 |  Peru
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 alpėne 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.
January 25 - Arequipa, Peru
We arrived in Arequipa halfway up towards the Andes highlands about 5 days ago. Before that we were driving for two weeks through the desert in Peru, and although I like driving through plains and desert, this was getting a little tedious. It is amazing the huge variety of desert that Peru has to offer, though, from endless sand dunes to plains of rocks to mountain canyons. In most places it is so dry that there are not even cacti, and it can seem as if you're on a different planet - and unfortunately we have more of this all the way down to Santiago. Ica was one of the highlights of the desert - it is an oasis surrounded by dunes at least 1000 feet tall.
Ulf and I went sandboarding there, and we spent better than half an hour slogging through loose sand along the dune's ridge to the very top. It was late afternoon, and as the sun started going down the wind kicked up creating small sand bursts that blinded us for a few minutes. We would place a step and sink in four or five inches, and you could also easily slide off the peak of the ridge a few feet, as the edge of the dune rolled away into the valley below. The view from the top was what people imagine exists only in the Sahara - an endless vista of massive sand dunes, sculpted by the wind into bizarre curves and overhangs and strange scallop shapes, with not a tree or desert plant for fifty miles.
After the first 20 minutes we started hiking 20 meters up at a time and resting, aiming for a random piece of windblown trash as a marker each time, and finally we reached the peak which was deceptively far away. Then after a little rest we started down the hill on the sandboards, and I was hoping for blinding speed because the hill was much steeper than most of the slopes I snowboard down. The board I had was a little longer than a lunch tray, with a bottom surface like formica, and the only way we could get up to any speed at all was by never turning - a very different experience from snowboarding. Towards the bottom where the slope was less I tried to do some turns, and my board started sinking, because it was too small for me. Once I lost that momentum, it was all over. We thought about trying it again the next day, but it just didn't seem worth the slog up the dune.
The day before we'd been in Pisco, home of the Pisco sour, a drink made from sour mix (made fresh from citrus fruits) and the local wine. We took a tour from our hostel in Pisco to Paracas, where we were put on a boat and did a tour around the bay. The islands 20 miles off the shore have a huge number of birds and sea lions, sitting right below huge seabird guano mining operations. So basically we were trying to watch the sea lions fight while cruising slowly by some rocky islets that smelled like a urinal, and trying not to get divebombed by swarms of birds. We also saw the Candelabra, a large branching figure drawn deeply into the sand on a long dune that slopes down to a high cliff filled with caves. There are various theories as to what it is, from a Wari era depiction of the San Pedro cactus (a hallucinagenic plant used here by brujos in ceremonies) to a signal for pirate ships.
South of Ica we saw the Nazca Lines, which are figures drawn on the desert floor by scratching through the sand to a brighter strata below, making the lines visible from far above. The lines were made by the Wari (I think, if I'm not confusing them with another Pre-Inca civilization) about 900 AD, and represent animals, plants, abstract geometric shapes, and according to our enthusiastic guides, an astronaut. We first stopped at the mirador (a 20 meter tall tower) on the side of the Panamerican Highway, but we couldn't see much, so we continued into Nazca and took a typical tourist plane to see the lines from above. We were in a Cessna, and we'd heard that it was possible to get the pilot to do a some loops, but our pilot told us the plane was a little too old for that. Too bad, since that might have been the highlight of the day. The lines are from an altitude of 1000 feet or so not quite as big as you might imagine, and not exactly stunning in their execution. Since there are lots of tracks and roads running through the sand, it's hard at first to spot them, but luckily our pilot led us through each figure, circling first on the right side, then the left, so we could get our precious photos. Each time, as we approached he'd say "One moment, one moment, the whale! The whale!" then wait for us to snap a shot, and then make a congratulatory "Okaaay!!"similar to one that you might say at the moment of release when you're burping a baby. There was a standard flightpath looping around all of the figures, and we were done in about 30 minutes with 10 or 12 figures. Afterwards I was thinking that the great mystery of how the lines were made to be seen from above is a lot less mysterious after you see the mountains that overlook the plain. Maybe I'm a little jaded after the Aztec, Teotihaucan and Mayan ruins.
