Ecuador

December 20 - Quito, Ecuador

What can I say about Quito? I should be able to say a lot, since I´ve already been stuck here for four days, but the place isn´t making much of an impression on me. It has been raining a lot, somewhat out of season here, and the nearby mountains are usually shrouded in clouds. As with many Latin American cities, there is a huge amount of smog from diesel buses, trucks, and even taxis, but here you notice it more because the air is so thin. We´re above 9000 feet, which I seem to be acclimated to now.

When I left Panama Monday afternoon, first my flight was delayed by weather getting from Panama to Quito, and then we were ultimately diverted to Guayaquil on the coast. Quito is on a small plain surrounded by mountains, and apparently has an airfield about the size of a postage stamp well inside the city limits, and even better it also is prone to fog and clouds. Another woman on our flight had been diverted the same way a few years ago. I guess it´s better that they went to the coast instead of trying to feel their way around in the clouds between the mountain peaks.

We spent the night in a hotel that the airline paid for, getting into our rooms at midnight. I was in a room with a German guy who spoke some English if I didn´t talk too fast, and no Spanish. He´d already been in transit for 30 hours, waiting for a flight in Havana. I met him again in Quito last night, and Copa had lost his luggage - there was more than one airline involved, and three transit cities, so Copa just gave up - and they paid him $75. That put my own problems in perspective... he and his girlfriend (who flew in separately) are off to Galapagos today, and all he has is carry on luggage - some things he picked up yesterday around town. Then again, I also have a motorcycle in Bogota at the moment that is now two days late, so my problems might be worse.

We slept until 4:30 when we were woken up to return to the airport to try to fly out. We ultimately didn´t go anywhere until after 9, during which time we were confined to a gate area with rows of chairs because we were passengers in transit who had not cleared immigration. Every now and then Copa would give out some juice, or a little coffee. We hadn´t been given time to get any food at the hotel since the restaurants closed before we arrived and opened after we left, so it had a slight refugee camp feeling as we all crowded around the check-in counter for whatever they were about to run out of.

I´ve been staying at Hotel DejaVu with Arne and James, two other motorcyclists I´ve been in contact with for months, and finally have caught up with. We´re in the Gringo Zone, around Amazonas, where there are internet cafes galore, English used book stores, language schools, and every kind of food except Ecuadorean. Arne and James shipped with the same company, and gave me some advice yesterday on finding the Panavia shipping company´s office, which still took me an hour because it was pretty well hidden, and they aren´t in the phone book. Ultimately I went into another air cargo firm in the area around the airport, and the guy was really nice and called around for about 15 minutes to find out where Panavia was. Alarm bells were starting to go off. When I got to the office, the guy at the front said "Motocicleta?" as soon as he saw me and I immediately knew the news was going to be bad... and I was totally unsurprised.

They told me 6pm, and I didn´t even ask why. I told them I´d be back at 6, but as soon as I walked out I figured I´d come back the next morning, because I realized they were probably lying. Experience has shown, whether waiting for the power to come back on at the gas station in the Yucatan, or waiting to get on the ferry at Mazatlan, or wherever, that if you ask when something is going to happen, you will always get an answer. It will always be wrong, and the person who gave it to you will not feel the slightest embarrassment when it turns out to be completely wrong. So I returned this morning, and was told noon. This time I asked why - since I´d been told 6 yesterday - I should believe noon today. I was told that there is an engine problem and the plane is stuck in Bogota, but they really believe it will be here at noon.

Whatever. I actually budgeted some time for problems of this kind - it was the reason I raced down through Central America last week. I have this afternoon, and if it doesn´t arrive by 2, I probably won´t get the bike before Monday. I understand that, and while it sucks, is not what I considered outside of the realm of possibility when I kissed $350 and my bike goodbye in Panama. The problem is that Monday is the 23rd of December, and is probably the last day before January 4th that customs will really be working. That is the main reason I hauled ass to get here. I suppose Christmas in Quito is better than Christmas in Choluteca, which I was facing 2 weeks ago when I lost my title, but it would really piss me off since I rushed through Central America to avoid this. If the worst does happen, it would give me a chance to see the Galapagos Islands - before I have to possibly fly into Bogota to find my bike...

On the good news/bad news front, Arne and James are also still here. They had engine problems, and their bikes have been in the shop since Monday being worked on. They are also getting the mañana treatment. They went to the shop this morning, and were told noon, but in reality its probably more like 3, or 6, or Monday. I can always catch up with them further down the road, so I hope it comes together for them this afternoon. If all goes well, we´re heading for Lima for Christmas, Nazca a few days later, and Cuzco for New Years, where we´ll hike the Inca Trail. And if all else fails, there´s always the bus...

(Later that day)

It`s now 4:45. The flight from Bogota was "delayed" several times, and had just left Bogota at 2, which would have put it in Quito by now, but of course I don`t believe a word they tell me at this point. I do have a new perspective on the situation, though. I met two other motorcycle people, a couple from Germany, Ulf and Anke. Anke got hit by a distraction scam this morning - two guys in business suits sprayed mustard on her pack, and they grabbed her camera while pretending to help her. She had all of her documents in the camera bag. They realized today what I realized in Honduras - the only thing you can´t replace at your embassy is your title. So they´ll try to recreate two German titles with a stamp that Ulf is having made, and a color laserprinter. As for the other papers, the German embassy can only give a temporary passport right now - good for getting on a plane to go home - and she´ll have to wait 2 weeks for one that she can use to cross over into Peru. So they´re trapped in Ecuador until January. I ordered a new title online from New York State today, just in case...

Anke and Ulf told me that Panavia had said to them from the start that the bikes would not arrive before Friday, because Panavia´s only cargo jet had to fly to Mexico and Venezuela for other cargo first. We´ll go to Panavia for a new round of bullshit tomorrow, but for now I´m stuck in Quito for the weekend which means that Arne and James are going to set out without me. I´m a little pissed off, given how fast I rode down here to catch up with them, but then they´ve already been stuck in Quito for over a week with engine problems. I´m thinking maybe I won´t kill myself to catch up with them... Arne´s advice by email on things after he´s already gone through them has been handy so far. If I´m going to lose some freedom to make all of my own decisions though, I´d rather do it with a group that I would feel ready to depend on in an emergency, and of all the people I´ve ridden with since June, I don´t get the impression that they fall in that category.

