridges. I imagine some tribe hidden upon these ridges, watching this solitary red dot progress up the valley, before imaging myself looking down on myself from way up there, where perhaps feet have never been. Twisting up and up along the trail, eventually the trees stop, abruptly like leaving tunnel. Then bare black and white mountains amongst cold damp air where grows asparagus in season, fat feathery heads being chopped from thin stalks and stuffed into sacks by the whole family, filling the road with a green waste of leaves and stalks. I’m freezing cold when I make it down to Concepcion and stock up and head out after a long chat with the friendly shop owner, and having spotted a tall crucifix on my descent decide to ride back a little and try to reach it. With a few dead ends and a bit of pushing up the final meters I make it! Another great spot, overlooking the town and its cloister.





Huancayo, the city near Concepcion, was one long strip of shity (opposed to city) and I passed through quickly continuing on towards Huancavelica and, save an interesting bridge which led to a small lively market where I watched a witch doctor taking pulses and dispensing green potions from Pepsi bottles, the road was dull, and Huancavelica too. Beyond Huancavelica though the dirt trail breathes life to myself and to the mountains, which glow iridescent; blood, blood red and deep, deep fiery orange in the setting sun. I glimpse a mountain that, from the road at least, somewhat resembles Arizona, USA's "The Wave". I try to reach it for camp, passing a returning herd of lamas laden with sacks of potatoes -and pink ribbons - the herders are invisible beneath thick wrapped layers of clothing, but I can't seem to find a way to the Wave, and before it's too late I set up at a small lake, certainly no hardship, a great spot.





Pure silence


Here, even my pen sounds loud scraping on the paper, but not as loud and terrifying as the sound of ducks landing on the lake! I tried to remember if I'd ever really heard this sound before, that of wings cutting and beating the air - not the sound of beating wings - a spectral ghostly noise that tore me from drifting into sleep with a jolt. When I do fall asleep it is fitful and full of disturbed thoughts, though simple every day thoughts, bananas, brake pads, her, water, fuel, tomorrow, words and sentences from the pages before bed or ones I seem to be writing that drone on and on in nonsensical monologues. Roll over, groan, check time, 1am, roll over, where's your hat, check time, 2:42am, roll over, the hat is hurting my ears, what's the time? 3:02am. When will morning finally come? Then it comes, too soon. And the ducks are gone. Tired and heavy, like I'm being squashed, and cold, but warmed at least by the thought that tonight I'll be in Paracas at the coast, though I wonder what I'll find, I have only brief cuttings of a conversation I'd had with a local who recommended I go there, "...should go.....Paracas....compass....Pisco.....south."

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The Trail of Coloured Mountains

....CONTINUED from Part 1 of 3 above!

I turn my back on the lake, at least for a lifetime and continue on my road, passing through the land of colours that I've never before seen, and I try to describe them to the inside of the helmet, but I can't do it. The lakes are easier, blue. Deep, deep lazerite blue and I pass many of them, finally losing some height on a road that is much longer than I'd anticipated. With thirty kilometres to go I see them the formidable, vanquishers in the mist. Old enemies. That terrifying beauty. Dunes. I hadn't expected dunes. I hadn't really expected anything. It's late and I rush to get petrol, food and directions and continue towards the dunes, coming ever near like approaching ships. I turn ninety degrees and pull off the main road towards the pack of dunes, darkness. It's black sand here, firm enough but finding a way to the dunes is impossible; natural groves of palms, areas of bushes and shrubs, soft sand, and acres of bones, thousands of bones like hip bones. But not bones at all, mineral deposits that crumble like clumps of sugar, though still impossible to ride on.

The sun is gone now and the dunes seem no nearer, sinking back into darkness. One dead-end after another. I've twisted in so many circles, around obstacles this way and that, that I fear I won't even be able to return to the road again, wherever it is. The wind comes ferociously at me, straight off the dunes with handfuls of sand and I wonder if these are grains of wisdom or even a warning. I set up camp amongst the palms out of the wind to think things over. But even here I'm not safe, sand piling up against the wind-battered tent like doubt, until it is an insurmountable dune, and I am buried. Can I make it up the dunes? Those massive monsters, so stark and lifeless they seem to represent death. And, if I can make it up and beyond, what about the next one and the next one? Or if I cannot return? Or I breakdown? Alone. Weak. Vulnerable. This would be easy with two. The wind would retreat. But alone it doesn't, and it brings with it a bleak coldness, though this has the effect of waking me from my stupor and I write my diary.

Aug. 2nd, Day 1431. NEAR The Dunes, Paracas.

Surprisingly cold. Increasing vulnerability. Things take on their true importance; the bike becomes my most needed friend, if it fails you; you're stuffed. Your stove, your fuel, your food and water, tent and sleeping bag etc, so important without these where would you be? Don't forget one, be careful with them. I think, 'if only I could ask my parents, "can I do this?" if they said yes, I will believe them wholeheartedly and carry on, and "no" likewise but back to the main road.' I must cont. To prove my worth. To turn back would only show my true weakness. I fear I will wake in the morning to find the whole world vanished, washed away by the wind, which takes all sound with it, leaving me far away from those I cannot hear.





Can't reach those dunes....


In the morning it is almost true; the wind seems to have taken all colour away, a strange stillness and hanging mist. There is just me, no movement and the only sound is that of sand crunching under my feet, another world, or may as well be. With the poor weather I sit reading, waiting to see if things will clear, but they don't so I head to nearby Pisco with plans to return later, camp and try again.

I buy lunch, fingers tapping and legs bouncing with nervous energy, eyes flick left and right following the thoughts flying around my brain. Many days of this and I'll be exhausted.

I ride back passing the odoriferous fisheries and the dirty tiny beach houses along to the coastal side of the Paracas national park, to try from this side, through the park entrance, to look for camp. There's a well used trail, over the sandy ground to some of the tourist spots around the entrance and I take that, the wind is picking up again but with the benefit of sweeping away the hanging mist. There are no palm trees here, no bushes, no bones...but brilliant coastal trails that lead to the deep sea cliffs dropping into the foaming blue sea! The views! The sea! These cliffs of jagged chalk! SPACE and dunes all around! More, the dunes are firm and ridable!





Following the coastal trail....


I reach "The Cathedral" that in the past was a huge natural stone arch at sea, but has since fallen but it's bay is still a fine and breathtaking spot. Whilst the few other visitors are turning about to return to the entrance, I continue on south, the trail a little fainter, hugging the cliffs and bays and so beautiful it is that I'm reluctant to head off alone and I ride free. But soon, the desire becomes too great and I nervously cut inland away from the security of the trail on to untouched sands towards a high col in the distance.





...breaking free, following the compass.

A strange feeling, like I've left the bike and all it's luggage behind and it's just me flying along the sands freely. The sand flies beneath me though the target seems to get little nearer, like the Hitchcock zoom effect....




This is all until I hit the dreaded "wedgies!" - something that over the coming ride I'd become all too familiar with - and I am sharply reminded that I am after-all still aboard Rodney. Formed by the strong afternoon winds that whip along the surface, these wedges of sand form in the wide valley floors and are impossible to steer through or skip over and often meant a big detour, or a sore bum....





A "Wedgie!" Just replace the underwear with a motorbike


The sand is firm otherwise and great to ride on, though it softens towards the top of the dunes and at times feeble Rodney struggles to make it to the top, but make it he does. Then, from this new lookout, a whole new vista and one to savour before I check of the compass and pick out a distant point, far, far away on the horizon, before dropping off the dune. At times these were frighteningly steep, too steep and too soft to ride across and down and I fight with brakes, left foot off the peg and digging into the sand to try and slow the bike and stop the rear-end from jack-knifing me off the bike until, at some terrifying speed I reach the salt pan bottom, or more likely, more Wedgies! But one can skirt these, and fly along flat plains through the most incredible landscape. This. Is brilliant.

Inevitably I find another track, a moto or car trail as the landscape forces us one way or the other around gullies, down steps, rock fields, cliffs, humps and burrows until I reach another high point and look down. I squint down the steep slope, through the now horrific wind shooting waves of sand zig-zagging
along the ground up towards me and sent
mercilessly away, to a trail that bisects my own path. I decide that in case the weather becomes impossibly nasty that it is probably wise to camp near this trail, giving me an easy escape route. But finding a camp spot in this wind is goign to be tricky. I walk miles in circles looking behind every conceivable leeward side only to find wind, it's just everywhere! In the end, after a desperate search I give up and start putting up the tent on a patch that, despite being in the wide-open, seems to somehow have less wind. But, when I go to drive the first peg into the ground I get only a centimetre or so before the peg stops, I try the next, and the next, all the same. I rub away the top layer of sand and sea shells to find a solid white....It's the bones! Like the minerals from last night, only a solid floor! An ancient seabed! NO! I let out a low sob as the tent rolls away into the desert like tumbleweed with the wind and I slump on my knees. Stronger than vinegar, but beaten by salt.





Afternoon winds tearing through....


Most likely I sat a moment and ate some biscuits and then came up with the idea to use my old trick of a cunning pile of rocks and using the bike as a wind break and giant peg. Well frott me, it worked. I get in the tent, and drop dead. When I wake up, seconds or hours later, the moon is rising up over the mountains and all the wind has vanished...I put the tea on and start the diary...

Not lonely but very alone. Absolute silence. Even the wind has gone.





Patent Pending, the Jones Peg


The sand whispers over the ground like an Arabian dream, piling up in soft waves of rippled gold. I watch it from the tent porch in the morning and notice a plastic bag stuck in an eddy floating high above without moving at all. I spot something far off, a couple of vehicles, or is it an animal train, I can't make it out...I grab the camera and on full telescope I am able to learn that it is in fact, just two boulders. I remember staring in to the darkness of Atbara, flame torches moving in the distant dark, and then all of a sudden, heart racing, panic rising, upon me!....or not there at all. Gone. Like the camel mounted boy who guided me through the dunes, past the adventurer's jeep, buried up to it's windows in the soft sand...there, encouraging, there, willing me on, and then, just gone. I never know if he was ever there or not.





