Peru, Peru, Peru … we had already been traveling for two weeks in the country but on my map the progress looked like nothing! I felt like we had to advance faster, otherwise we wouldn’t reach our target, Santiago de Chile, in time. During the resting day I had met Soren, Brent and Sven, the three touring cyclists we had left behind in Chachapoyas, again and they told me about their further route: from Cajamarca directly towards the coast, Trujillo, then up the Rio Santa Valley to the Cordillera Blanca. I got doubts about our planned route through the Andes … the coastal route would add more kilometers, less altimeters and bring us to the really high, snow covered mountains a lot faster. What to do now?
We decided to go the harder, less traveled way. Off the beaten track! The progress in kilometers and maybe even height meters per day would go back as would the road quality factor. But as I had mentioned before: When the road quality starts to suffer, the adventure begins.
For lunch we went to a restaurant and brought our own spaghetti and verduras (vegetables) because the “gui” (guinea pig) that lay out in the kitchen didn’t fit our appetite and ideals.
At the afternoon of the first day on the bike again we came to a street market and had to fight our way through. Because most of the Peruvians in this area are about a head smaller than I am I had a lot of trouble with strings hanging just the right height to avoid me passing without bowing down. And of course we were the highlight for most of the people passing with our two fully loaded bicycles through the market.
The showers one evening made it impossible for us to continue - even though both of us do have rain clothes now it’s just not possible to ride uphill in the rain without getting wet under the clothes as well - these are situations when a velomobile (human powered three-wheeled bicycles with a outer fairing like cars have them) like the Leitra, Quest or Alleweder would come quite handy (or a weather protection consisting of the HPVelotechnik Streamer and the AWS (All-Wetter-Schutz) I’ve seen on the spezialradmesse.de website). Well, maybe next time!
But instead we fled the rain, we hid under the balcony of a farmers adobe brick house. Jesus, the very friendly owner, welcomed us on his veranda and when the rain didn’t stop until dusk he suggested we could sleep on his wooden balcony - what a warmhearted character! We started cooking spaghetti and Jesus was totally impressed by the MSR Whisperlite stove which we unfolded in front of his eyes - this was also the first time we had to repair the stove because the rubber ring inside the pump went off.
Unfortunately there was a party going on nearby so his beautiful daughters just checked shortly what’s going on and were far too shy for me to take a proper picture of them. At the party they fired loud shots into the air every 15 minutes … until 2 or 3 in the night, despite all the rain!
On sometimes really tough gravel roads we climbed up towards Cajabamba (yeah, this really sounds pretty much like the Cajamarca we had just left) and arriving in town a man stepped into my way, holding a microphone in my face. His companion put a video camera on his shoulders and totally unprepared they started to interview me - probably a local TV station who had heard from someone that there are two gringos on four wheels in town and one of the bikes looks like a joke on two wheels (for them).
On the way to Huamachuco the eucalyptus plantations we had gotten used to since Cajamarca now came together with really sandy and in parts un-rideable roads, so not only once we had to get off the bike and push it up the hill, step after step. I got angry when the front wheel started to slide away to the right and I had to invest precious energy to lift it back, but fortunately the sandy parts got less and instead we approached a wonderful lake (laguna) a few kilometers from town.
Then maybe 2 km before Huamachuco a 125 ccm motorbike caught up with us and the rider waved his hands heavily for us to stop. Police? Robbers? They didn’t look like any of those. One of them started to hold a microphone into my father’s face and the other (named “Segundo”) again held a video camera on his shoulder. Man, we started to feel like celebrities. Where did all the fame come from? Probably they must have watched Cajabamba television and thought the story would also fit into the RTC Huamachuco channel.
My father immediately directed the journalist to my address because of my better Spanish (”less worse” would be a more appropriate term). Anyway, I didn’t feel like giving another interview to the same questions again and instead started to ask the journalist questions. Then I took out my camera and even started to take pictures of them - quite a funny situation that got only topped when my father told the guy with the microphone in the hand that it was not connected to the camera but that the connector was lying in the sand. Quite a welcome change and hilarious story!
South of this a little bigger town mining country started. First we cycled along a massive gold mine for at least 2.5 hours uphill. At the corners of the mine watch guards with rifles protected the mine and immediately got nervous when I wanted to take pictures of the massive machinery used to process the gold-containing rocks; I considered it more important not to get in a conflict with a man with a gun in his hand than bringing home pictures of the machinery. Instead I got this nice shot of a tiny dog sleeping where even I would never sleep 
:
With the gold mines came coal mines, but on a totally different scale: long tunnels beside the road, some more than 200 m long, and totally dark colored people brought the millions of years old fossil fuel to daylight. What takes a mining truck one ride takes them probably a month’s work!
On the way to Pallasca we had to climb descend into a steep and narrow valley more than 1000 m in altitude. All the many s-curves on the way down we had a wonderful view onto the more than 30 s-curves that would lead us up the other side again, we could anticipate all the hard work in the dusty heat of the early afternoon and the liters of sweat that would immediately evaporate right away from the sweaty arms.
(will turn the picture when I´ve installed the Flash plugin
Lucky us that we didn’t encounter a lot of traffic: one truck at the beginning of the climb and a much too fast bus when we had already brought all the hard s-curve work behind us. I was so happy not to sit in the bus at that time, not to let someone else have control not only over his but also over my life and the lives of probably 33 or 44 other passengers! I can go the turns at my own speed, I can put down the foot or easily jump off the bike if it’s getting too hard and I can stop at a steep cliff to slowly and carefully look down if I want to, but I guess I’m not the only one for whom such a ride might yield a nightmarish odyssey.
In Pallasca we stopped for a few hours. We could surf the internet for free in the town hall and the administrator of this little internet library was really fit: He put the German SuSE Linux on all the computers, not only in town but also in neighboring villages as we later found out. Additionally he put a story about the two foreign touring cyclists on the Pallasca website only quarter an hour after our arrival, including 2 or 3 photos he had taken of us and our bikes
Hey ihr 2,
schon alles gepackt?
Jetzt gehts bald nach Hause…
Hey Verena,
klar, alles gepackt und schon in den Startloechern! Aber dennoch fuer alles bereit, denn wir sind ja in America Latina, wo das Leben mit anderer Geschwindigkeit voranschreitet
Am Mittwoch morgen um 4 Uhr geht es los von La Serena im Bus nach Santiago und von dort am Nachmittag ´gen Osten nach Europa!
Alles Gute aus La Serena an Verena (et Co.
),
Tu hermano Danielo
Thanks for the update….my kids eat like Bugs Bunny so will make sure the carrots are all organic now!