December 24 - A Merry Christmas in Quito

I'm still in Quito, but today we actually got our bikes out of customs. Feliz Navidad! Now I can stop whining (see my last post). I had imagined my BMW Dakar in the hands of a narco-guerrilla in Colombia, who was trying to figure out the heated hand grips and how to light his cigar on the power outlet as he fled into the hills from the American supplied helicopters of the Colombian army...

Speaking of FARC, this town is lousy with pro-guerrilla graffitti, scrawled stylelessly and unevenly in spray paint on walls everywhere. The FARC are the largest and most dangerous of several left-wing revolutionary movements in Colombia - there are also some on the right, glorified death squads with some ties to the government. They are all involved in kidnappings and disappearances - one practice is called "miracle fishing", because unlike the old kidnappings where they tried to get a particular rich person, now they just kidnap everyone on a stretch of road and see what they're worth alive. In the war there, whoever wins, the little people get screwed. All of these groups have taken over the cocaine industry from the traditional cartels to provide financing for their guns. As things stand, the U.S. government is financially supporting the Colombian Army (over $1 billion for "Plan Colombia", now in its fourth smash hit year), and U.S. cocaine users are supporting the FARC. "Death to Capitalism! You need smoke? Sense? Coca?"

In my consideration of an all-expenses-paid suicide run down the Panamerican Highway in Colombia I actually investigated where the guerrillas are based inside the country. Turns out FARC controls areas in the Andes, especially between Cali and Bogota which is affectionately known as Farclandia. They also are active on both sides of the border in the areas near Panama, Peru, Venezuela and Ecuador. The Colombian province that borders Ecuador, two or three hours from here, is called Nariño, and is a major base, but the FARC also spill over into Ecuador regularly, and the Ecuadorean Army, seriously outgunned, tries not to get in their way. This is the pattern all around Colombia - Panama, for example, has no army, by virtue of the fact that the U.S. eliminated it after the invasion of 1989 (remember that?).

The only country able to deal with the FARC's battle hardened troops and heavy weapons is Brazil. The FARC tried this shit on them, and the Brazilians started sending fighter jets into Colombia to strafe their airfields and shoot down their planes... They also landed a "protective" cordon of 2000 troops around an airfield when they realized the 100 or so Colombian troops there were about to get slaughtered. I love Brazil. Now they have a deep Amazon radar system, partially to be able to track and shoot down narco-guerrilla planes.

The recent Colombian president Pastrana ernestly tried to negotiate with the FARC and ELN and end the insurgencies - he in fact gave them FARClandia, when he in good faith pulled the army out of an area the size of New Jersey. They responded by kidnapping more people and killing a presidential candidate. He was been replaced after the summer election by the right wing Uribe. Looks like Uribe is going to turn the army loose as well as the right wing groups. The Colombian Army doesn?t seem strong enough or well financed enough to actually defeat the FARC and ELN. They will probably repeat the typical cycle of Latin America - where the government and guerrillas trade control of rural towns, and every time they take over again they kill whoever was considered to be a "collaborator" for the other side. Quite the quandry for the peasants - so many people trying to "liberate" them to death.

Anyway, the FARC as well as the ELN have been starting to cross into western Venezuela for kidnapping victims as the supply runs dry in Colombia (because everyone in Colombia with money now lives in Miami.) Quito is 160 miles from the border with Colombia. So when I saw the graffitti here, at first I was concerned. "No al capitalismo"; "FARC es justicia"; etc. Then I saw "conformidad es violencia" - i.e., conformity is violence, with a little anarchy symbol, and I realized it was probably some local idiot rich kids who think the FARC is so cool, the same kind of "anarchists" who used to squat in Tomkins Square Park in NYC for the summer and then go home to their parent's McMansion when it got cold. Some people just can't be happy with simply buying a Che Guevara t-shirt from the Gap.

This doesn't mean that Quito is safe. Saturday night, Ulf and I went out for a few (dozen) drinks (Ulf and Anke are two other motorcycle riders from Germany who happened to get their bikes on the same plane as me). We decided to move from an English pub (which true to form closed at midnight) to another bar, and the bartender insisted on calling us a cab. Ulf and Anke had just been robbed the day before, so we said ok. We were 5 blocks from our hostel. The taxi wanted $2 for less than 10 blocks to the next bar, which seemed a little crazy - we gave him $1. We got out in front of the club, which wanted a $3 cover - and I'm paying $6 a night for my room here, including breakfast. So we decided instead to head to a more laid back bar, and since it was 5 blocks we figured we'd walk.

We started walking there - during the day it seemed like a perfectly nice area, but we realized that the Gringo Zone is also the red light district late at night, and also where people buy drugs. I asked a guy what street we were on because I didn't want to open up a map there - the New York City rules for dangerous streets are never to look like you don't know where you are or where you are going, especially when you don't. He latched onto to us as an escort. It was one block, and I was drunk so I spent the three minutes trying to come up with a polite way in Spanish to tell him to get lost - I could only remember "dejame" which translates to "Leave me!" which didn't seem called for yet. I also dropped back behind him and kept an eye on the street around us.

He walked us around the corner and asked for $5 for getting us there safely. He seemed to be mainly in the business of charging for being black and not mugging fearful gringos, but he wasn't really good at being menacing and he was about half the size of either me or Ulf. We laughed at him, but I then offered to buy him a beer to assuage any bad feelings. I figured he might be an interesting character for half an hour. He asked me for the price of a beer. I said no, he could stay here and drink with us if he wanted, but I wasn't giving him money. So he said ok, I bought a round, and he took the beer and walked out.

Moments later, a drunk and rubinesque woman at the bar started the old bar game of how ignorant Americans are... i.e., how we couldn't tell any English speaking country accents apart, and how we know no geography, etc. She initially thought Ulf was an American. Guess we all look the same to those New Zealanders. I got lucky and pegged this woman in the bar as a New Zealander from her accent, which she was a little amazed by, then I decided to be a prick and asked her to tell me where I'm from based on my accent. She had no clue. I asked her why it should be ignorant on my part to not know about her country of 4 million people when she couldn't be bothered to know about the difference between Texas, California and New York. I explained that America has 280 million people, and all other English speaking countries have 160 million or so total... and maybe she might consider learning more about us than what she got out of watching Dallas. I waxed rhapsodic about American regional cultural differences, appearing genuinely offended, sort of. I'm pretty sure that everyone else in the bar knew I was just having fun, but she unfortunately was the humorless sort, and didn't realize I was just winding her up. After a bit this got tiring, so I asked what she was doing, and it turned out she was a truck driver for a tour company throughout Latin America. She had never driven in Quito before, however, so we couldn't get any info from her on roads south of here.