Saturn

The weather is colourless and foreboding, like yesterday. Cloud but no cloud. Soft but hard. Swirls of wool and marble. Over breakfast I decide which way I'll go, beyond the Saturn-scape of yellow, cream and black, a maze of mushrooms, gulleys, arms and fingers knitting into deeper valleys. I warm the engine, look over the camp spot for any 'forgottens', click first and just ride away. The freedom is both delightful and tiring in the anxiety it brings. At every rise I reach the anxiety is rejuvenated by the huge expanses ahead of me, distances that I must cover, to the road that cuts back inland, the road I keep expecting to see, at the next rise, at the next rise, but it never comes. These distances hold hidden traps, large drops, and steps, secret fields of wedgies and rocks. But then, after passing one huge expanse after another, confidence grows replacing the anxiety with vast amounts of delight. I'm doing this! I can, do this. The pronoun is important! A dangerous one though. One. If one breaks down.....

Luckily I didn't....or the bike and I reach the road, though I nearly missed it and via this, heading back inland reach the long range of golden soft sand dunes and a more beautiful sight one will never see, those golden soft velveteen ripples, running off in the distance all the way to the town of Ica. Arriving in Ica was a sad moment, litter and tires cover the sand, squallid shacks and horrid huts, signs that read, "For Sale, 100 heactares (of sand).", "Private Property." and mines dotting the sand. So much sadness. I ride to the oasis of Huacachina, which likewise is squalor, somehow being turned into a tourist village where the streets are filled with V8 dune buses, ugly buildings, ugly people. "'The horror, the horror!' he cried in a whisper, at some image, at some vision, he cried out twice, a cry no more than a breath."

An unbeleiveable day, says the diary, but Ica has filled my joy with a city of junk.





Desert Camp






The oasis at Ica

On the way back to Pisco, the long dying drone of the engine running out of fuuuueeeellllll, managing only 8km on the reserve tank...though luckily coming to a stop outside a fuel station. From here I backtrack further, inland beyond the high blue lakes and colourful mountains, towards Ayacucho and a small village called Quinua. Quinua it is clear is famous for its crafts, particularly the very Tim Burton-esque churches which the villagers place on their roofs to ward off evil spirits. I was ferociously ill here and spent a few hours in the hospital and a few days in a hotel here, and in Ayacucho, recovering.





Quinua's Evil Defences


It used to be that trying to sleep in the tent was difficult, the fears at times, but more the noises and the proximity to them. A puma outside my tent, when I first wake, I think - still deep in the tunnel of sleep - how can I describe this in words? And oddly, not what is it? And I must have been writing my blog in my sleep and continue to think in cliché book form, An animal outside the tent, it sounds like white-noise backwards, no, no....that's not it....Sounds big though, A big animal outside my tent, like....oh crap I had a simile a second go....what does it sound like....umm, I TELL ya what it sounds like Jones me old boy, sounds just like those toys at Teohuatican that you blew into to sound like a Jagu...It's a JAGUAR! Noooo, can't be....foolish thought.

But then I hear its footfall as it turns, Jeepers! It DOES sound big...and that fella mentioned pumas earlier just today...What are you doing....get out of the tent....!





Ayacucho's main street

But I was too slow, it was gone. I look around for footprints, nothing. But then I went straight to sleep, without a thought and now it seems I can't sleep in hotels. The noise! My God! The melee of dog, taxis tooting at cars that can't go anywhere hemmed in by the badly running buses which, when they can move, roar up narrow streets in clouds of black, people shouting, traffic police whistling at everyone who can't move to get a move on, music blaring, cockerels crowing, toilets flushing, rats scurrying....How does anyone sleep?! Ayacucho was raelly nice, but get me to my tent!


************************************************** ******************************

The man tells me I can pass to Abancay. Another voice calls out from down in the ditch, where once was a road,
"Sell me your bike!" he says popping his head up like a gopher.
"Yeah, all right, how much?" I reply, but it seems he's all talk and his head vanishes.
"So I can make it passed then?!"
"Yeah...."
"To Abancay?" I say, meaning I'm not just popping to the shops.....





Spot of roadworks....


In Abancay, safely reached, a festival of some sort, though I seem to have missed the men dressed like gorillas whipping each other. A woman sticks a pin on my chest, Blackadder comes forth again as she asks for one "solito". The money in Peru is the 'Sol', so a 'solito' (or dollito) is like saying one "small" dollar, as if asking for 50c but she wants it in dollar bills. I look at what my dollito has bought me, a blurry laminated stamp of Dolores. Not very good. Come on, let's get to Cusco.





Whipping gorilla

Cusco is of course home to the world famous Machu Picchu but it's an expensive place, and a busy place too. So, after much consideration I decide I am not willing to pay the large fee, small dollars or otherwise. By chance though, I arrive at a trail-head to some other Inca ruins, Choquequirao. Not many people visit this Inca site, certainly the trail head was deserted, probably as no one can work out how to pronounce its name to a taxi or bus driver. A local girl at the trail head tells me it's a three hour walk, sounds perfect and it's also much cheaper. But then, packed up and setting off a friendly man tells me it's actually three hours to La Playa, from here it's another 4-5 hours to the ruins....and then back. I realise this is going to be one tall order.





Timor

When I encounter haggard hikers returning up the trail to the village, like troops from war, I learn that they have taken three days. I pass several as I run down, chatting with each one and filling me with doubts. It's not until I reach Timor, a bearded Turkish man with legs speckled with a mosaic of bites and his shirt wrapped up on his head, that I realise it is hopeless. Timor spits out the ball of coca leaves from inside his lip and points out the onward trail across the valley, zig-zagging up a desperately steep mountain. This means that the trail drops, from my start point near Huanipaca two vertical kilometres to La Playa, the beach at the river in the valley. People then usually camp here, to be ready to make the huge effort up to the site itself, at 3,000m! A total climb of 5,000m! I knew that it was seven kilometres in length down to La Playa, so can assume that in total it is perhaps a 30km trail, to go and return, meaning an average gradient of 1-in-6! So I decided to join Timor on his ascent back to Huanipaca. Timor had cut grapes in France, cut marijuana in USA and busking just about every other country on his way to Peru. A true hippy, he was travelling with five others in a combi-van whom he met with at a Rainbow Family convention. After a while though and I leave Timor behind, eating salt and some herb root mixed with water, and then meet one of his friends, a Brazilian girl with bouncing black ringlets of hair. Well, they weren't bouncing now, as she's sat in the dust, legs straight out in front, chin on chest. She smells of hippy, like dirty hair and old underpants.

"How much further?" she asks hoarsley.
"Urgh...I think I just passed the 4km marker."
"QUE MIERDA!"
"Ummm....indeed....sorry about that....do you want some bread?"

She snatches the bread as if possessed by some Satanic hunger and then, of all things, we start talking about biscuits and she tells me her favourite are Casino. I reach into my bag and pull out a pack of Casino and toss them to her. She cradles them in her hands, looking at them without comprehension, as if I've just handed over some long-lost heirloom, as if she might just cry.

"See ya!" I say with a big grin and in Portuguese she replies "Until later!" her eyes now returned to the biscuits in her lap.

This must be one tough hike and surely harder than my Huayhuash trek. This trek enjoys the thicker air of lower altitudes, but it also enjoys all-day, blisteringly hot, intense sun. I was getting through my water rapidly, and with no streams in the trail, even I was meditating on the red and white cola label and I was even a little worried for the tiny girl and Timor with their large packs so far to go late in afternoon heat.

"You want some sopita?"
"NO JUST GET ME COKE!" I say desperate.

He squeezes between a group of men eating the soup huddled on and between sacks of rice, sugar and oats, crates of Cusqueña , to pull out a bottle of coke. I slip past the woman filling the doorway and spread out like a rag-doll, and also eating the soup to sit on a mud wall in the street and savour my coke. The village is populated by the dirtiest people and I watch them pass by - seemingly with no purpose. Shirts and jogging trousers sullied and soiled as much as the thin sandals with wide straps that are filled by fat squares of cracked and muddy meaty feet. One man, walks up the street in zig-zags and stops in front of me. Given a moment he turns to look at me, he let's his face do the talking, "oh, I say chaps, it's a...burp...it's a bloody gringo..." His thought train is derailed by the surging alcohol and he looks back up the road, trying to remember where he was going...or where he is. The old woman in the shop is now groaning like this man's internal voice, though she merely wants to get to her feet.

The man turns back to me again, and raises his eyebrows in surprise..."Well, bugger me, it's hummmmpff it's a gringo!....Don't I know you, sure I've seen your bloody mug somewhere..."

By now the woman has made it to her feet and, bent double, is feeling out for the door frame. The groaning continues.

The man prevaricates whilst the woman expostulates and I just contemplate how perhaps to help things along. But, no sooner and the man seems to wake from his reverie and continue his zig-zagging up the road between the houses like a ball on a tilting table. The woman too is making good progress, around the corner between the shop and the low mud brick wall...what's she doing?....she shuffles down the wall as if participating in a shallow spot of rock climbing, demonstrating adept usage of the chimney technique....






Then she takes a poo.

I chat with Aliessi, as the woman hikes her skirt back up and slowly groans her way back to the shop floor. Aliessi is a lovely man, his face says so, though his Spanish is fast and hard to follow, something about a Japanese garden, valley, gringos, and the fact that he is about to start his 7km walk home. I'm then tugged by the arm and led to a party, the Presidents wife is 48 today. I'm given a drink of 'chicha', poured in this case from a petrol can. Chicha is a drink made with maize and fermented, and it tastes a bit like one might expect; like runny cream of wheat and petrol. I try to refuse a second helping of the lovely stuff, but as the world over they insist and the communal cup is thrust at me, brimming with combustible porridge. After about ten minutes I get worried that maybe someone else might want the cup, so I take a swig. Now they told me that this chicha also included sugar, but there's something else, something, something a bit...a bit bilious. You were expecting a great punch-line there weren't you?