South of Nazca we split the long trip to Arequipa by stopping in the fishing village of Chala. The town was small but very friendly, and we brought our bikes down a slope over a few steps into the courtyard of a hotel that was run (we learned later) by Jehovah's Witnesses. I found out that there was an Inca ruin nearby. Ulf and Anka were beat, so I went off on my own back down the Panamerica to a dirt road that sloped down through the hills to the ocean. At the end of it was the Puerto Inca Hotel - a nice little beach resort in the inlet where the town had been, about 100 meters from the ruins themselves. As I approached the parking lot there was a sign that said "Private Property, and the only way to the ruins was through the dining pavilion of the hotel. I walked through the ruins and the only explanatory signs had the hotel's logo on the top, and Pepsi on the bottom. There seemed to be some very active archaelogy going on, so perhaps the government intends to open the site more to the public in the future, but it was a little depressing to see the place so commercialized.
The actual site is stunningly beautiful, a bay with spires of rock and jagged cliffs surrounding a small beach. Puerto Inca was a fishing village which supplied fish as far away as Cuzco (to give some idea, my motorcycle ride there is a total of 3 days.) I would guess that they must have caught them alive and brought them there in water, but one guide book said that they used runners to transport them. Stone buildings and their remains are scattered through the bay and up the hill, with strange domed holes in the sand that were used for storage. The amazing thing about the site is that there are absolutely no plants in the area, and we saw no modern agriculture anywhere within 50 kilometers, which means that if this was also the case 500 years ago this whole settlement lived on only fish and things that they traded for with the other cities of the Inca empire, and the town looks to have been pretty large.
Driving here is much like it was in Ecuador - everyone stares at us as we go by - but many of the people in southern Peru wave to us, and we wave back. Most of the time when we meet Peruvians, they ask exactly the same questions every time - where are you from? Did you drive the whole way here on the motorcycle? Aren't you tired? How much did the motorcycle cost? How many cylinders? How many cc's? How fast can it go? I thought in the beginning that we always got these questions because of my limited Spanish, but as it improved this hasn't changed much, and when I think about it, I was pretty much getting the same questions as far back as the U.S. and Canada. When we were in Huaraz, one of the guys looking at my bike started asking the typical questions while I was eating lunch, and I mistook the "How fast can it go?" question for "How many cc's?" - so when he asked how many kilometers an hour it can go maximum, I answered "Seis ciento cinquenta", i.e., six hundred and fifty kilometers an hour - I had no idea why he was looking at me like I was a madman until Anke told me what he had been asking. Afterwards, we started thinking maybe this was not a bad idea... "How much does it weigh?" "Five kilos." "How many cc's?" "One million."
Speaking of local curiosity, I forgot to mention in my last log entry that an incident that happened when we were trying to leave Machala. Anke went into a bank to get cash in the main square, because it was the last chance to get a supply of dollars before Peru. Local people had told us to look our for our bikes, so Ulf and I were standing among the three bikes watching everything that everyone was doing, as a curious crowd looked closely at the bikes, and touched various parts of them. I had to ask some people not to lean against my bike because it tends to fall over easily when its on the sidestand - politely but with authority, and this also kept them from touching my tank bag and other gear. The crowd continued to grow, along with the usual people that try to sell you gum, cigarettes or postcards, and we were literally surrounded, and waiting for Anke for almost forty-five minutes. Finally she came out, and we quickly mounted up and headed around the corner - and were stopped by a TV news crew, who wanted to interview us. Anke was up front and they asked her a bunch of questions, and then they asked me one or two - where I was from, what was my name, and then did I have any problems in Ecuador. Riiight. Even if I am going to slip across the border in half an hour, I know that there is only one way to answer this one - "No, I never had any problems - Ecuador is a beautiful country!" The news crew seemed a little disappointed with this and moved on to Ulf, who said even less, and then they filmed us as we zoomed off - to a red traffic light 40 feet away. Andy Warhol never said where you would get your fifteen minutes of fame...