Her friend came over - he was Ecuadorean, a middle aged balding guy who spoke excellent English - and I decided to talk to him instead, because there seemed to be a chance to actually enjoy the conversation. He was from Guayaquil, and I asked him about the relationship between Quito and Guayaquil. Quito is the capital, about 2 million people in the middle of the Andes mountains, and Guayaquil is maybe a little larger and is a commercial and port center on the coast. This set off a heated discussion between him and the bartender - he was from Guayaquil and the bartender is from Quito. He said that the saying went, the money is made in Guayaquil and spent by the government in Quito. Turns out I'd actually dropped a verbal landmine unintentionally, but I did learn a lot about the internal politics of Ecuador by listenting to them. We also talked about why Ecuador had become a separate country from Colombia after liberation in the 1820's, and the future of Mercosur (the South American customs union). But by the end of the night, pool became more important than any political discussion, and the bartender finally dumped us in cabs and closed up. I told him where we were going, and asked if we really needed a cab, and he said it was up to us, but basically, yes.

The next day we continued the Kafka-esque process of trying to get our bikes back. Ecuador is the most difficult country to fly a motorcycle into in Latin America, because theoretically you need something called a Carnet de Passage. A Carnet is an insurance policy that guarrantees that rich gringos won't drive expensive vehicles - $50k Range Rover or a new BMW motorcycle let's say - into the country and abandon them, cluttering up the pristine landscape. It usually costs 50% of the face value of the vehicle - in my case, $5000 since I bought my bike new in January. You eventually get the money back - most of it - but I don't have a spare five grand lying around, so I didn't get one.

If you ask the Ecuadorean Embassy in the U.S. if you can import a vehicle without a carnet, they will say absolutely not. But to quote an Israeli friend, there is always a way... They don't require a carnet if you drive overland into Ecuador - but southbound, this means flying into Colombia, and dodging the FARC down to the border. You can also import the bike by boat or plane, and then upon arrival you have a few options, absent a carnet. First, you can be totally shafted by customs and forced to air freight your bike on into Peru. Another is, and I am not making this up, to have a customs agent ride on the back of your motorcycle 8 hours across the Andes to the frontier with Peru. I've heard that is also possible to post a bond of twice the value of your bike to your credit card - they apparently never try to cash this. Finally, there are local people who can "expedite" things - Ricardo Rocco, the president of the Ecuadorean Motorcycle Association wrote me a letter of introduction after I contacted him through the Horizon's Unlimited website. Ricardo is currently leading a team of motorcyclists through Patagonia, but he left the letter with a German biker in another hostel. So I had my title, my passport, my international driver's license, my NY driver's license and my letter of introduction on Friday, and I was all set except for the fact that my motorcycle hadn't arrived (and wouldn't be in the country until 7pm that night). I kept asking the boss at Panavia Air Freight if the plane had left the runway in Bogota yet, and he kept telling me yes - even though it had been 4 hours and Bogota is only an hour from Quito.

That's when I met Ulf and Anke. Anke had just had a run-in with the local thieves, who splashed mustard on her, while supposedly helpful urchins grabbed her camera bag. As luck would have it, she's put all of her documents there. Anke had lost all of the documents necessary to import her bike. Ulf still had his documents, so he could import their two motorcycles, but she still needed a title for hers. They had already gone to a stationery store to have a rubber stamp of the Bonn city seal made, in case they needed to make some new titles. I took them back to the hostel to meet Arne and James, and they ended up staying there also. We partied, and then Arne and James split Saturday.

Sunday we actually saw the bikes, though the officials at the bodega (which means warehouse here, and not corner shop where you buy 40 ounce bottles of malt liquour) wouldn't let us take any clothing or equipment out. We went home feeling somewhat defeated but secure in the fact that all of Monday would be enough time to run the aduanna maze and get our bikes out before everything shut down for Christmas. Nice thought, but wrong. Monday morning, we got our Guia (airbill) papers from the airline - and I had some fun talking down their $28 fee to $16, after all of the bullshit the manager had put me through in the past 4 days. I didn't care too much about the money, I just wanted to be as much of a pain in the ass to him as he'd been to me, and I found that it is easier to play the part of an irate customer when you really don't care either way.

Then we hired a customs agency to negotiate all of the bureacratic hurdles for us, and after we handed over our documents all we had to do was wait. I won't hire guides at overland borders anymore after my experience in Honduras, but Bertha Ibarra came recommended by Ricardo Rocco, and besides she had an office, which meant that if my documents went astray I could find her henchman later. Bertha was actually motherly woman in her 50`s, in turns helpful and scolding. She had a good half a dozen people working in her office, and all of them seemed to be on our case for the next day.

The three of us are all veterans of the Central American borders, but even for us, the Ecuadorean customs procedures were truly Byzantine. As time dragged on, we started to worry that we weren't going to make it. We were fairly sure that no government employees would really work on Christmas Eve, and Ricardo Rocco of the Ecuadorean Motorcycle Association had led me to believe that the customs people would not really be working again until January. We convinced them to let us start getting the bikes ready - Anke asked that we be allowed to do so as a Christmas present, and they went for it, so we reconnected our batteries and put gasoline in the tanks, and started the bikes up to be ready to roll, then turned them off again to wait. One of the bodega forklift jockies backed a forklift into my bike at fairly high speed (for a forklift) and knocked it over - he said the brake wasn`t working, but he also hadn't been looking behind him. I kinda wanted to kill the guy with my Lariam-enhanced rage and superstrength , but a little voice inside my head said "just wait until the bike is outside."

As 5pm approached, the people from Bertha's agency seemed a little panicked, because the Jefe (Boss) had not returned to work from lunch. Turns out this one guy's signature is needed for anything to move in or out of Quito, and he was probably doing some Christmas shopping. Worse yet, our passports got locked inside an office when everyone split for the day - this meant that we'd be in serious trouble if we got stopped randomly by the police, which happens all the time. We went back to the agency's office, and they gave us photocopies of our documents, and told us to be back at 8am. We had almost made it, and now we were back in limbo, at the mercy of whoever decided to show up for work on Christmas Eve. Ulf and I went out for a few beers again, and we actually got down to the agency at 9am.