Aliessi

Time then, of all things, for dinner and it seems I'm invited, though I can think of little else than discourging my stomach's contents. All sit around the room, sullenly, eating, as if this were the last supper, or maybe the one just after.

"This is a good experience for a gringo,no?" says the birthday girl's son.
"Indeed, it is an experience." Another of her sons sits the other side of me, his plate untouched, seeming a little worse for wear from the night before, the birthday-eve being the big celebration.
"Want to dance?" asks an old lady, all my favourite things, but an opportunity to work on some new faces. And, perhaps they work, for more people join in, and we have a merry time pulling faces and moving feet. The president even joins in, telling me that they are building a cable-car to the ruins, "We can't wait!" he says, "in twelve months they'll be loads of gringos here!"
"Yup! And in about 18months you'll hate tourists!" I say with a smile.
"Oh, no! We can't wait, $25 a ticket...loadsa money!"

Indeed. Loadsa wonga! I have a feeling he'd fit in in Birmingham!

With talk of singing, I get a quick sprinkling of good-luck confetti on my head and escape fast, to find camp, where I contemplate their kindness and generosity. I think they will make a lot of money and, if they can keep up the hospitality they and the tourists will be winners for certain.





Nick with good luck confetti head, more chicha, my dancing partner and the president.




************************************************** ******************************





Cusco


The first thing that strikes me about Cusco is that there are no moto taxis! No homeless dogs either! Banned and shot by the tourist police perhaps and replaced instead by Toyota estate Taxis and gringos! I sit on the steps outside the grand Santa Domingo cathedral in the beautiful main square watching them, the taxis and the gringos coming and going along the broad cobbled avenues. "These are gringos!" I think to myself. Silly shorts and silly shoes, shoes made for running though the wearers look only likely of running out of money as they dish it out in front of me to children for photographs. And I thought it was an Indian myth. I wonder too, if the tourist police didn't get things wrong. I want to scream. A man next to me hands out a Peruvian day's wage to two kids, I'd happily garrot this fellow without trial, with his fancy camera strap. And then steal his camera...

I wonder if Gringos and Limons aren't much different, they look at every stone as if it was called Rosetta, or edible, or do I not look hard enough? But then I'm a gringo too. No unnatainable truths here though, just stones. Though one must admit that Inca stonework really is a thing to marvel at. They really knew their craft and their giant, smooth blocks remain hermetically fixed in place where others have fallen. Standing the test of time, of earthquakes, of rain, of photos...and, of urine. Nowhere though is the smell stronger than in my hotel room, and stronger still at night when the rat comes out and scratches around beneath the floor boards. But despite the smell I liked my hotel, it was otherwise peaceful and my host was lovely and I liked Cusco too.

"You're a bad man!" says the woman, back in the square.
"Sorry. I just won't pay for photos." I reply, surely I could have roused some sharper remark, but as she walks away I wonder if she's right.
















More photos from cusco in the album Peru IV

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Continued from Part 2 of 3 above!

When I reach the village of Chinchero, near Cusco, I'm dismayed to find that to even look around the non-Inca village, I must buy a tourist ticket. This is also expensive but does at least includes numerous sites and museums. Even so, my first reaction is to turn around and I start walking to the bike, but once I reach it I also reach the conclusion that if I don't buy a ticket, I won't be seeing anything. I know it's not really my thing, but I might kick myself if I don't see anything, but it's a lot of money. I sit on a bench to think about it long and hard.

Inside Chinchero is the village church, though this is Colonial Spanish from the early 1600s. Inside the church it is beautifully decorated, painted from bottom to top with green and reds and faces, and as well a hodgepodge of frescoes and mini-altars and the main altar filling the end with garish fake gold. As no photos are allowed inside I stare at the walls with concentration willing my brain to remember....but it's fairly useless.





This is taken from http://www.marklauri.com

I also meet Sonya, a weaver finishing off a two month project, a table piece that she might sell for $300, though she says an exporter comes around the village collecting pieces every Sunday and so she'll sell this one to them. Sonya was a lovely woman, despite the heavy flow of tourists and my explaining I couldn't buy anything. I watch her as we chat, threading the needle through threads fixed for tension to a metal gate, twisting a piece of wood, sliding a collar of wool and twisting the threads to finish off the border, an intricate coloured eye of eight or so threads, itself taking two days.





Sonya's hands at work.






Inca stonework at Saksaywaman

Soon though, too soon, I am bored of Inca, bored of rocks and regretting buying the ticket a little, especially as my visa for Peru is running out. I visit many other sites included on the ticket, going through the motions because I've paid, and then the museums in Cusco which are poor as well, with more Spanish Catholic art than Inca artefacts. Still, the return to Cusco gives me a chance to go to the customs office in the hope of extending my vehicle permit, confirming only what I already know.

“So I have to leave the country?”
“Yes. It is the only way.”
"How long do I have to stay outside the country?"
"Ah. The law does not say this."
"And you can't just give me a new paper here? Because I can get a new visa for another 90 days here in Cusco."
"No, this is not possible. The law says that vehicle permits cannot be extended."
“Okay, but I don't have to have an extension, is it possible to have a new one?” though it seems my Spanish is a bit poor here, and to clarify I say, “and throw this one in the bin?”
“No, you must go to the border. The nearest point is.....”

Miles away. But at the very least, commendable behaviour of the official. So I camped overlooking Cusco, watching the planes come in and go out, and then set off towards Puno, Laguna Titicaca and the border.





Camp over Cusco


I feel sick. I actually feel a bit like an accidental arsonist might feel after burning down his best friend's house...with his kids in it, post hence, a man with a secret. A post coital rapist with a conscience, bit strong I know, but it's bad. Things are bad. "Rapist" is a word on my mind. Rules, too. I'm thinking about breaking rules. My rules. The horror! The horror! It's not that bad. But the stumps of teeth, the finger nails like a corpse's black and yellow and ridged and long, the rheumy eyes, the desperation. I can't possibly break the rule, I can't hand out money. No. Absolutely not. That would be bad, very bad, terrible, you know that! But she was poor. No, she was beyond poor...where are the charities now...? No, where are the neighbours! We don't need charities. But....I have fruit, I can give her that at least. But it's nothing, it won't help....But better than nothing....I make a u-turn and race back. Is she eating grass? I hand over the fruits I have and she cradles them lovingly in her arms. She speaks, I wonder what she is saying? I only stopped to take a photo of the house but then I saw her. Charities.





The lady...all because of a picture


I ride on and for the rest of the day wonder if I'm wrong and I should give money to the people I meet. I'm always telling people they should help their neighbours, their communities, rather than work with charities. Are my neighbours therefore, the people I meet? But I also know that there are reasons why people are poor. And much of the time I don't really understand these problems, or the people they involve. I've gained the idea that charities are, generally speaking, not very good (apologies to my friend Tali and many people besides) and I spend all day wondering if my opinion is merely conjecture. Or, if perhaps with my knowledge, if there actually is any, I could actually help the charities to really help the people. But I probably can't. It's a big job. It's a tough job. What a job! And actually, I usually always decide that it is quite simply a case of overpopulation.

Then, at lunch I meet people living in the exact same environment, in clean clothes, riding motorcycles purchased with money from crops and cattle, happy people, off to a wedding, lovely shining happy people. I was invited to the wedding and was just on my way when another gent arrives and tells me that “Oh, no. That's a waste of a time, it's not until tonight.” So that I could hardly follow him, as essetially he'd just univited me.




So I pushed on towards Cusco, stopping in Lampa a lovely little village of red mud and large Gothic church that wreaked of pee. Then to lake Titicaca, a popular tourist spot for it's big (8372km2), high (3812m) and pretty deep (281m) making it one of the highest lakes in the world that you can float a big boat on. I saw no big boats, but I saw an awful lot of beautifully deep blue water, and as well on the Capachica Peninsula, the lovely hats of the Lachon peoples, hats that look like drying and curling up old pizzas with giant coloured baubles. The people wearing them though were equally unsavoury and unvaried in their response to me, laughing and mocking all the while, hysterically in my face. This treatment has actually been common outside the cities in Peru and, whilst I try and give them the benefit of the doubt, that they are not really being spiteful, but I just get annoyed, my doubts were small, tiny and shrinking all the while. Because of the recent treatment in Peru, I'd cut my hair, laundered, trimmed the beard and polished my boots – often the subject of mirth – but, to no effect. I often find that this treatment will vary from one village to the next, only several kilometres, so I always try to forget the past, and enter a new place with an open mind. But here it was incorrigible and that night my diary was deeply etched with scrawlings in block capitals, referring to the STUPID EFFING MONKEY LIKE GRINS and laughs that drove me to astonishing and a shaming amounts of anger.




I've been asking people why this is, including the monkeys, but they only laugh all the more. From others it seems simply that I'm white in place where there are perhaps no white people. I've been travelling quite a long while now but have never quite experienced this amount of ridicule, even in places deep in Africa where it was obvious that I was the first white person in at least a while to pass through, or one of very few to visit there. Here in Titicaca though, surely no excuses as it's a tourist hotspot.








My mood presented itself ahead by way of a thin hanging funeral veil of rain falling from a murderous black sky. These veils, a strange phenomenon, a little like slicing the taught underbelly of some huge grey beast that bleeds ink, sinking into the atmosphere as if in water, and yet never quite reaching the ground, diluted. The thin veil ahead appears razor-thin so that I'll pass straight through within seconds, and be safely into the sun clearly visible beyond. But, as the rain starts to hit this isn't the case, seconds turn to minutes, though I try desperately to keep going, to push through, I saw the sun, I know it's there, just keep going! The smell of grass comes bursting out then, the sweetest most lovely smell, and then onions so powerful. But then nothing. Nothing but wet. Wet and cold. I realise that the blue sky I had glimpsed earlier has long gone and when finally I turn around it isn't one small curtain but a huge draping sheet that wraps me in its cold damp. Soaked through I search desperately for a camp spot, on and on I go trying every half-chance I see until eventually I find an old mine where I can tuck away, just out of sight. I race to get the tent up in an effort to keep it dry. Futile. May as well have put the tea on. Then, in the rain, take off all my clothes which I pile up into a sodden heap inside the porch and get in the tent. I'm shivering badly and rush to put on what dry clothes I have to get ready for a cold and thunderous night. As the hot tea boils, I pray that the morning will be sunny so that I can dry my riding gear, otherwise riding away at over 4000m is going to be frankly horrid.