We arrived in Arequipa Friday afternoon. Arequipa is one of the towns that supposedly the Spanish founded from scratch, rather than colonizing an Incan city. It is called the "White City" because of the sillar (a volcanic stone) that is used in many of its buildings. It reminds me a lot of Antigua in Guatemala, but the colonial section is surrounded here by Peru's second largest city. The main thing to do here is visit the Santa Catalina convent, which was a kind of resort for the surplus daughters of rich Peruvian families for several hundred years. As explained by my guide there, it was customary for the last few centuries for either the second son or the second daughter of rich families to enter the Church and perform pious acts to get their parents out of Purgatory faster. Santa Catalina was completely cloistered, a roach motel for nuns - once they went in, they never came out. Since a lot of them were only going because of this custom, the families did what they could to make their stay in Church prison more paletable, which meant supporting them in the style to which they'd become accustomed - servants, nice furnishings, expensive paintings, a beautiful private apartment with kitchen and servant's quarters - which did a little damage to that vow of poverty. The convent covers several city blocks, and has its own internal streets and plazas, with walls painted in the indigo blue, burnt orange and deep red that are the colors of Arequipa. One of the plazas was called the sook, the word for market in Arabic, and it was where the servants of the nuns traded items on behalf of their masters. About 150 years ago, a pope decided that this was a little embarassing and sent in a new abbottess to clean up their act and make them live like nuns in communal dorms and kitchens, and there are still about 20 nuns living in one section now (down from a high of 175 nuns and 300 servants.)
We left Arequipa three days ago for Colca Canyon, and our base of operations was the town of Chivay. This was another haul through mountains with gravel roads, but a large section of the road was recently paved, so this was much more gentle than our trip through the Cordillera Blanca north of Lima. Even so, by the time we got to town, Ulf's BMW R80 GS had lost another fork seal, and was out of commission for the next day. My bike's ill-designed side stand had finally given up that morning also, and I had to carefully get off and put up the center stand while balancing the bike every time we stopped. We decided to put off the repairs and go down to the canyon on two bikes, Anke riding hers and Ulf riding on the back of mine. Anke's bike was too small to safely ride two people on gravel, and I had a seat and back rest for a passenger. Ulf had made the mistake the day before of assuming, without asking Anke, that he was going to ride her bike, and she would be on the back of mine. Since he didn't ask her, Anke said no. But by the morning Anke was tired and secretly wishing that Ulf would ask her so she could rest on the back of my bike. Instead, he asked me to drive faster out of town, so that people wouldn't see him being a passenger.
The road to Colca Canyon went through a few towns, and passed some old Inca settlements with terraces that were still being worked that ran up the side of mountains and down all the way to the canyon below. The plants were a strange mixture of alpine grasses with cacti, with llamas (or alpacas? guanacos? They all look more like cute stuffed animals than livestock to me) and cattle alongside the road, and often on it. As we approached the Colca Canyon at a mirador called Cruz de Condor, we found out how it got its name, as a condor floated towards us next to the road. He was maybe three meters from one tip of the wing to the other, and he was at the level of our bikes, but 5 meters to the right over the edge of the precipice, gliding incredible slowly and gracefully. He had white edges on his wings, and to change direction he moved only a few feathers like an airplane shifting a wing flap. He was so close that Anke fell off her bike in surprise after she came to a stop, and I almost did also. Ulf was scrambling for his video camera until he realized Anke had fallen over and then as he righted her bike the condor was gone.
The Cruz de Condor mirador looked out across the canyon to mountains with faces that resembled castles, with vertical faces rising out of the slope of the mountain, cut by streams that were almost waterfalls. In the distance were snow capped mountains, and below us in the canyon eagles and another young condor rode thermal currents in the air, never flapping their wings as they spiraled up above us and down again.
On our way back to Chivay, our luck with the motorcycles got even worse. The radiator on the front of my motorcycle presents a very small but unprotected profile to the front, and a rock in a million-in-one shot somehow flew into the radiator and got stuck between it and the frame until it cut a small hole in the radiator. A few kilometers outside of town, I smelled coolant, but it was only when we stopped back at our hotel that I found out it was gushing out. In a few minutes the radiator was empty, and my bike couldn't go anywhere without the engine seizing until I fixed it. Chivay is a fairly small town, so Ulf and I walked around hoping to find things to fix our bike. He got really lucky and found a new fork seal almost exactly the right size - the only seal they had in the only auto parts store in town. I bought an epoxy from the same place and put it on that day, and according to the directions it would take 16 hours to cure. The next morning it was still soft - probably because of the altitude - so Ulf and I spent the next day working on the bikes. I got my stand fixed at the local soldedura, and pulled out the radiator so the epoxy could dry in the sun, while Ulf removed his front wheel and one of his shocks - we did all of this on the street in front of a hotel and it looked like a motorcycle repair shop had just opened up. By 4pm I'd had the stand welded better than it had been originally, I'd tested the patch on the radiator, Ulf had reassembled his bike and taken a test drive, and we were ready to go. Packing up took another half and hour, and we were headed back to Arequipa. We ended up driving in the dark for the last half an hour, but we had a nice hostel with hot water waiting for us. We've more or less got the bikes back together, and we won't have to do much gravel if any between here and the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, a welcome relief - one day on the gravel seems to equal two days of repairs.