We had little hope that things would work out before people started leaving, but we followed our guides around the various offices and waited for documents to be processed and receipts to be issued. We sat in one office in the middle of a crowd of supplicants, and listened (and half understood) as one of Bertha's people was told that we had "problems" - in truth, we should have had problems since we were short a title - Anke had a photocopy, but usually that won't cut it. Then we watched us one of the minions of Bertha made a Christmas present of a really nice bottle of wine to one of the guys working the computers, and then all of the sudden, a lot of major problems dissolved. Within two hours, we were done. After the last week, this is the best Christmas present I could have gotten. The bikes are now safely behind the locked gates of the hostel, and tomorrow we can go somewhere outside of Quito.

Being in Quito for Christmas is very strange, since the weather has heated up, and nothing is really closing early today. A local farmacia has hundreds of electronic Christmas ornaments playing the same carols slightly out of sync and out of tune, in a way that is discordant and creepy, but other than that you would never know that Christmas is tomorrow unless you went to the mall. I'm guessing that much like the Day of the Dead in Mexico, this will be more of a family holiday here than a public one, and we probably won't see much of the way that it is celebrated. Our plans are to head to the Queen Victoria ex-patriate pub for a turkey dinner and party, but we have no idea what if anything will be open tomorrow. Ulf is betting that the greed instinct will keep many gringo oriented places open, and it is looking like he could be right. If not, we now have our stoves, cooking gear and food, so we're set either way.

I'm also now seriously considering staying in Quito through New Year's, because unlike Christmas, New Year's is great party here - people put on masks of important figures and famous people from the last year, and then those masks and giant figures are burned to say goodbye to the old year - last year George Bush and Ossama Bin Laden masks were among the most popular. This means I have a few days to kill - we're planning on seeing the volcano, the Equator Monument, and I might even fly to the Galapagos Islands, though I'm not sure if I really want to spend $500 to see birds with blue feet. All that really matter now, though, is that I have the freedom to go wherever I want again.

January 2 - Still in Quito, Ecuador

We spent the days up to and after Christmas partying and talking to people back home. We often got in very late - they came to expect this after Arne, James, Ulf, Anke and I came back at 4 in the morning the first time. The front gate was locked, so Arne climbed over with a boost from us and opened it, and then the door was locked, and still no one was answering the bell, so we climbed up on the roof of the building next door, and then James and I boosted Arne into the high second floor window of their room. He scaled the last bit like a rock climber, went through the hostal, came back down to the front door with the sheepish looking kid who had night duty - he'd been fast asleep.

Ulf and I had a few nights drinking, playing darts and pool, and smoking - I finally fell back into my bad habit after three years. I've decided I'll try to quit again after I get through the Andes - right now, every time I look over a precipice smoking doesn't seem to be the most important factor in my long term health. Finally we were getting sick of the city, and decided to get out into the Ecuadorean countryside.

Our first foray from Quito was the day after Christmas, and we headed up to Otovalo a few hours north of Quito. This was almost all well paved, and was a good shakedown ride for the bikes. Otovalo was the center of the textile industry in Ecuador, and I bought a really nice blanket/wall covering there to ship home. The towns we saw in that direction were all clean and looked nice, a total contrast from Central America. We ate in the market and checked out the crafts in the big open square where there were hundreds of stalls. We then tried to head towards a local waterfall that was said to be worth seeing. I'd never bought a guidebook for Ecuador because I didn't expect to stay more than a day or two, so I just decided to follow Ulf and Anke. We met a German/Ecuadorean couple with a four year old boy in the town square, who first insisted on giving us detailed directions, and then decided to lead us there in their Landrover.

We headed out on the main road and turned into a smaller town aout ten kilometers away, along cobblestoned streets and dirt roads, to the opening to a hamlet where the main road was being rebuilt. Anke had a small fall here going down a hill, but was game to continue. We walked throught the construction, and down a gorge to a river - both Ulf and I remarked that the forest looked like North America or Europe, not the jungle we had expected. Here the path became somewhat murky. The river was fifteen feet across, and there was a path on the other side, but no bridge. We went along our side of the river on a muddy path through the forest and thorn bushes. Ulf was ahead of me as we went through one thorny patch and we came into a narrow riverbank with the hill on one side, and the water on the other, and a young bull in the middle.

He was about 4 feet tall - and we expected he'd be fairly docile, until he slowly but persistently tried to push Ulf into the river. I tried to pass and he nudged me into the hillside with surprising strength - happily his horns were still only and inch long and round. It seemed ridiculous, but he was strong enough to push us all in the river, including the little boy. Then I figured if he couldn't see us he'd stop fighting us, so I threw my jacket over his head, and the others were able to quickly get by - after a minute he got frustrated and decided to leave us alone and wandered off into the thorns. My first bullfight - Hemmingway would be proud.

We spent the next two days working on the bikes - Ulf needed a new fork seal, and I needed protectors for my forks to prevent losing the same seal on my bike. We spent most of a day cruising around town looking for parts - every store had one tiny specialty, and it took at least 10 stores before we were done. One guy lent Ulf the tool to do the job - he was leaving on vacation until after the New Year, and he said we could leave it with another motorcycle shop just down the street.

Our next foray was suggested by Wilson, the owner of Hostal Dejavu. New Year's Eve we'd had some champagne with his family, and he'd suggested that we see El Oriente, the part of Ecuador to the east of Quito over the Andes. Ulf and Anke already had some ideas in this direction, so we took his suggested route that went from Quito to Tena to Puyo, out to Palora, and back in a circle to Quito through Baños and Ambato. He drew us a map - and then wrote the name of a city to the north on the road, near Colombia, wrote "NO!" and underlined it twice.

We left some of our gear in the hostal to lighten our bikes for the gravel, and headed out to the east. I was not especially eager to hit more gravel after Alaska, even more so because I had a pure road tire on my back wheel, but I figured I'd follow them slowly and get back into the off road groove - good training for what I'd have to face on the road to Cuzco. Anke seemed totally unbothered by the gravel, and Ulf was actually looking forward to it.

The road was paved as far towards the jungle as the oil pipeline ran next to it, then broke into gravel patches sometimes a few kilometers long, and then we took off onto another chipseal (tar over rocks) road that carried up over the mountains and into the cloud forest. We changed ecological environments four times in one afternoon, going from high Alpine to cloud forest to jungle and back. Then the road finally disolved into dirt - and not just any dirt, but a punishing moonscape of small holes, all over the road. Ulf and Anke have a theory that you do less damage to yourself and the bike if you go faster - at about forty m.p.h. you almost glide over the hole to the other edge - but then of course you can't steer away from any of the really big holes, the ones large enough to swallow your front wheel. The nice part was that the areas of the road with the holes tend not to have much loose gravel, so the ride is brutal but steady. They wear kidney support belts because they've heard that this kind of riding can cause your kidneys - which sit on two thin stems - to detach. I think I might get one of those in Lima... My mirror also snapped off spontaneously from all of the vibracions.

