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Published: September 26th 2006
Top of the world
This is the highest I have been so far, 5,059 metres above sea level, and probably the highest I am going (it is the highest pass that I could find on my map of Peru it wasn´t directly on my route and I had to make a diversion of a couple of kilometres just to bag it).Aye in the catelogue ye go for men
Going up a long yellow-green curve of Altiplano I see him,
Chase instinct triggered
A well-used toilet brush torpedoes towards me.
Bandits at three o´clock!
Chest steady, legs thump through dust,
Chaotic fronds of mangy brown hair
Focussed on pursuit.
Still a hundred yards away yet closing in earnest.
Flanked by two others, he is the emperor of this humble patch of dirt and grass
The immediate geography conspires against me,
I cannot simply smile smugly and freewheel gleefully away
Instead I must climb and confront him at the pass.
What kind of beast is he?
Like men they come in many shapes and forms.
Elder statesmen stretched out on the heated tarmac of a latin afternoon
Indifferently nod their baked heads,
Certain in the knowledge that I will not give them meat.
Young bloods whose green bark carries a hollow sound,
Lacking conviction they will merely stand their ground.
Best of course, are the dead.
Picked a quarrel with the wrong truck and
Now wear a tyre print on their head.
At last, peacefully supine.
This fellow is of the worst sort,
Before he smells
Chocks away
I prepare for take off on the Nazca runway. fear, he scents prestige.
Intent on business, with a pack profile to preserve,
He tears a sandal off my trailer
Then, seeking a softer prize tracks my rotating heels.
(Why do they never try to bite my wheels?)
Internet advice recommends: stand still; do not meet their eyes
Difficult to follow when they´re lunging for your thighs.
No time to engage in diplomatic process.
A stone kept close to hand for such unruly highwaymen
Is first threatened, then deployed.
It misses, but the point is well made,
Superior military technology has been displayed.
The hour is mine, he will not rally.
Satisfied now to only beat
A loud face-saving retreat.
I retrieve my sandal (and stone) then exit his lofty jurisdiction.
Tonight I will not enter some small town only to
Tumble unwittingly half-shod into the arms of my mother,
Oedipus in lycra.
Another blog another poem. A worrying trend? Every day in Peru I am getting chased by dogs. It is quite annoying. It is best just to try and ignore them. Most dogs are just happy to make a noise and seem bewildered, even slightly offended, when they receive a sharp kick in the
Motorbike man and daughter
Met this bloke in the desert just north of Nazca. He stopped in front of me and rummaged around a bit and then gave me some fossilized shark´s teeth which he had found nearby. head. Every now and again though you get a serious punter. The poem above was inspired by a dog that leapt onto my trailer in between Puno and Arequipa and ripped off my sandal (The title is a line from Macbeth that I remembered from school, hello Mrs Barlow, and has obviously been lurking in my mind waiting for the appropriate moment to surface. It is sort of typical of the kind of thing that I haven´t thought about for years that pop into my mind as I pedal along).
On the dog front I have been proactive and elevated the arms race. I have just a received a parcel from my brother, thank you Fraser, which contains along with many other precious items, including saddle number 5, a "Dog Dazer". This is a small hand held device that omits a high pitch noise which humans can´t hear that is meant to deter aggressive dogs.
Before I left Nazca I went up in a small plane and flew over the famous Nazca lines. I had been looking forward to doing this for a long time. Have to say though it was a bit of an anticlimax. Spent most
Pilgrim´s progress
This pilgrim is arguably cheating a bit as he has a wheel on his cross. Having said that he walks for 12 hours a day and covers about 40 kilometres. I think he started somewhere in Chile but I couldn´t work out where he was going. Stuck on his cross were little pictures of his family. He also showed me his feet which were covered in blisters. I gave him a banana and a drink of water. of the trip focussing intently on the blue sky directly ahead of me in an attempt (successful) not to throw up on Franco, the pilot and my two Japanese fellow passengers. The plane flew quite high in comparison to the other planes which meant I didn´t get that great a view of the most interesting lines i.e the ones shaped like a monkey, spider and hummingbird, etc. This was a bit disappointing but sort of drove home the point that these lines were probably not drawn to help aliens park their UFO´s (or perhaps the aliens had much better eyesight than me??).
The best bit about the flight was the BBC documentary that I was shown in a nice hotel just across the road from the airport. In the room where you are shown the documentary is a mummified human body (with head) which looks very bored. Understandable as it only gets to see the same programme over and over again, albeit in different languages.