Tomorrow we're off to Juliaca, and if all goes well Cuzco the following day. We've heard reports through Horizons Unlimited that there is a political protest spreading through Bolivia, closing the roads, and roads around Puno have been closed by flooding and torrential El Nino rains. The adventure continues...
February 9 - Puno, Peru
We left Arequipa for Juliaca on a road I assumed was going to be one of the worst of the trip. The pass between Arequipa and Juliaca is 4500 meters, and there can be snow there at any time. What I didn't bargain for when I was sitting in NYC was that the Peruvian government has been paving everything in sight for the last few years, especially on the Gringo Trail. The road was completely paved, and even though it was the highest road we have been on it is in the high plane here - there is no drop off at all in most places. It might have been one of the safest roads I have been on in Peru. We did see snow (or maybe hail) melting on the side of the road, and it was damn cold, and rainy, but the driving was easy, and the bikes didn't seem to be having any problems other than a little loss of power. The scenery was rolling green hills, leading up to mountains that are maybe 5500 or 6000 meters, but only 1-2000 above the road, and lots of llamas or alpacas grazing.
I've taken to drinking coca tea (mate de coca) with a lot of my meals. The leaves are a mild stimulant which many local people chew along with a catalyst like baking soda, and this is good for soroche (altitude sickness), along with hunger, fatigue... digestion... depression... cancer... the grippe... The people here will also hasten to add that this is nothing like cocaine which is made from the same leaves. The tea is nice and hot on cold Andes evenings, and it does seem to help with the altitude.
We arrived in Cuzco on February 1, and then set to seeing the remnants of the Inca civilization - but first, we spent a day, as usual, fixing the bikes. I found another missing bolt in the headest - explains why my headlight has been bouncing around - and I finally got my box fixed from the crash in Baja at a local soldedura. We were staying at the Hostal Estrellita - a very friendly place we heard about from other travellers in Arequipa, and we managed to get rooms for 10 soles ($3.50) with breakfast, a common room with a kitchen and a VCR, and a huge courtyard to work on the bikes - they even let us wash them there (end plug.)
Sunday I cruised the museums around Cuzco. I saw the Inca Museum, which was pretty informative, as well as the Museo Regional, which was not. The Museo Regional was however in the former house of Gaciloso de la Vega, aka The Inka, who chronicled the history of the Incas in the 1500's in his Royal Commentaries. I picked up a copy in Arequipa which I just finished. He took the oral tradition of his family - his father was a conquistador and his mother an Inca princess - and put it in a written form for the first time, because the Incas didn't have any form of writing.
His book was considered one of the most important on the Incas until modern scholarship took over. He got a lot of the basic facts wrong - he credits the king Viracocha with the expansion of the Inca empire that didn't happen until a generation later - but it still is an interesting look into the culture, since he was able to talk to (and was raised by) the Inca royalty that witnessed the invasion. One of the most interesting things is that since he was half Spanish and half Inca, he tries to gloss over the most brutal things that both the Incas and the Spanish did, and this comes to a head in the actual conquest by Pizarro. He ended his life in a monastery, and seems to more or less have concluded that the Incas were a divinely ordained stepping stone to the eventual Christianization of all of the western part of South America.
Monday we went to Pisac, part of the Inca's Sacred Valley, where there was a medium sized town founded high up on a hill. It was raining most of the day, and we actually saw a rainbow below us in the valley, which was spectacular. We had a guide named Simon, who seemed to believe that the terraces were constructed by or for aliens. I found this out when I asked why the people who live in the high plane have abandoned all of the terraces that still exist - he explained that the climate has become much drier (Really? Tell that to the people in Juliaca...) He also informed us that the city was made in the shape of a partridge, and showed us around the defensive structures of the city, which are in the shape of a snake. Later on at Ollyantambo we found out from another guide that in fact the hydraulic works of the Incas, such as the aqueducts that run for 10 or 15 kilometers, have fallen into disrepair, so there is no water to get water to the terraces, and Pisac was shaped like a condor, but Simon was entertaining.