So I spent much of this day, on dirt, gravel and mud, in clouds and fog and rain, in a narrow notch in the overhanging jungle that was snaking down the mountain, passing trucks and buses in between curves, in that tense mode which is not fear, but the total focus you have to have when any moment's distraction can bring disaster, and you don't have time to be afraid. Then I thought about it at the end of the first day, and I realized I'd already had more than a week's time of riding on gravel, and had never crashed in it - I've crashed in snow, on pavement and on sand. The second day I was guardedly optimistic - I figured if I made it through 2 days without a crash I was probably going to be fine - and at the end of the day, I actually felt good about it - mentally. Physically I felt like a cow after it has been passed through a linebacker.

During the minutes and hours of high tension, a lot of things go through your mind, and in my case I often get the lyrics to songs that I have long forgotten about. For example, as I was trying to ride down a sandy hill and through a small river I had the song "Everyone Hates His Parents" from Falsettoland. That's right, I'm riding a motorcycle off road in the jungle of the Amazon river basin, singing showtunes inside my helmet (thanks sooo much Len). I would have preferred something by Ministry, Soul Coughing or the Clash, or anything Industrial or Techno, the james Bond theme music... something cool, but no... I also got the "This is Serious" tune, which was performed by four talking handpuppets on channel 11 in New York on the dangers of eating your parent's valium - "No no no NOOO!!" My subconscious runs the gamut from old Irish folk songs to the Beatles to songs some of my friends wrote five or ten years ago.. It's really annoying sometimes, but I guess it helps me concentrate. Perhaps the Lariam actually is driving me crazy.

Our first night we spent in Tena, which is an Ecuadorean city in the Amazon river basin. I was surprised by how close it was to Quito, and how far the Amazon tributaries go towards the Pacific. The coast in Ecuador and Peru is a thin costal band, with an incredibly high but not very wide range of mountains, and then suddenly you're in the jungle - maybe its some kind of a semi-jungle area a little above the actual jungle 500 meters, but these waters flow to the Atlantic. There also were not many mosquitos, and the temperatures were warm, but not steamy. Tena was a nice town focused on white water rafting and jungle trips for tourists. We met a birdwatcher - an English guy who was happy to find other people who drank. He sported some tattoos and thought other bird watchers were tree hugging poofs. The next morning, we also met a local Peace Corp member, who was in charge of health education in the area. Ulf and Anke had never heard of the Peace Corp before, and were surprised that the United States is doing something so... international. Of course the Peace Corp was originally formed to create international good will towards the U.S., and the fact that educated Europeans have no idea it exists is kind of indicative of how it's going.

From Tena we headed to Puyo, then really far out into the middle of nowhere down a road towards a town called Macas near the Peruvian border, because we were trying to find a road to a town called Palora. Wilson had told us that we could do some kind of loop through Palora, involving (as we understood his Spanish) a suspension bridge, a cable car, and then a water crossing. This information turned out to be not entirely correct. We got across the bridge - and tried to ride the cable car across but it was closed (because everyone now used the bridge right next to it). We never did figure out where the water crossing was supposed to be, though we did do a bunch of small ones on the way there and back.

We showed up in Palora, a town barely drivable from the outside world. There was of course an internet cafe. We asked directions to try to get out the other side of the town to Mera, but the road we were looking for did not exist - we were told this in English by an Ecuadorean who used to live in Jersey City. So we waited out the afternoon shower and then retraced our steps to Puyo, where we arrived at 5pm. We had an hour to make it to Baños before dark. The attraction there was the thermal baths, definitely something nice after two days on the bad roads, but I doubted we'd get there before nightfall, and there was also a chance of rain. Riding mud in the dark in the mountains was not something I wanted to do. We stopped to figure out where we were going - Ulf and Anke wanted to push on, and I gave in, but then when Ulf went to start his bike, the starter motor wouldn't do anything. He had an old R80 GS, a great touring bike, but a little old. He tried to fix the problem for half an hour, and by then we were past the point where we could try for Baños. We tried to diagnose the problem - he had lights, a click from the solenoid, but no starter motor. He'd had no problems until he turned off the bike - this seemed to indicate the starter motor. It then occurred to me then that he could try to push start the bike (I was glad that I hadn't thought of that earlier, since we'd probably have driven on).

We stayed at a fairly expensive ($45 for a triple) German owned and themed hotel, and Ulf and I spent a few hours opening up the starter motor, hoping it was a loose contact, but there was nothing obvious. We could still push start it to get back to Quito, so rather than possibly damage the bike so it wouldn't start we decided to wait. Instead we went out to enjoy the town, and happened on the Dragon Train in the town square. This was a jeep pulling a bunch of roofless carts with front and back bench seats, each holding about six people, the whole thing covered in green plastic and colored flourescent lights (the front of the jeep was actually a green rhino, but we still called it the Dragon Train). As we got in, the guy collecting the money said "Tres grande niños", and we realized we were the only adults without kids on the train, but we didn't care. The train took off through the narrow streets and traffic, and as it reached wider, darkened streets the driver zigzagged from one side to another, making all of the kids scream. He pulled out onto the highway and found a wide open area where he executed tight turns and figure eights, the front of the jeep nearly touching the back of the last car, all of them tilting outwards from the centrifugal force - Anke and I joked that the headline would be "Gringo Bikers Killed in Dragon Train Accident" but we came back without harm, thinking about a second round - but there was a crowd of children waiting for our seats and it seemed a little unfair for us to take two rides.

We came back yesterday for New Years, a good choice as it turns out. We came out of Puyo in the morning up the narrowest mountain road I have ever been on. The road shrank from a good sized paved road to a gravel track literally as wide as the buses on it, forcing us to stop hard against the rock wall as they passed. We took to honking our horns as we rounded the tight corners to warn people that we were coming, and in some places we were driving in a notch that had been cut into the mountain face with the road overhung by loose stone. The views were incredible, when we could afford to look at them. Soon we were into another area with long tunnels without lights, with water dripping from the rough cut walls - my dim headlight didn't help at all until my eyes adjusted, and I tried to follow Ulf and Anke closely so that I could see from their lights.