And frankly horrid it is. Well, actually, when I wake, not too bad, cloudy and grey in preparation. I decide to get away early before there's any chance of the more common, afternoon rain.





Getting ready for another drubbing


Over the border in Bolivia the officials are friendly, but tell me that I have to spend a minimum of 24hrs in Bolivia. I don't really want to do this as that also means I have to import my bike, change money and sit and camp over the border. The stamps hover over the passport for an excruciating time though eventually they do give me the two seals I need, "as friends.” he says, adding “But, if you're not back here in one month, I'm coming to Peru to get you!" I wondered if their procrastinating was in an attempt to get me to pay a bribe, but as well I think that genuinely they just want me to visit their country. Back at the bike and the Bolivian customs official beckons me into his office. People who say "you can't judge a book..." well, you can for when I get inside the office and see the man, I know I'm in trouble. I wonder what my face says about me? His face tells me he is a bad person.

"Vehicle Papers."
"Oh no...I'm going to Peru."
"OK, Temporary [Bolivian] paper."
"No, I mean, I came from Peru, I just needed the passport stamp....now I'm going back."
"But your motorcycle is on Bolivian soil."

Ah. Fiddle sticks indeed. I go to the window to look where my bike is, I know where it is, it's just there, it's in Bolivia, I know it, I rode it there, and wonder why I'm performing these theatrics, but at least it gives me time to think without looking at the bad face and to come up with a strategy.

"Umm...sorry." (nice strategy).
"Peruvian temporary vehicle permit."
"Well...I don't have it! I just gave it back, I've left the country after all."
"Then you have a problem. (yeah, it's you!) You should have left the bike in Peru and walked over."
"Wait, give me a second. I might have a receipt." When I go to the bike I find I do, by some fortitude have the old paper, but I'm still certain he is about to diddle me so when I go back into the office, I do so with renewed avowal.

"Sorry," I say, "I really didn't think it was a problem. I just, well I just rode without thinking. I didn't know. I wasn't thinking. Here." I hand him the paper, which he scans over before asking,
"How much did you pay?" He is of course referring to bribing the immigration officers. His voice is different now though, more human, his face too, and I realise I'm free.
"Nothing!" I say, snatching the paper from across the desk and with a wry smile add "that would be corruption!"

(For those interested, in hindsight, it would be wiser to get your visa extended at the immigration offices all around Peru and only exit the bike at the border, thus negating any need to visit the Bolivian (or other) outpost. The bike can be renewed indefinitely, but Brits at least have only 183 days per year allowance in Peru.)


Less than two minutes at the Peruvian border and I'm away, now with a slight weight off my mind with regards time limits, though one weight added by way of the customs official, I fear he'll give me trouble when I return to enter Bolivia. But that thought soon vanishes along with the grey cloud, a new curtain raising, and I too, up and away from Titicaca lake towards Moquegua. Instantly my mood is quite different from that at the lake, a beautiful trail and few people to spoil it, like getting away from a really bad party full of people you don't like. Passing through fields of tall wind-cut rock fingers towering over the small thatch homes on my way to the fabulous salty lake, Loriscota. A brilliant trail, and a beautiful high lake is Loriscota, surrounded by distant volcanoes and inhabited by a multitude of bird-life, the big beaked flamingos a really special highlight.




Flamingoes at Laguna Loriscota

The great route continued from Moquegua. Dropping again in altitude through fantastic desert canyons, with little traffic and easy camping having only yapping foxes
for companions. This led to the colonial city of Arequipa, which has
its splendid backdrop of volcanoes Misti and Chachani. A nice but busy
– as always – city.




The road to Arequipa







Santa Marta church in Arequipa, Volcan Misti in the background



After the recent rains I'd experienced in Titicaca I was fearful of the arriving rainy season, especially with all of Bolivia yet to see at much the same latitudes as Peru. With this in mind I decide I must be quick on the final trails in Peru, only a one loop left now; but one that looks formidable on the map, taking me to Colca Canyon, Cotahuasi Canyon and the Valley of Volcanoes.

But things start badly when I reach Lluta. I shouldn't have reached Lluta. But I have and must consider the fact that in taking the wrong trail to Colca Canyon, I've just lost another day . It's a long way to return, too long, but anyway the trail is stunningly stark and wild, the few people friendly, asking me to “take a photito!” and too, I can still reach Colca from the end of this trail.

I spend a lot of the ride trying to read the landscape in accordance with the map, trying to ascertain if the tall mountain that is to my right is the one that should be on my left. If it is, then I am on the right trail and the map is wrong! The rest of the time I spend looking at large birds of prey, proud grey eagles and then up above, a condor. I see the condor swoop down and land to nestle in a hollow of grass. I get off the bike and go skulking over, camera fixed and ready. When I get to the lip, within 5-10m, the condor takes flight and with it my motor-functions. I stand there agape as it KAW KAW KAW KAW!s loudly away, spreading it's huge wings and dropping off into the valley. No photos then....but 'ere's an eagle who came screaming torpedo like past my tent one morning having spotted a tasty mouse 3000m below in the canyon....perhaps.





Heeerre, mousy, mousy, mousy....


I stop for fuel in Chivay, a small town nestled at the head of Colca Canyon from where I hope to back-track essentially, but on the correct trail, over Colca Canyon.

“It's that way.” says the pump attendant.

His face and pouting mouth seem to be pointing awfully close to where I've just come from....
"What....that one just there?"
"Si."
"That one I just came from?"
"Uhh, si."
"That goes to Lluta?"
"Si."
"And Pedregal?"
"Si."

And so I come to realise that I have just passed the second deepest canyon in the whole wide world and hardly noticed....oops. Still the trail was no hardship and the condor was good and I have Cotahuasi to come, which is the deepest canyon in the whole wide world! It's taken much longer than expected to arrive, and I'm still worried about time, especially having seemingly wasted a large portion of it in some invisible canyon. But, in the morning I decide that “I'll go, but must go really quick...no reading!”

Fool.

Time limits are the travellers curse...ask Mr.Magregor.

So I raced off, if one can call it that, for the trail is steep and Rodney is running very poorly, worse even than normal. Any sort of uphill gradient means 1st gear and flat roads are 2nd or, if I can get a little bit of a downhill spurt, 3rd. Tedious. I never remember feeling this frustrated on Rudolf.

As is common in Peru, almost any dirt trail is breathtaking and here it is the wide-open spaces amongst the mountains that amaze, riding along arrow-straight roads through the wide-open plains where graze wild horses and fluffy plump lamas.





Sppppaaaaaaaaaaaacccccccccccceeeeeeeeeeeeeee!


These wide-open spaces give the impression that the very end of a cloud is attainable, like a rainbow whose end you can see in a similar open space. And these grey clouds are regrouping, building, moving in and tightening their grip. A tiny archway sits on the horizon, not a rainbow, but a doorway leading clearly out from under and beyond this brewing storm, to heaven, to sunshine. I push Rodney as hard as I can, downhill now, transfixed on this archway and praying that the trail will lead me there, and not steer me off towards the misery. The road turns one way....but then, thank God veers back again...then another...but gratefully again returning me to put the arch within sight once more! But then, the horror! the horror! as the road turns ninety-degrees, pointing me straight towards the misery. I've tried my best to ignore it and now, staring it in the face, it looks seven shades darker, a horrid face, ugly, worse than any pizza-hat wearers, worse than the grinning monkeys, worse than the customs official...oh but I'd pay a bribe now! I know what's to come, the sky so black now, so black, blacker than a black man's big black bumhole and I fear, I fear. I fear the bumhole.

Almost crying now, but then, then, a blurry vision, a mirage? I see something, and then I hit it, a deep swinging berm that flicks me fast around and away...back towards the arch! And now, look! Look! I can see the whole trail ahead, running straight and true, all the way up to the horizon and through my gateway...a bit of Frank Sinatra seems appropriate and I sing, "Heaven,
I'm in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak!"





Archway to Heaven, though seen from the good end.


From the pleasant village of Andagua, the road drops down and down, into the black, black hell of the Valley of the Volcanoes. Surrounded both high and low by volcanoes, winding and twisting down and down, between and amongst towering piles and ridges of cool black and rusty brown lava. Vast, vast quantities in a vast expanse and, popping up amongst the detritus, some of the eighty tall cones of dead volcanoes.





Valley of the Volcanoes


But then time was pressing, and it presses now too as I sit at the computer! For this blog is epic in proportions....and I hope in trials, trails and tribulations....ride on, write on, ride on! And I'm running out of energy, my mind is a dull block, no words, no poetry there, need fuel, some of those biscuits perhaps....but then, not now, not here, but there, in the valley, with the volcanoes, I needed petrol....the tank was again dry, and only 305km (60mpg!). Luckily the dirty dregs in the stove's fuel-bottle are just enough to get me back to Andagua, where I buy two gallons from the village shop for $16.00, and not the small kind.





The steep pass that leads rising away from Andagua





Rodney JUST made it....and what a view.



"What you know it?" I ask.
"Yes, of course! The Queen, the pound, Manchester, London, the wars with France."
"No with Germany."

"Don't you know history?"
"Yeah, well, some of it...France were our friends!"
"NO! Come on! Nelson...?"
"Ohhh yeah, him. Who was the other fellow?"
"When the Spanish came, you English were here too."
"Really?"
"Pirates! You bought the Pound with you too, very strong! A very strong country!"
"I'm related to Blackbeard you know."
"Then Germans and the Russians!"
"What, pirates?!"
"NOOOO! In the World War."
"Ohhh, I'm following...."
"Hitler! Terrible! He wanted to take over the world."
"Almost managed to as well...you could argue he was brilliant."
"Oh no, terrible man, killing the Jews...."