He did correctly explain that the three stepped pyramid shaped rock in the town was a symbol of the Inca model of the universe - the bottom tier represents the lower or inner world, the world of the serpent, the middle is the current and natural world, the world of the puma, and the top is the upper world, the world of the condor. The same symbol with a bottom half with three steps and a hole in the middle represented the entire Inca empire, made up of four quarters, with Cuzco at its center. Then he tried to sell us necklaces with this symbol in marble... When we finished I gave him a ride into town, and I don't think I've ever had anyone so afraid on the back of my bike - when I leaned into the turns on the switchbacks down the mountain I thought his grip on my shoulder was going to break my collarbone. He showed us a bakery in town where we could get empanadas, and while we were standing in the courtyard waiting for change (as always) we checked out a guinea pig pen with little houses, windows, and a bridge between them. Very cute, but these guinea pigs are called cuy locally, and are considered very tasty. I guess it was just a fancy meat display case...
On the way back to Cuzco we saw Sacsayhuaman, a massive fortress built by the Incas on the hill that overlooks Cuzco. The city of Cuzco was shaped like a puma, with Sacsayhuaman as its head. Garciloso de la Vega remembered the place when it was more or less intact, before the Spanish settlers started mining it for stone. The three huge towers that he described are gone now, but the stones in the walls are incredible in themselves - one of them weighs 200 tons, is over 20 feet tall by 16 feet wide, and was carried there by several thousand people.
Ulf and I took a break for a day to get over a massive hangover we acquired at Norton Rat's tavern. Our ostensible mission in going there was to talk to Jeff, the owner, about road conditions and blockades in Bolivia, where he'd just come back from. We ended up talking about motorcycles for a while, and Ulf relayed greetings from his friend Andy who'd been there two years before on a motorcycle - Jeff couldn't remember him, so they talked about that for a while, and then we played darts until he closed, and regained consciousness late the next day.
Our next stop was Machu Picchu, and our challenge was to get there without paying a ludicrous amount of money. Originally we'd wanted to do the Machu Picchu trail, but this is incredibly expensive because it was recently privatized, and was also closed at the moment because of rain. The alternative was taking a train from Ollyantatambo to Aguas Calientes, the last town before Machu Picchu. Somehow they have buses in Aguas Calientes, but we never discovered a road there. We left the bikes at our hostel in Cuzco and took the bus to Ollyantatambo. The tourist train is expensive but by taking a bus to the local train we were able to get there for only $15. The only problem was that the train there left at 8pm, and then the train back left two days later at 5:30am. So we killed an afternoon checking out the Inca town of Ollyantatambo, which was much more interesting than Pisac. Here we learned a lot more about the Inca hydraulic works and stone working techniques. De la Vega describes how the Incas would build aqueducts running long distances, sometimes to water only a few acres of terraces, and most of these are still working at Ollyantatambo. The terraces had layers of earth with layers of small stones and sand underneath them, a natural filtration system, and they also used clay in some places to trap water. They were also masters of crop development, and actually had a tiered outdoor laboratory where they could test strains of potatos, corn or quinoa for different altitudes. Seems like the Spaniards never really understood what they were destroying.
The next morning we decided to hike up to Machu Picchu with some other people we'd met at Estrellita. We woke up at 3:30 am, and got going in the dark and the rain at 4:15, down the stepped streets of Aguas Calientes. The idea was to hike the 8 km up to Machu Picchu for dawn, when the birds start singing and before the mass of tourists arrived - the first bus is at 7am. We grabbed some sandwiches and mate de coca on the walk through town, and headed off into the dark down the dirt road, a small procession of seven gringos in rain ponchos with flashlights. The smoke from my cigarette mixed with the rain, and as it was lit up by my headlamp formed a cloud of mist that obscured the path. Soon the dirt road started travelling up the mountain - most of the 8 km was vertical - and we started crossing a path of stairs which went the same way but straight up. We took it after the second switchback, and the steps led steeply up through the cloud forest, a good second best to the actual Inca trail.