On this road we noticed some men in one town setting up a stripped tree on a post, to pivot it upwards like a toll gate. They were still finishing it, and allowed us to pass without problems, but I was wondering if we were about to encounter more political problems like the road blocks we had seen in southern Mexico. In the next town we found out what this was, as another gate was closed and surrounded by children in costumes - everything from boys in military or police uniforms with fake guns to Spiderman to zombies and ghouls, but the favorite by far was women's clothes, sometimes with a baby doll. One of my favorites was a priest who blessed me with water and a branch - "Gracias, padre!" I said as I drove off. There were also devils blessing people - that seemed a little odd in such a Catholic country.

I guess this is the core theme of New Year's in Ecuador - getting strangers to party with you by stopping them from going anywhere. There were literally hundreds of blockades on the road, sometimes only a hundred feet or less apart, and the kids sometimes asked for money, but Anke gave them a roll lefover from breakfast at the first one, and after that we never gave them anything. It didn't seem like that was really expected, though many asked - they just wanted to get the adults to stop and play with them for a minute, and when we laughed at their costumes, the gates was usually lifted for us. The buses often had to wait for five minutes, as the driver became furious and started honking. My only worry was that one of the kids would not be strong enough to lift the gate enough, and sometimes on the bike it felt a little like a high speed, high stakes limbo game.

Definitely one of the highlights of the return trip was watching another biker, on a Harley knockoff, complete with the nazi half helmet, get stuck at a barricades while a teenage boy in drag did a lap dance on his front fender. This guy had been following us for a while and finally zoomed passed us as we tried to negotiate one of the barriers, only to come up to the next road block first, where he was surrounded by boys dressed as women. He was not amused - which only made it funnier.

As we hit the Panamerica the road blocks disappeared and we made good time back towards Quito. On the way we caught our first sight of Coatapaxi - an active volcano capped with snow, 6000 meters tall (20,000 feet) making it the tallest active volcano in the Americas. Quito was chaotic, with some streets blocked for the festivities, but we did eventually wind our way back to Hostal Dejavu. We put the bikes back inside the courtyard and started getting ready for the party.

The reason I had wanted to stay in Ecuador was that they have a custom for New Years of burning the old year in effigy. Both good things and bad are burned, a rite that allows the New Year to begin fresh, and in the days leading up to New Year's they sell hand made paper mache masks in the streets of people who have been important figures that year - last year Dubya and Ossama Bin Laden were among the most popular, and this year Ossama was still up there at a lot of stands. I thought about it, but went for a Ecuadorean politician instead, for $1 - I asked who he was, and the guy who sold it told me he was the loser in the recent presidential election. Anke got the winner, and Ulf got the old president, who reminded him of Stoiber in Germany.

These turned out to be better choices than we knew. As we walked down Amazonas, the Times Square of Quito, we tried to slip through the crowds around bandstands and stages with puppets that would be burned in a few hours. People lit off huge fireworks (sometimes M80's in the middle of the crowd) and vendors sold shishkabobs with fried chicken, plantanos, potatoes and sausage. As we made our way down, there was a knot of people - the president elect was shaking hands in the crowd. We put our masks on, and shook his hand - he had a good laugh when Anke pulled hers down, and I said "I think you know me." It was the first time any of us had shook the hand of a president.

We then headed to the Reina Victoria Pub - an English ex-patriate bar - for a few rounds, then went over to our favorite bar, Patatus. Miguel, the owner, also laughed at our masks. I asked him about the custom of burning them, and he said that we should keep them, but if we wanted to burn one we should find a bonfire, throw it in it, then jump over the flames. I did this, and as I walked back to his bar some Ecuadoreans in front of a restaurant who had seen this display insisted on doing some shots with me. One of them embraced me a bunch of times and then told me to repeat after him as he said that Quito was the best - siempre Quito - and that Ambato sucked ass. Drunk as I was it took me a few times to realize that we were talking local football. After making sure I understood - "siempre Quito!" - he finally let me go. We did some champagne at the New Year, and then partied in the bar until closing. It was a great New Year's, with the only downside being that it was Cathy's birthday and she wasn't with me.

After a day of recovery, we've gone back to work on the bikes - Ulf now needs a new magnet for his starter motor, and Wilson and Roberto seem to know someone who could do it. They also "helped" me - I was trying to fix my mirror, and a piece of the bolt at the bottom of the stem was still stuck inside the hole - so Wilson took over, and with some aggressive drilling was able to remove all the threads from the hole, so the replacement bolt I have won't fit because the hole is too big now. Wilson has a lot of energy, and is always trying to help someone - but he doesn't do a lot of listening, even if you speak Spanish. My approach probably would have taken a few hours longer, but I am always thinking that it is better to spend twice as long thinking about it first then trying to fix the damage later - as I now am with JB Weld. I am hoping Ulf's repairs go better.

January 19 - Lima, Peru

We left Quito and headed back down the Panamerican Highway to the volcano Coatapaxi, which we had some unfinished business with. As usual, when packing up again for the first time in a week or two it took us a couple of hours to get going, and then another while to escape from Quito. We weren't in the neighborhood of Coatapaxi until 2pm, which is about when the park is supposed to close. We decided to come back early, and found a nearby hostal that was run by a group of Israelis called Papagalo.

It was a really beautiful place, once a farmhouse that the owner has spent most of the last year restoring. The group who ran it played all sorts of music from Sara McLoughland to early Police to Leonard Cohen, with a fireplace in the living room for the cold Andes nights. Two of the Israelis were also bikers, and had come from NYC through Central America to Venezuela and then gone up the Amazon tributaries by boat to Peru, and then to Ecuador. Both of these guys were named Ayil, and one Ayil had met the girl of his dreams and was going to ride with her on the back to Machu Pichu, so the other decided to pack it in and go home, and was in the process of trying to sell his bike.

We rode with Eran, the owner, up to a mountain pasture with some beers to watch the sunset. We went further away from the highway on dirt roads, through areas that looked uncannily like upstate New York, except for the height of the mountains. Anke got a flat on the way, so Eran went back to get a truck - and we all had a moment of paranioa when we realized we'd left our stuff out, he was gone, and we were just sitting there. In addition to the mustard distraction trick where they lost some of their documents, Anke and Ulf also had a lot of stuff stolen out of a hotel room in Costa Rica. I'd just had my food bag stolen - I'd left it on the bike in my tank bag, figuring it would be safe behind the locked gates of Hostal Dejavu, and one of their neighbors in back grabbed it. This actually had not been a great loss - mostly dehydrated camping food I've been carrying since LA, and I left it there partially as a test of the honesty of the local people. It had survived Central America, border crossings and all to be swiped in a safe place in Quito. Then Eran returned, and we felt a little silly as he helped us load up Anke's bike, and we drove it back to the hostal.