At this point the old man goes off into a little bit of a monologue that I struggle to follow. He spoke loudly and with much animation, so that passers by appeared to think that I was Hitler getting a good telling off for my rather hideous behaviour!

"So, how long to Cotahuasi?" I ask, when eventually the opportunity presents itself.
"Oooh, about seven hours."
"Plus a bit more for the canyon I think."
"Hour an a half to...(a town I didn't recognise)"
"Okay, great, thanks! Too far I think, I'm bit worried about the rain."
"Oh, it won't rain today."
"Well, I assume it never rains here."
"Gets a bit windy sometimes."
"Anyway, I must go! Long way to go! Nice talking with you."
"You won't forget me, will you?"
"Doubt it, hard to find anyone with something to say. Until later."
"Hope it goes well!"

And so I turned back to Arequipa, leaving Cotahuasi Canyon for another day, another trip, another lifetime.





Riding the bulldust back to Arequipa


Who knows what came before? Or what will come later? Here and then gone. Though never really there at all. Time is unkind. This way. Or that way. Unkind is time. Those grains of wisdom slipping down, through the narrow space, until the last grain drops...but where are they? Even the hour glass lies. Bottomless. The black hole of our time. Leaving nothing behind.

I'd like to leave something behind, I think to myself as I sit looking at these rocks, maybe just a grain or two. I wonder who sat here before me, in this scorched field of boulders? I try to picture them, three of them, children with chocolate skin and eyes like black-holes. They wear woven loin clothes decorated colourfully with the same animals that they are carving into the rock, these rocks, condors, eagles, fish, pumas, camels and snakes....people too; shepherds and hunters and sad crying dancers, the moon and the sun.

The sun is pure searing heat, penetrating all corners, leaving no shade and no plants either, cream and white hot rock. I hop from rock to rock, hundreds of them, thousands maybe, brushing away sand to reveal more petroglyphs, what a place! Down below, the river runs on and on, next to a road that is not mine.

I wonder what I will leave.





The very brilliant Toro Muerto

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Those eagle eyed will notice that there is a big jump in proceedings from Guatemala to Peru....

This is because I'm always having problems with the formatting on horizons' hubb, so I tend to stick it on ADV, almost as bad, and more preferably of course my website.

This last install from Peru seems to look reasonable....as you will notice it is very long!

If you do enjoy this, I recommend you go to the webpage www.talesfromthesaddle.com or www.facebook.com/talesfromthesaddle

There are many, many photos on both of these pages as well as the missing articles in the blog...though if you have missed them, then you've got some catching up to do!

Enjoy....any questions, comments, please let me know!

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I hadn't seen this RR yet (been on the HUBB for a couple of months)...

Um. Wow.

That is all.

Ride safe Nick and if you're still out in 2014 I'll see you out there.

Well, it's been a while since I posted on here! Glad you like it...unless you mean "Wow...this blog is the worst thing ever"...hope not!!

Now you need to catch up on teh rest....I'd defiantely recommend at least reading Ecuador and Colombia, and maybe Darien too! If you want me to post them here, I can do that too!

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Have some pics, just entered Bolivia....



Had to ride the famous "Road of Death"!




And a trip to a quiet beach on Laguna Titicaca.

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There's some new photos (Bolivia Part 2) on the webpage (and facebook once the upload completes).

Sorry there are so many, I tried my bestest to delete them...

Website photos are here http://www.talesfromthesaddle.com/picasa/photos.shtml

Facebook will be here, but please wait a few minutes, the internet's pretty bad....
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?s...7388151&type=1

Hope you like them,
Nick

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If you are interested in budget, since leaving San Fran (in Sept or Oct 2010) I've spent something LIKE $13,500....(I thought it was as little as 10k....hence the edit, I'd forgotten a cash job in Guate, sold my car back home and my exchange rate was a little low. Hopefully now is there or thereabouts.)

I might be wrong this is a quick check of statements, so maybe there's something I'm missing. Remember, this includes a $1500 plane ticket home, a new bike and $450 to cross Darien and about 800 days (it being December).

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I've looked more closely, and spoke to my folks at home, and have come up with this....

Since September 2010 when I landed in San Francisco, USA until now December 2012 (Bolivia) I've spent roughly $13,000. This is working it out with an exchange rate of 1.6 US$ to 1GBP (I'm British so work in pounds usually, but for easy understanding for all).

This includes;

A new bike in Guatemala - (18,500Qs) $2350
A visit/flight home $1250
Replacement of worn out camping stuff when I went home, $1000
Crossing Darien - $450
And $500 on health insurance.

I worked in Guatemala, and at home when I visited a total time of about 5 or 5.5 months, I also sold my old car (and had to pay to get it road worthy to do so!, I forget how much that was)....but hopefully this gives some indication. I don't think this includes shipping my original bike (...that later broke in Guatemala) from South Korea (where I worked after the Africa stint) which cost $1000, as I paid for that in Korean Wan and so from another bank account.

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Riding in TupizaIn Part 3 of Bolivia, read as the journey continues, still dropping in altitude on my way from the high cool altiplano to the lowland Amazon. From Tupiza now in the south of Bolivia, heading out east through meteor craters and down towards sea level again and the hot jungle, and the hottest place I’ve ever visited, before attempting a ride through this infernal green ocean north along the fiery “Devil’s Road”, one long isolated trail, 600km direct to Sucre….maybe.


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A small pair of legs hang plump like cooked brown sausage links, wiggling and kicking as if trying to get in to the deep chest freezer. The shop owner, a man with a droopy face watches on, propping up the lid with a raised arm. He looks fed up.

”How much is this one?” comes the muffled voice from inside the freezer.
”5 Bees,” he says. The man’s shoulders are narrow, narrower than his waist and they arch over as if they’ve been propping up this freezer lid since the beginning of time.

The legs wiggle more frantically, higher and deeper, there’s a scraping sound of boxes on ice and then, ”how much is…is…this one?”
A sigh, ”8 Bees.”
”Hhmmmff….and…this one?”

I think about jumping in the freezer myself, it’s hot and I feel like a cooking sausage. The man’s eyes narrow and his bushy moustache bristles with tension as he looks at the boy’s weighty form. The droopy man looks inside, “well, which one?” The boy’s legs fight and spasm,lots of movement but with little gain until with straining digits he just manages to finger the ice-cream buried deep within the recesses of the icy tomb, “ESO!”

Looking at me, all eye-lids and jowls, Droopy says, ”6Bs.”
”Oh,” says the boy.

The boy’s body slumps on the freezer wall like a damp towel, exhausted. Soon the feet drop down to the floor – still attached you understand - revealing a tubby boy who brushes himself off and then empties his pockets. Among the sweet wrappers and marbles is a small amount of change, maybe 1.50Bs. Droopy shuts the freezer door, dunkk. “Hmm,” the boy thinks, “just a coke then.” and Droopy hands one over and turns to me.

“How much is….” I begin, “ummm…I’ll just have a coke thanks.” He reaches into a chest fridge and down into the piled-up bottles to pull out a coke, pops the cap and wordlessly clears an arm-chair in the corner for me. I slump down and grasping the red and white I empty the sweetness into my mouth. Ahhhh….I hate buying coke. I mean I love the taste, don’t get me wrong and here it tastes even better, glass bottles and sugar cane. But, it seems like such a waste of money, I should drink the water I make so much effort to carry. But I'm not in Africa now where money was so tight. Now my budget is a little healthier, but even so I’m still marked by my time there….and it does only cost US15c. As well, this treat comes as a congratulations for having just saved a few dollars on fuel…at the cost of about an hour and a half in time.

With my bike’s number-plate broken off, I was hoping that I might be able to persuade the fuel attendants to fill my bike up at the lower nationals’ price. Here in Bolivia the law states that “Vehicles with foreign plates must pay 9.22Bs per litre,” an increase of nearly 250%. If you remember, in the previous chapter the bike’s number plate broke off whilst bouncing along the wearisome corrugations of the Lagunas Route. But this got me thinking, without a number plate could I argue that the bike doesn't have a foreign number plate…because it doesn't have a plate at all? Usually I'm buying fuel on the black market anyway as pumps in the countryside are rare, and there it makes no difference, the prices fixed for all. And technically, I should pay the full 9.22Bs at the pumps, it just seems unfair somehow, despite the reality being that it is completely fair; I don’t pay Bolivian taxes, but then who does? Whilst it would work later, it didn't here in Tupiza, but I still didn't want to pay the full price, hence the long search for a black-market (or “black bag”) seller who had some……and the resultant celebratory drink!

As I sit sipping the cola droopy-faced Alfonso makes me a sandwich from his lunch kit. Into a white bread roll he spoons filling; “aji” (red-hot chilli pepper), seasoned with a sprinkling of tuna. “PPPPuta!” I splutter as I take a bite, “I think it needs more pepper…!” Alfonso smiles.

The shop is crammed wall-to-wall with fridges and freezers and Alfonso sells ice-cream and sodas rather reluctantly to those who dare disturb his reverie. He rises heavily from the other sofa to wade through the heat of late morning to a face in the doorway glistening with sweat like condensation on a cold glass…always they have the same questions, “how much is this? How much is that? And this? Hmfh, okay, I’ll just take a coke.”

Where the walls are visible behind the jumble of fridges one can spot the usual eclectic mix of posters; the Virgin Mary, cola ads (“¡Ahora en 2L retornables!”), naked blondes and calendars depicting llamas photoshopped into the Swiss alps, usually poorly and missing a hoof or ear. I’m laughing at the pictures as Alfonso slumps down into an armchair. He raises his brows quizzically, tipping his head back, “que?”