As we climbed the first light of day began to peer weakly through the clouds. I passed out some coca leaves to our group, which helped make up for our lack of sleep - I sprinted up a few flights of the stairs - and we arrived at Machu Picchu just around dawn. Unfortunately, there was so much fog that we couldn't see the city, and we arrived at the Hut of the Caretaker, the highest building, and thought the city was above us, and kept climbing for a half a kilometer more, until we realized we were on the Inca trail and headed into the forest. We stood around in the rain trying to make sense of a soggy map ripped out of my Lonely Planet Peru, and then figured out our mistake and went back to the Hut of the Caretaker.
To learn more of Machu Picchu we decided to get an "English speaking" guide, for our group plus a Singaporean guy we had just met. He was the worst we'd had, and we didn't learn much that we hadn't already known, but he was entertaining. He gave everyone in our group a nickname based on where they were from - Ulf got the name of a German football player and he confused me with Drew, a guy from Australia and started referring to me as Paul Hogan. He had a verbal tick which I mentioned to Anke sounded like Tourette's Syndrome, where he kept saying "Example" and "You will remember" before everything including our names or "Come this way."
At one point he showed us a rock in the temple of the Sun which he claimed was shaped into a model of the surrounding hills - which we all agreed (those of us who were still with the group) was complete bullshit, to which he replied that our imaginations would be better after a few cervezas. Anke broke off and joined a German speaking tour, and actually came back later with some interesting information - apparently the city was just a normal town, which was never discovered by the Spanish but may have continued on in secrecy for a generation after the invasion.
After seeing Machu Picchu we opted for the bus back down, and spent a few hours soaking in the thermal baths that give Aguas Calientes its name - a good reward after all of the climbing. The baths didn't seem hot enough - maybe 120 degrees - but after a dip for a minute in another pool of ice cold water from the river the hottest bath gave a pleasant tingly sensation. We had some pizza and some beers and went off to bed early for our 5:30 train.
We spent the next two days relaxing in Cuzco, cooking and watching movies. Monday we headed out for Puno, and arrived in the middle of the Candelaria fiesta. We'd thought the last day was Sunday, and figured there was no point in getting there the night of its drunken climax - but it turned out it was only beginning. Most of the streets were closed and it took us about an hour to find our way around the crowds to where the hostals were. Finally we got parked, and booked ourselves a trip to the Floating Islands and Taquile for the next day.
That night I needed cash, so I braved the crowds down to the Plaza del Armas and looked for a bank. I passed through a temporary gate through Avenida Lima, where the parade was, and got caught on the far side of the parade for a while. In a lull, I ran a block up Lima against the flow of the parade, and finally got to my bank, then got stuck there again.
We went to the Floating Islands the next day just outside of Puno Bay on Lake Titicaca. The islands were originally created by the Uros tribe when they wanted to escape Inca domination, and they are recreated continuously by laying new reeds on the top as the ones underneath rot away. There are entire villages on a single float, and our guide described how one day he went out there with a group and the entire Uros community had untied and moved further out on the lake to get away from a storm. The reeds are used for everything, and they are even good to eat (not in the sense that they taste good, but in the they-won't-kill-you sense. They're actually like soft, bland celery.)
Later that day we went further out on Lake Titicaca to Taquile - a town that supposedly is continuously knitting, including the men - though we never saw this. Since the festival was still going on in Puno the tourists seemed to outnumber the islanders about five to one. It was like a mediterranean island, one big hill rising out of the lake, with no animals bigger than a dog, and no machinery. The people who live there have to carry everything up several hundred meters from the landing.
We then took the 3 hour ride back across the lake to Puno, and as we went a storm blew up with strong waves, and our tiny ship was tossed... if not for the courage of the fearless crew... well, you get the idea. This had come out of nowhere - we'd left Taquile under sunny, cloudless skies, and many people had gotten sunburn from the intense rays at 4000 meters. Somehow no one on the boat got sick. There wasn't enough room in the cabin below for all of the passengers, about 25 of us, so I ended up staying on the back deck, watching as the waves came up almost over the side, and checking out an incredible lightning storm that was hitting Taquile.
Ulf and Ake have decided to cut short their tourism on Lake Titicaca, so we're going to leave tomorrow and try to make it to La Paz, where they'll be going on to a colonial town to the north, and then the Salar de Uyuni. I need to make time, so I'll be headed south and then into Chile. But first, we'll be stopping for lake trout in Copacabana - we've been looking forward to trout cooked in butter for a few weeks, and are now convinced that the trout from the lake actually has bones that are made of butter, and in the process of cooking the bones actually dissolve as the fish marinates itself...
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