We got up somewhat earlier than our norm the next morning, and went out to drive up the side of Coatapaxi. Ulf's friend Andy had done it on a motorcycle, but had said that it was really bad for your transmission, because of the steepness. One of the Israelis had also driven before up as far as the parking lot, at 4800 meters - 16,000 feet, and said that it would be no problem. So we weren't sure what to expect. On Eran's advice, we headed through the town nearby to a somewhat secrect back entrance 20 kilometers away - a steep ride up cobblestones and sand - with the idea that we'd be able to get through without paying. We'd forgotten it was Sunday, when the locals would probably also be going up there, so there was a guard at the secret second entrance, standing in front of a windblasted multiroom ruin - he'd gotten up there on a dirt bike also. The roof was partially missing, the floor was rubble, but the guard had a desk there, and he made us pay $10 for our tickets.

The actual ride up Coatapaxi was nowhere near as bad as we had expected, even with switchbacks deep in volcanic dust, though the climb was steep. We were also surprised that none of the bikes had any problems with the altitude - in my case I have fuel injection, but Anke and Ulf have carburetors and bikes often half a hard time "breathing" at the top of the Andes and can stall, and we were now at 4600 meters. We reached the parking lot - a vast level open area with a few tour buses and vans, and some stray hats - the wind was almost strong enough to blow over the motorcycles. It took us over an hour to climb the 200 meter vertical distance to the refuge, about half a mile away - it seemed ridiculous that it was taking this long, but we had to rest every 20 meters or so because of the altitude and the steepness. From the refuge the view was incredible - we could see for probably 100 miles. Coatapaxi is a volcano, and so unlike a regular mountain stands completely alone in a huge treeless plain with all of the land for ten or twenty miles in all directions affected by it, strewn with volcanic rocks and alpine streams that run off its flanks. In the distance were other volcanic mountains almost as tall. Above us was the glacier, swept by clouds that start to appear every day around 9am as the sun heats up the snow. We went up from the refuge to look for an ice cave, and the way above us to the peak was the only area free from clouds. We went a hundred meters climb higher, but then decided to give up because we didn't have a guide or equipment, and the ice cave looked like it might require both (we later found out it was a short horizontal walk from the refuge but we'd gone the wrong way.) We came down from over two hours of climbing in less than twenty minutes - a bit of a letdown given how much effort climbing had taken.

I spent that night drawing a map of my trip on one of my aluminum boxes and putting on stickers of the flags of most of the countries I've driven through (We found them all at a mall in Quito.) The next day we left the hostel and started the ride south to the coast. We made it town Cuenca, a beautiful colonial town surrounded by a modern and not very beautiful city. We happened to be there on Janurary 6, which is another holiday (I'll leave which one to someone more Catholic than I am) and there were more parades and processions with costumes, again with lots of drag - we saw a group of teenage boys in girls' uniforms from one school chase another boy in the girl's uniform from another school...

As we came down through the mountains January 7th, we had a moment where we started entering the cloud zone again, and there was a strange interval where the clouds were flowing quickly up the side of the mountain, past the L shaped notch cut into the mountain for the road but not touching it, almost like a solid flowing curtain of bright white. We weren't so lucky as we descended and we spent a few hours going up and down through the level of the clouds, at one point in grayish valley, then fog, twenty minutes in brilliant sunshine above the clouds, then back again. Later in the day we went the alpìne mountains became desert mountains, and we rode through areas where ravine walls had collapsed strewing boulders across the road every few hundred meters. Then we descended further and the environment changed to jungle again, and we were at the coast.

We spent two nights near the town of Machala, in a seaside resort area called Puerto Bolivar that looked like it had been shelled, or should have been. We checked one hotel, and it was too expensive, but there weren't any others that we could see, so I asked a man on the side of the road where we could find one - he suggested the place we had just been to. I asked if he knew another, but he said the others in town had "a bad character". We did find another hotel, and spent the next day at Jambeli, and island off the coast that Wilson had suggested as a poor man's alternative to Galapagos. We didn't see any sea turtles on the beach, only thousands of sand crabs. We decided to go inland, and rented a dugout canoe from a family that lived near the interior channel through the mangrove swamp. Their pigs rooted in the low tide's black oozing mud - it took five of us to free the canoe and I had the thankless job of pushing it off. Ulf, Anke and I all had experience with regular canoes, and we found out just how much harder it is to steer a dugout, with all of its mass, as we went around in circles in the natural (and at times not so natural) cess pool that is the mangrove swamp, being chased by dogs on the shore, until we got tired of it and went back.

January 9th we finally crossed over into Peru - and Ecuador turned out to be as much of a pain in the ass to get out of as it was to get into. We were turned back at the final bridge into Peru and sent to a customs office, where our papers went back and forth across a hallway for four and a half hours, the last two of which because they were waiting for a fax of our original entry documents from Quito. A little after 5pm they finally let us go. We headed to the Peru side, where they said we were too late to enter the country, by half an hour. We couldn't reenter Ecuador, so they said we would have to leave the bikes there - something we refused to do. Anke pretended to cry, and they gave in, and in fifteen minutes we were done with Peru.

We spent a night in Tumbes, the first town down the road, because it was close to dark, and then the next day headed to Mancora, where we stayed for three days at Punta Ballenes. This was a hotel recommended by a friend of my dad's, Brian Hill, and it turned out to be a good call. There were palm trees, a pool, a thick green lawn, and the dining area was a room with windows on all sides. There was a big open space instead of a window facing the surf, which literally pounded the foundation of the pavilion, a few feet under our table. The waves were huge, and the sound of them smashing the rocks was always audible throughout the hotel. The owner was a Peruvian guy named Harry Schuyler, with a few stories to tell and his own book of jokes and anecdotes on the bar inside. He was also a rider, and let us do an oil change there, and helped us out in a few other ways also. Ulf and I spent the first day drinking beer in the pavilion because Anke was sick, and we struggled through the work on the bikes the next day. Mancora is a huge surfers town, mostly surfers from Brazil, and the town had a great party vibe. The third day we met an American woman who was a guide for a Peruvian touring company and she showed us a hot spring outside of Mancora, a twenty minute ride off road through sand and hills and along a dry river bed three hundred meters wide. It was like a natural jacuzzi, and the high mineral content of the mud was also supposed to be great for your skin.