”Is that your daughter?” I ask gesturing to one of the blondes.
”Hm, one of them.”
”Your wife must be very pretty?” I say. He twists the corner of his nose up, not really. I gesture over to the facing wall and ask, “And what does she think?” Alfonso’s brows knot in confusion, so I add, “the Virgin Mary….of the blonde?”
”Ah…It’s ok…it’s no problem” he says breaking into a twinkling smile, “they’re both virgins!”


Alfonso, AKA Droopy
A man comes in, dabbing his brow with a handkerchief, a big man with messy hair and his shirt half out, he looks tired. He asks how much a few things are and then buys a coke.

Alfonso slumps into his seat.

The man leans in the doorway and takes a deep gulp from the dewy bottle, a sigh of pleasure like a wave on the shore. He goes on to tell us about his journey from Tarija, which I’m interested in as it’s my next destination…

“OrrrrrreeEEEEeeblay!”

Oh well. He tells us that the journey has taken him all night, ten hours for what normally takes four or five.

A young girl comes in then, holding a shiny precious coin out in front of her, like a guiding compass. She asks how much every individual sweet is, holding the compass to each, lemon drops, caramels, cola sweets, lollipops, gummie sweets, fruity chews and on and on. She looks glumly at her coin not so precious after all and then leaves, without even buying a coke.

Alfonso slumps into his seat.

The dishevelled man goes on to tell us that he took the main road from Tarija, heavy rain causing a landslide. I’d actually planned a different route; a minor road direct across the mountains to the north. The prospect of a landslide-challenge ignites momentarily, but I decide to stick with my original plan, reasoning that sitting in the rain and not moving won’t be much fun. Shouldn’t force things.


Leaving Tupiza


A Woman leads her goats out to feed on thorny desert bushes in Tupiza


Into the mountains, heading east to Tarija, storm clouds to the south
I ride away from hot Tupiza then, heading north before turning sharply to the east into the mountains along smooth grey dirt. I look far to the south, to the obvious thunder clouds, below which must be that other road and I ruminate over my decision, whether right or wrong, dry or wet, brave or weak. To soothe my concerns the road here is excellent, dropping into a hot fertile valley of bizarre and huge angled wedges of rock; an ancient meteor crater. I stop in another shop for another drink in a lovely little farming village, crumbling sandstone buildings around a small square reminiscent of Italy. A man sits listening in the corner of the cool interior of the shop, quietly drinking as I chat with the owner. One or two friendly farmers come in to buy some local - and supremely “special” looking – clear brew, either taking a few quick nips or else filling their own bottles from the large plastic gallon bottle secreted behind the counter. They head off to sit in the shade against the wonky golden walls of the church or else start off on the long walk home through the fields, at least partially drunk. I leave to find camp, spending an age trying to find a spot along one of the huge blasted-out shanks of the earth on the high lip of the crater, but can’t quite make it. I find a very fine spot all the same with long views down the broad red valley.





My trail joins the Pan Americana highway the next morning, as it heads ever southwards, here on its way to Tarija at 1,800m (6,000ft), and even provides some beautiful riding. However, along with urban Tarija, it all comes as a bit of a shock after several weeks in the altiplano where even bananas were hard to come by. As I walk around the centre of Tarija a man pulls up alongside in his car and asks if ‘that’ is my motorcycle parked several streets over, I say yes and he tells me that I’m a bit foolish to park it there, it will be robbed. I thank him and tell him it’s fine, though now I’m not so sure. I continue on, looking for a hostel with parking, but failing, hot, sweaty and a little concerned for the bike I turn about and start back.

Rodney, my trusty companion is still there parked up when I return. I pat the tank, “vamos amigo, let’s go.” I find my way out of Tarija where for the first time my ruse works and I buy fuel for the local’s price and from here on main roads heading lower still to the east. However, the anxious feeling remains, a feeling of being out of place, like I don’t belong in this odd urbanised area. I’m made happier when the paved road stops and, with a bump-bump, I drop off its terminus and continue along dusty red dirt towards the lowland Amazon, the temperature conversely rising rapidly.



I see condors enjoying the cooler air up high, circling atop the hot rising air of the thermals. Down here though and all I can do is think of the heat which is now incredible. If I stop the bike, only for a moment the petrol in the fuel-line evaporates and the bike won’t start. So, when I reach a frond-roofed shack and stop for a coke I find I can’t restart the bike. I chat with others, truck and bus drivers, all parked up, either broken down and waiting for parts to arrive, or simply waiting for sunset. All agree that today is simply too hot, for the engines particularly, on this slow, twisty and steep road. After a few attempts I manage to push-start the bike, though after all the effort I’m considering turning it off again and going back inside for a second litre of coke!


Another(!) coke....55°C/131°F
The sun burns white and fills the sky with light and heat leaving little blue to be seen. It’s even hotter riding than stationary, the air as hot as flame, burning my face and filling my stomach with a swelling sickness (probably all the cola you greedy git). I pass numerous broken down vehicles as the road carves its way through low gnarled trees and bushes, including my favourite; the plump bellied Toborochi tree. This tree, they say, is the hiding place of Araverá, an ancient goddess. Araverá was pregnant with a son who, it was prophesised would destroy the evil spirits, Aña. These chased her everywhere until they lost her when she hid, and remains today inside the Toborochi tree. I wonder how these trees can bear the 55°C (131°F!!) heat…I’m not sure if I can, despite a belly-full of cola….maybe the Toborochi manages better as its belly is actually a storage for water, and not cola….or a goddess.


Toborochi trees...and maybe a goddess







The Pilcomayo CanyonA telephone-box like cabin sits perilously close to the edge of the road and the Pilcomayo canyon as I approach. A man steps out, squinting into the dazzling heat, his face the usual blankness of someone with a bagful of coca crammed into their cheek. He doesn’t tell me to but I stop and wait as he stares absently left and right and spits bright green. Confirmed by radio that the single-lane is clear I’m waved through and the man repairs to his small cabin to cram more leaves into his numb cheek, to keep him going through this intense heat. Along I go, traversing the vertical walls of the canyon by the very narrow and excellent, but sadly short, trail cut into the towering sandstone walls brooding over the Pilcomayo river whose waters run brown and warm below….water….oh, water! I drank mine long ago and I search for a shop in the last of the light and, finding one, I buy two litres of Fanta before riding back to the canyon to set the tent up riverside.

It’s not a river for swimming in, running fast, brown and turbid. Black cormorants stand unmoving on rocks and boulders amongst the river. They look cooked and shrivelled up, like old dry bugs and not once do I see them fly, or move. The sun, mercifully setting, is still all powerful and I strip off quickly to underwear. Ants dart about on the floor like people burning their feet on a hot beach, and mosquitoes and flies buzz around angrily drinking my sweat and blood, forcing me into the tent. Inside is unsurprisingly stifling, despite putting only the inner-tent up and though I’m rather sick of the sugar, I take endless gulps of the already hot tang until the bottle is painfully empty. I certainly can’t entertain the idea of eating and instead choose to lie down and sweat into the mattress, which sticks to me like Velcro. I put on a t-shirt to alleviate this, but in this heat the T-shirt feels more like an electrically-heated, fleece-lined, goose-down polar jacket and even slipping my head-torch on feels like donning a woolly hat.

The sandstone floor under the tent burns hot as smouldering coals and makes sleep impossible. Perhaps not just the heat, or the noise of trucks as they erupt into life as darkness falls and pass by one after another, but perhaps it is because I’m worrying about my next problem; tomorrow. In the previous chapter (The Lagunas Route) I had finished by describing my decision making for this route. This basically involved my choices to visit this canyon before turning north along a long and isolated route directly to Sucre. It looked to be a good challenge though even in Tupiza I was worried about this one and if perhaps I was taking on a bit too much. My estimation is that it is between 500km and 600km, maybe even more. It’s almost impossible to tell due to the difficulty in taking into account the elevation changes. Once, a road that looked 10km on my map turned out to be a near vertical switchback decent over 30km, or short sections to a town 2km away – by crow and by map - are actually circuitous routes down, around and up valleys 50km or more. Not only many times longer but also inevitably many times slower thanks to endless hairpins. And so now on the eve of this route I’m quite worried and night-time thoughts whirl around my mind; how far will it be, how much fuel do I need, can I even carry enough, and how much food and water, how many days? I'm also worried that if it’s this hot it could be quite dangerous….if I get a problem…..better not to think about it. I spiral around and around my thoughts, again and again and again, until eventually falling asleep.


Parrot in the shop


Camp, the ground like smouldering coals


In the morning, already roasting hot....and the sun isn't even up!
The black cormorants are still there unmoving when I rise early next morning. I want to beat the heat but I also want to reach nearby Villa Montes early, stock up with several days food and water and find two large bottles to fill with petrol, before back-tracking to near my camp-spot to start the road north as early as possible. The sky is just lighting violet as the unseen sun approaches the horizon, but even so it must be approaching 30°C (86°F). I consider riding in my underpants, but can’t carry the extra clothes on the bike. Putting on my riding jacket is absolute torture and the helmet is damp with the slimy now-cool grime of yesterday.

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Petroleum towers along the way
The road to Villa Montes is very twisty, far exceeding the map’s perspective greatly and, at 70km, much farther than I expected, delaying my start along the Sucre road. I pass by several oil drilling towers as I twist and turn along, wanting only to arrive. I stock up quickly in the markets of Villa Montes which is just waking up, people setting up, unwrapping blue tarps from the neat bundles of their stalls of fruit and veg. I'm delayed finding the two four-litre oil bottles for fuel, but do eventually and fill up those, the tank and not forgetting the life-saving 0.5L stove bottle. I get a slight scowling frown from the pump attendant at my lack of number plate but again pay local prices. Finished, I then buy two litres of fruit juice, it’s before 9am and in the shade of the cool concrete shop it is already 32°C! I drink my juice down easily, wanting more, and talking at length with the shop owner who agrees with a smile that yesterday was killer, “today will be better,” he says, “there will be clouds. Yesterday there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky!” I ask him both how and why he can live here…him and his friend smile, ”when it is hot like yesterday, we don’t work, we just drink.”