As we left Mancora we hit a series of road blocks, but the people let us through. We stopped at a gas station where I talked to a truck driver, and told him that the traffic was still blocked for anything bigger than our bikes - we never found out why. He replied that he had been stuck there with his truck for four hours already - the only people they didn't stop was the trucks that were carrying fish, because the protestors didn't want to have them there for a few days ripening in the desert sun.

We passed through a lot of fogettable towns in the northern desert on our way down to Lima. We passed through one large area of dunes that was called the Sechura Desert - but this seemed like a meaningless distinction, since everything south of the border with Ecuador is desert. Chiclayo was the first place we stayed, and is possibly the ugliest town I have ever seen. There are no trees to stop the constant wind from the ocean, so any trash gets blown into the desert east of the Panamerican Highway and stays there forever, and with the small desert scrub plants it looks like a crop field of plastic bags and bottles. There are also tract housing developments in the sand, where only the brick fronts of some buildings were started, and the first few courses of bricks for one side, and the house will now become a ruin before it was ever completed. There are also vast fields of smalls piles of construction debris and household garbage, evenly spread over a few square miles of sand. As we left we saw a wall of green ahead in the sand, perfectly even and extending a kilometer away on one side to the foot of a mountain, and the other for a kilometer or two, both sides perfectly straight, and then we were in a manicured palm tree lined drive with flowering trees, and then it ended abruptly again and we were back in the endless sand and distant hazy mountains.

Trujillo was similar, but larger - it's the third largest city in Peru. We stayed in the seaside town of Huachaco - I think. It's hard to be sure since almost every town in the region starts with Hua-. Huaraz, Huancayo, Huanaco, Huaca... I just did a search on a website for Peruvian cities that start with Hua and there are 1600 matches. Huaca must mean town or city in Qechua... makes it really difficult to get directions around here. We saw Chan Chan, a big adobe ruin of a civilization that lived on the coast around 1200 AD, before the Incas. The part of Chan Chan we saw was the one restored section, out of a city that once took up twenty-five square kilometers - but other than an obessesion with fish, we didn't find out a lot about these people. There were no civilizations with writing in the Andes, so all that is known about them as well as the Incas starts with the accounts of the Spanish, and verbal accounts of the Inca survivors.

We left Trujillo and went south on the Panamerica to a town just north of Chimbote, and then east into the mountains. We'd heard that there was something called the Canyon del Pato - that's the Canyon of the Duck, but nevertheless it was said to be stunning. So around 4pm we headed off of the highway and started into the mountains on a road that was rumored to be largely paved, and possibly 90 kilometers to a major highway. This turned out to be completely wrong. We were also carrying another passenger - Ulf and Anke had spent all night talking to a Swiss guy and a French guy, and they decided to give the French guy, Jerome, a ride to Huaraz. So we were soon bouncing around, Ulf and Anke heavily loaded, and me with lousy tires and a bad front fork seal, on gravel and sand over the hills into deep desert canyons as the dark closed in. The mountains were like something out of Mars, in a rich assortment of oranges, reds and browns, with rock strata that were skewed and curved. We thought 90 kilometers was going to be easy to do before dark, but at 6 pm we found ourselves at a police station manning a gate across the road, and they told us we had two hours more of bad road to Huallanca.

We decided to camp in the town, called Yuramarca, and we set up our tents in the rock garden between the police station and the traveller's shrine to the Virgin Mary. The river was right behind us, but after a steep climb down twenty meters or more we found a rocky edge strewn with garbage and the remains of other travellers meals, so we went back up and got dinner in the town. The town was two rows of buildings in a river valley between tall mountains, completely devoid of any vegetation. Some of the houses had been abandoned, and most of the people there seemed to be road workers from the large number of heavy construction vehicles parked near the buildings. Yet there was still a choice of restaurants, and we picked one and got the basic chicken dinner on offer. We were entertained by the town drunk for a while. He as an old man, and after he found out Anke and Ulf were German, he said something incomprehensible about Hitler - I couldn't tell if he was pro or anti - and then asked me how many kids I had - he apparently had 13 from 4 different women, and said something else about bad children being a curse to their parents. The owner decided to get rid of him, and then sat down with us so he wouldn't come back. "That's the problem with this country, why we're never going to get anywhere," he said. I thought he meant drunkeness, but it turned out he was referring to the 13 kids.

After a nearly sleepless night I got up around dawn, as did Jerome, Ulf and Anke, and we got an early start. The road to Huallanca was as bad as the day before, and now went though a series of tunnels roughly carved into the rock face and went back and forth across the Rio Santa. The canyon of the Duck was indeed worth it, though I still had no idea of how it got the name. It reminded me of the canyons out west in the U.S., except that the walls had to be almost 3000 meters tall, so there was line upon line of rock strata, all in different colors, and exotic landforms carved by the river and the wind. After Hallanca the road climbed and turned into the Callejon de Huaylas - callejon means alley in Spanish, and the road was one vehicle wide and went through much longer winding tunnels where we had to honk before we entered to warn vehicles on the other side. This road looked down into a boiling river that raced through a canyon only twenty meters wide but perhaps a thousand deep. After only 150 kilometers we found ourselves back on pavement, and on the way to Huaraz and the Cordillera Blanca. We dropped off Jerome in Huaraz, and had lunch, but as we went north the day turned cloudy, and we could barely see any of the peaks, some of which are almost 7000 meters (23,000 feet). We were over 4000 meters ourselves, and it started to rain. The air was the coldest I had felt since Alaska, and we decided to get over the mountains and back to the coast. This was the fastest descent we'd had so far - 4000 meters in less than 80 kilometers, going downhill all the way, and the temperature quickly went back to tropical, and we arrived in Barranca at 7pm totally spent after 10 hours of riding.

We arrived in Lima Friday afternoon, and have been scrambling to re-equip our bikes and leave as quickly as possible. I got new front and rear tires - true offroad tires for the rainy season mud on the way to Cuzco - and also managed to get my front fork seal repaired, and also bought a kidney belt, so I'm ready for more off road now. We saw the Museo Nacional here, which completely sucks compared with the Mexican and Guatemalan archaelogical sites and museums, but that again is probably partially the fault of the lack of writing to base anything on. The Museum is a concrete late-modern-ugly style skyscraper with huge vaulted rooms, with nothing in them. On the other hand, after seeing that and the cathedral, I feel like I got enough out of Lima, and I'm ready to go. Lima is actually not bad at all, compared with Quito, but I want to get to Cuzco and Arequipa. From here, we go to Ica for sandboarding, and Nazca to see the lines, and then it's back into the mountains for Machu Picchu.

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