Whilst I’d like to just drink, I’m preoccupied, thinking of the possible difficulties and unknowns ahead that one can never plan for, only worry about. Who knows what I'll find. My mind moves to another place now. The man is talking but I’m not listening, as if I can see the words, see him talking but make no sense of it all. I’m too busy thinking. I’m thinking that it would be nice if I could carry more fuel, more food and more water. I’m thinking I can’t, the bike is fully loaded, including 9 litres of fuel. I’m thinking the road could be more than 600km. I’m thinking about my recent forays in the altiplano which taught me that perhaps my fuel range is much less than I’d thought, perhaps only 500km. I’m thinking how on the one hand I don’t have enough fuel and on the other that there’s nothing that can be done. I’m thinking; what if there’s a problem. What if I fall badly. I’m thinking I just want to get going, I want desperately to get moving, to just leave the voices and fears behind. So, I bid the friendly chaps farewell and start off, back the way I came through the Pilcomayo canyon and to La Palma and my turn off north on to the Devil’s road.


The beginning of the Devil's Road


Click to view the map
There are several roads in this area all running parallel from south to north along the basin and rising up towards Sucre at 2600m. I assume that they are all old petroleum hunter trails. With the heat and the dense scrub land being hostile to almost all but mythical goddesses and the hardiest organisms, there is little to tempt people to live here, far from Villa Montes, Sucre or Santa Cruz, even with these roads in place. The initial part of the route is as expected very good, leading to a petroleum well and with some rural houses along the way whose inhabitants manage somehow to scrape a living farming tired-looking (pre-cooked!) cattle, or else at the oil wells. There are several junctions and feeling lost and a little anxious I am eager to speak to anyone and everyone I can, to quiz them about the route ahead and not feel quite so alone. This is always a bit of a Catch 22; asking means more information, and more information often means more fears, things I hadn’t thought about. If not this then they have no idea about the route at all, which is almost as worrying as it only shows the lack of use it receives. The consensus here is that the route does seem at least to exist, is a very long way, is very sandy and meant only for horses. But they say I will make it. I hope so.




The last photo, hereafter I was to anxious to cover ground and didn't take any until things got easy again...and Irelaxed
Narrower, the trail tunnels deeper into the gnarled jungle which closes over and around the thin strip of dirt, closing me off from the houses and people behind. After some time I surprisingly see two men amongst the trees making a concrete water trough for cattle. They give me very complicated directions and explain that just round the next curve the road becomes bad, no people, unused. I get a photo here and pour in the first of the two 4litre jerry cans, which the tank gobbles dismayingly, meaning I’ve covered just over 120km. I’ve not even started, I hope I’ve got enough fuel.

The trail is oppressive in the darkness, becoming rocky and the two men were right; clearly unused now. Rather than being totally flat the trail undulates and twists through the vast jungle to the point where I have no idea of direction at all and I realise my insignificance, a small dot of red among an huge ocean of green. The darkness at least puts me and machine out of the scorching grasp of the sun’s reach, which I'm grateful for. But I don’t like this trail, ghostly somehow, not a place for the living and I think about turning back. I can think of little else only of covering ground and so anxious am I that I stop taking photos in an attempt at haste.

When I arrive then at a junction I have to try hard to remember the directions given in all the conversations earlier. I seem to remember that the first instruction was to keep left, that right was bad, maybe then I’d follow a channel or canal, and perhaps once I reach a school I can turn right. I can’t remember. I was so busy worrying about the quality and length of the trail, or perhaps simply: just worrying, that I didn’t really concentrate on the directions. I try desperately to remember, feeling like the boy on the freezer, reaching around inside and stretching out his digits, fingering memories. I take the left and pray I understood correctly.

After the early rush from camp and the frantic preparations in Villa Montes this morning, time slows now to an equally worrying standstill. Whole days seem to pass by to cover single kilometres. Anxious and confused by this warping of distance and time, I look more and more regularly at the odometer, which seems to barely move and eventually watching these numbers becomes more important than concentrating on the trail. Large salmon-pink iguana flash colour like lightning along the floor of the ominous jungle where darkness otherwise consumes the green of leaves and the beige of bark, and lichen hangs from branches in shadowy webs of black. Even the jumbled rocks of the trail are black, slipping, tilting and tinkling beneath the wheels as I ride thoughtlessly hoping only that the odometer has caught up one-hundred kilometres, but when I look again it has moved barely one. I feel certain that, in spite of these small 1km increments, I am still using up all my reserves of fuel and, at the same time as getting no nearer my destination, I am moving many hundreds of miles from the last houses, people and help. With my total distance covered at about 141km, I still have a rather discouraging 400-500km to go and my fears move away from fuel, to that of time. How many days will it take? and, have I got enough biscuits?

From this all-enclosing darkness I eventually emerge into a much more open area; one of colour and sunlight, of grass and breeze. A great relief, but I am far from relieved. A building then, which I hope is the school, though it’s hard to tell as it looks unused like from a ghost town. I see a woman sitting on the hard-packed dusty floor beneath a shade tree outside the long rectangle of her house, and I pull over to check if I’m going the right way.

When I talk to people I have a need to remove my helmet, to get off the bike and say hello with a handshake, thinking that perhaps it’s not very nice talking to a pair of alien blue eyes and a big white nose, wearing what looks like a paratrooper’s jacket and sat – seemingly very happily - atop Apollo 14. Whilst perhaps this is a good idea, those few moments when the people watch as I remove gloves and helmet and twist out of the saddle, seem oddly tense. Kids come out of the shadows and stare as the woman, solid-looking and in a dirty blue smock worn thin with use and torn, takes a few steps towards me. I remember that; her smock full of holes and her odd walk; a stiff-legged waddle, like Frankenstein’s monster or a large zombie with their arms down. She stops well short of me and stands apprehensively back. Usually any tension I feel or imagine fades when I shake hands and say hello, but here it’s another still-familiar conversation, one of disbelief and the fear that I’m another petroleum hunter (or gold hunter as when I was captured by Indians in Colombia). It means that her questions seem oddly probing and my answers only seem to raise more suspicion. As we talk together I look around to the house, the shed, the landscape, the children, wondering how she and they can live here in this tiny speck of light set amongst a vacuous black hole. I ask questions to this end, but these only raise more suspicion, and are met with avoidance and generalisations. I look for vehicles too, and seeing none and wondering how she reaches town I ask if buses pass, “no,” she says, “so who uses the road?” I ask, “no one, no one ever passes.”


Not THE woman but nearby days later I took this photo of the same dress style...this one without holes
Another problem with long isolated routes is the lack of villages between – in this case – here (wherever this is) and the target, Sucre. It makes navigation difficult, with less to aim for. Here too, in rural Bolivia the distances are perhaps magnified/shrunk one-hundred fold as the common vehicle is not the car but the sandal….or maybe even two. In this case there really isn’t much to aim towards and the ones I mention she doesn't know so I have little choice but to ask how to reach Sucre itself. Initially she points me back, with her chin, to Villa Montes where she could take a bus to Sucre if she so wanted. I explain again and she goes on to confirm that I can continue along this route to reach Sucre, though this only highlights another problem; does the person you are asking really know the way? Egyptians, I noticed for example, always tell you to go the way that you and the bike are pointing, ie they always tell you it’s straight ahead. One becomes a little better to judge people as time goes by, usually a lot of time…spent getting lost. But you also learn that you have little choice than to trust the people and take the information available whether you think it good or bad.

There are two more houses here, making a village of three, and I pass by them on my way out of “town”. The route changes here, staying now in the relative open and meandering alongside a dry river northwards with the green darkness ominously just off to the sides. The trail crosses this river repeatedly via its dry and soft sandy bed of rounded grey rocks, and at times I seem to lose it completely as it fades from existence, lost to the pressures of the growing jungle or the river, until a patch of what is more obviously road momentarily reassures me. Suddenly I’m at a junction with six exits to choose from and not a single sign. Miraculously there is someone building a house at this junction and I go through the trees into the shade, to the house but there is no-one there. Damn, now what? But then after a moment, from out of the darkness comes a man with a bulging cheek of coca and the familiar feint delirium. When I ask which way to go he points with his chin and then with a spit of coca slime says, “the careterra,” to which I reply, “but which one is that!” I pull him out by the elbow to the 6-ways junction. He obviously thinks I’m stupid and he tiresomely points the way, across the broad riverbed, chopping the air with his hand as he says “sssiiiigue, siiigue, sigue,” meaning the road is easy to follow, just stay straight……

And upright, I think as I cross the deep sand again to the other side. There’s hardly a tire mark here now and plants and trees grow freely and hang into the road. The farther I go, the more and more of the hard-packed sand road I find has been consumed at some time by the river, and so more and more often I’m riding along the tricky riverbed itself. At one point, I try to slip narrowly between a tree leaning half-uprooted, bent forwards in the sand from an ancient flood, and an area of softer sand cut by the few tyres that have passed this way. I catch one of the tree's tough branches on my body and tumble off, stopping with a jolt. Before I even hit the soft sand I’m thinking to myself, “turn back…this is crazy, if it’s like this now, what will it be like in 100km!”


The 6-ways junction
I wiggle out painfully from under the bike sunk heavily in the sand, burning my leg on the engine case and hurting my ankle as I rush to tug it free from the heavy heat. I go to heave the bike up and as I do a spurt of blood surges out from somewhere on to the sand. “Bloody hell….that’s a lot of blood!” I picture a syringe full of blood being squeezed hard without a needle. My hand is cut and I wipe it on my trousers ineffectively but can see that whilst it’s quite nasty, it’s quite a small cut in my finger, maybe the brake lever or a branch stabbed it. But no time for that, vital fuel is leaking out from the tank; I have to get the bike up. I plunge my bloody hand amongst the soft sand and fix it around the grip and heave the bike a second time. This time my reddened hand slips from the now wet grip and I fall backwards and tangle in the tough tree branches which I fight angrily against. I get manage better third time and push and run the bike along the riverbed and across to the far side.


A slow awkward fall and a small but bloody cut to my finger.
The injury and fall have really brought things to the fore, I want out. This isn’t a very wise place to be alone, or maybe I’m just not good enough or tough enough, it’s the same feeling I get when I’m climbing far above the last protection, a fall would be big, and my first thoughts here are to turn back. The road isn't that tough (though I say this in hindsight), but it is long and isolated and the difficulties reside not in the depth of sand, or lack of people but in my head. There are some trails that as soon as you put your wheels on them, you just know that it's bad, it won't be easy and most likely you will reach something unexpected, some obstacle around the corner. It doesn't help that my bike is slow (or I am) and the distance seems huge. If I go on I'm just riding further into trouble, more than getting closer to my goal. Some people tell me I'm brave, but I knew all along; there's no such thing, or else I'm not brave and no matter what I do I can't change that.

Inspecting my hand I see the blood coagulating now, sticky like jam, thanks mainly to the help of the sand. I should clean it, but need the water. Then I start to think - as is usual - not about turning back but instead, “just a little more, just a little more effort, you can always turn back, just see what it’s looks like…”

It looks like a bad road, but like I've said, not that bad though I fall several more times and then take several more turns along un-signposted roads, for some reason I choose left invariably. After a long while, incredibly, I come to another house set in a large clear area of baked dry dirt. I can’t believe it and it reminds me that these are the real heroes and I’m very much a wimp. A mother and teenage daughter kneel in the shade of the small porch plucking chunky “choclo” corn-kernels from cobs into large red bowls. They look fairly shocked as I poke my head inside and ask if I can reach Sucre this way…and shocked further when I raise my hand and ask if I can wash it…they even had a tap.


I spotted trucks then, building a new road and relaxed enough to take photos


Only to fall
It’s mid afternoon when I see a truck. What’s a truck doing here? They do have a comforting effect on me though, other people, and this comfort brings on thirst, tiredness and hunger. I stop amongst thick shoulder-height grass roadside, to eat some bread and drink and I watch as another truck passes by. I follow behind this when I catch it later, the road churned up in to deep soft ruts of sand, and I pull over after some time at another house. I slip through a small gap in the grass to speak with an excited woman who comes over and explains all, “they’re building a new road!!” she says. Unsure if I should be relieved or disappointed, or even believe it, I give thanks and continue along the old road as long as possible until I reach a wide, stony and depressingly brand new road. Looking back from this the entrance to my trail is instantly lost amongst the tall grass and bushes growing and closing over it already.

I ride on feeling both happy and hard done-by, in fact I don't know what to think, unsure if it was hard at all, or as hard as I think, or thought and now over it seems so far away, another world, and from this end the trail seems easy, or was it. And does it even matter? The tall jungle grass and bushes continue to grow, growing over my memories, lost now, a new road, which I continue along, ever onwards in search of something and even now, writing this I still don't know.

I see that the jungle trees have disappeared, making way for rich bright-green cattle-pastures, and for comfy new houses. I stop at one to ask for water having drank almost all of my own day’s provisions. Amongst my feet run the piglets of a beached pig, the sow heaped in the yard where play two boys and a monkey. As I fill the water bottle, the man - to whom I've barely said a word - asks if I would like some dinner. Having hardly eaten all day I jump at the chance and sit with him on the thick round roots of a grand old tree eating, the colour fading from the world as the sun sets, and we talk. We discuss the monkey, whose name is “monkey” and he tells how the two boys caught it in the nearby jungle using a slingshot. “There’re loads!” he says. Not for long.


"Can I get some water?" I said, "Yeah...do you want dinner, too?"


A monkey named monkey and the boy who caught him with a slingshot
I’d noticed a lovely spot earlier; an oxbow curve in the river, curling tightly beneath very tall sandstone cliffs and I return there to camp. After much consideration of the dangers I place my tent near the upper edges of the cliffs. Then, after photos and a walk and as I brew up some tea, I hear a landslide below and decide, “probably best to move the tent…”, as always. As the sound of birds and insects crescendo and the kettle too for the second time, a thunderstorm arrives, and I move again…as always. I get soaked in the process and, in the dark, put the tent on top of an ant’s nest! And you think they’d be pleased for the rain-shelter!


My original position for camp...until I moved it...and again





Bug noises as I clean the day's sand from the camera


Some night time noise??

I go toucan hunting in the morning, spotting one with a long yellow beak and, in my memory at least, a white chest, bobbing up and down, up and down, as it flies by. I watch boys racing horses along the dusty road as I pack away, WOOOOing as they go on their galloping beasts to watch their grazing cattle in the pastures, happy souls all. Iguanas and lizards run across the road almost constantly as I ride, small and large, spinning their angled legs in a blur of motion to run out of sight before a good photo is to be had!


Corr, there were loads of iguanas and lizards on this road, continuously crossing the road


On the new road now, unsure whether to be relieved or disappointed, I carried on towards Monteagudo...very far east of Sucre, my intended target.
Reaching the large village of Rosario del Ingre I stop in the hope of finding bread (writing this I wonder what I was planning to eat and drink if the road was still the old road…sand and blood probably). I ask in a shop if there is some in the village, “did you see the white chair?” replies the friendly youth.
”Eh?” I say.
“Just up the road there.”
I look on blankly.
“The white chair…if the white chair’s out there’s bread….wait a second.” he walks around the counter and pokes his head out of the shop but says glumly that the white chair is in, no bread today.

I sit outside on the porch tucking into sugary drinks, biscuits and wafers, my Bolivian diet. The youth comes out with a wooden chair and sits besides me. “Where’ve you come from?” he asks.
”Villa Montes….mieEEERRde! it’s hot there!”
”It gets hot here.”
”Umm, maybe….but not 55°C!”
”Fifty-five! No, puffhh, up to thirty-five here. But…which way did you come? That way?”
”No,” I say, “that way".”
”That way! Is there a road?”
”Yeah….but it’s pretty bad.”

One by one other people come to talk, old women and teenage school children mainly, each more disbelieving than the last; a white person all the way from the UK. They are delightful and it’s a long time before I think of moving off. The school teacher, a raucous bubbly female, clearly has desires for me to settle here in the village and live as her love-slave and they all ask me about the countless women who must be falling at my feet. I correct them repeatedly, explaining that the only reason women would fall at my feet is because they stink. I stink. I elaborate that I wear clothes full of holes, rarely wash, live in a tent and that my idea of a good meal simply means more biscuits. I explain that my tent is very small, that it is only a “one-man tent” but then add with a wink-wink nudge-nudge to the teacher, “...and three women!” starting her off again and the jocular banter and innuendo continues from all whilst I sit there smiling and turning red.

I ask them all about the road, and importantly about the fact that their village isn’t on it! At least according to the map. It’s hard to say, but it seems that my route doesn’t exist as it does on the map. I should be farther west but the school teacher’s family live out that way she tells me and that no road exists. She adds that another trail loops from near here a little to the west and possibly to Rodeo, but it’s a very long way “zig-zag, zig-zag,” says the teacher, and still not my intended route. The initial excitement and challenge is lost now, it was lost yesterday when I reached the new road, but even so I decide I shouldn’t give up and I go back to take a look at this road. However, I’m soon lost again unable to find the turn-off. I speak to a petroleum worker who clearly knows the area well. From him I learn that maybe a direct road to Sucre begins from a point much farther west along the Pilcomayo canyon road, farther from Villa Montes towards to Tarija. Though the man admits that it’s existence is doubtful, and doesn’t believe any route links up to Sucre.


The very friendly people in Caserio, the teacher is in the pink skirt
In any case, having made such a detour I don’t have the fuel to reach Sucre even if the trail is there. I decide to leave and despite my non-arrival in Sucre, I’ve had a really good two days, interesting riding and great people. I ride back and through Rosario del Ingre and push on northwards to the main road at Monteagudo. Once there I buy food supplies and as well antiseptic cream for my hand. I walk around a small but lively market where people shout for one’s custom in the tight weave of streets, the current craze here is small fancy biscuits and – as always - fried everything. I sit and drink coffee to savour the atmosphere, just enjoying the happy presence of people, to listen and to talk to the coffee stall women. I buy a fatty fried dough from her which reminds me of “andazis” in Africa which I ate together with the sweetest, milkiest and yummiest tea I’ve ever known from fly infested cups. There wasn’t a single shop hoarding or advert there. The tea shops were marked not by signs but only by the smell of incense that they burned outside the door in small urns. The scent caught in my nostrils as I rode by, and I’d swing about quickly in a sharp U-turn regularly to spend 10p. I couldn’t talk to them then, only watch and say, “té” and nod yes to andazis.

I won’t be U-turning now, but I’m happy to sit and savour and, having arrived earlier than expected and in a place I hadn’t expected to, I have to decide where-to next…… as always.

Find out where next time!

(Author's note: Obviously since riding this I realise it was not as hard as it seemed at the time, knowledge is power after all. That said, if I'd have been able to follow the route - as I had assumed I was - on my paper map all the way to Sucre on this bad road then perhaps it would have been a pretty stiff test, as it turned out not so much....I've written, or tried to, the story from my point of view as it was at the time, which was quite obviously without this knowledge, and whilst it might read as me trying to BIG up my route, that is not what is intended.)

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Hi mate!
I just stumbled over your story and am impressed. Very nice read and pictures. Now I am looking even more forward to get there. Am currently in Costa Rica...
I guess I have to read some of your earlier reports in order to find actual inspiration and hints, for right now and the coming weeks...
Good luck!

Good God!!!
You can write, shouldn't you be saving this for your upcoming book?
Thank so much for sharing,
best and take care
Stuart

Nah, just take a look at the map for inspiration! Reading other blogs can sometimes spoil any surprises you might find along the way!....anyway, enjoy your trip and if I can ever help with anything just let me know....thanks too for the comment!

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