Anyway, the most credible theory advanced in the programme was that the lines were created as a part of a shamanic ritual. The lines were used for religious processions to attempt to persuade
Pisco
Pisco a town on the coast of Peru has quite a few nice colonial buildings, including this church. the gods to make it rain. More of a theatrical spectacle than just sitting passively at home and watching "Songs of Praise". During one prolonged drought, which lasted for 40 years, the Nazca lines got bigger and bigger as the people got increasingly more desparate for water. In addition to etching very creative lines in the desert people started to collect each others heads as offerings to the gods. Lovely. I wonder if today we would start to take the threat of climate change more seriously if Jonathan Edwards started slicing people´s heads open on a Sunday afternoon. I suspect probably not unless there was a complex head trading mechanism already in place.
Most of the riding from Nazca to Trujillo has been dominated by hills. I rode along the coast to the town of Pisco and then took a right hand turn and spent more or less the next five days going up hill. Early in the afternoon of the fifth day I reached the highest pass that I have done so so far, 5059 metres.
Whilst the climbs in Peru are long the gradient is constant and not too steep. Also even when the road is
Tuk tuks
Most towns in Peru have these tuk tuks. You have to watch out for them as they turn very quickly but on the plus side the drivers are good people to ask if you want to know which is the right road out of town. unpaved the road surface is generally quite easy to ride on. When you are going up hill all you can see of the road ahead is a thin, perfectly straight line in the side of the mountain. Every now and then you lose track of it and you have to look for a truck moving along it to work out where you are going to be going. When you look down the mountain the thin straight line is replaced by a whirling sprawl of entrails and only then you appreciate the full extent of the civil engineering that was required to build the road. I am not a bike rider who can put his hand on his heart and say I really like hill climbing however, due to the scenery, over the last month I have genuinely really enjoyed the riding, including the climbing.
Am currently staying in the Casa de Ciclistas of Casa de Ciclistsas in Trujillo in northern Peru. Run by a keen local cyclist and bike mechanic Lucho, and his family, Aracelli, Angela and their dog Luna. Luna is a rare exception to my general theory of Peruvian dogs adanced above (whilst she is very nice
"Mechi"
Those of you know me will know that I have a reasonably healthy appetite, I am certainly no stranger to the buffet bar. Mechi very easily convinced me that I really did need a big slice of her pineapple cake before heading into the Andes one more time after leaving Pisco. I am still considering using my Dog Dazer on her for testing purposes).
A Casa de Ciclista is a house where the owner has basically opened up his house to all touring cyclists. The vast majority of the ground floor is a large space devoted to repairing bikes. On the walls are all kinds of faded cycling posters from the 70´s onwards. If you are not au fait with the world of bikes, think lycra, think skinny men with bug sunglasses, white socks and dodgy moustaches limbs pumping hard, faces contorted in ecstatic agony. On these walls the full aesthetic glory of human athletic endeavour is revealed.
I have been given a free room in Lucho´s house and am allowed to stay here for as long as I like. Two other cyclists are staying here, both called Juan. One is a pencil thin French Canadian who for some reason, which I haven´t go to the bottom of yet, always carries a soft toy monkey around with him on his shoulder and a Columbian, who doesn´t have a monkey. Monkeys aside, I think the idea of a Casa de Ciclistsa is originally a French concept. Although there are several
in Latin America this one is the most famous. Of the 16 riders travelling south that I have met in Bolivia and Peru that have passed through Trujillo, 14 have stayed here with Lucho. I am rider number 774 in Lucho´s log. The guest books and logs are fascinating. People from all over the world riding all kinds of bikes, including tandems and recumbents either heading north or south. Whatever the language or nationality everyone loves bikes, South America and everyone really appreciates the hospitality offered by Lucho´s family. I also see in their guestbook people that I have met much earlier in my trip. Including: Hirsch, the man from Memphis with the biggest wildest beard on the Gringo trail; Justin the former postman from England who I had a chat with on the Carterra Austral in the south of Chile; and Claiton a diminutive Brazilian who in his rainclothes looked like a character from South Park that I met on the outskirts of the resort town of San Martin de Los Andes in Argentina.
Am riding out of Trujillo on Wednesday. I think Lucho is going to ride the first 50 kilometres with me and then return to
Trujillo. Going to keep it simple and just head along the PanAmerican highway rather than wander around in the mountains. Next big destination is Quito, Ecuador (and the Equator). Yann a French gentlemen and fellow cyclist that I met in Bolivia has recommended that in Ecuador I should try sleeping with firemen. If the right circumstances present themselves along the way I think I might give it a try.
Just the usual reminder that I am riding to raise money for Medecins Sans Frontieres. If you would like to make a donation please visit my website www.pushonnorth.com. Over the past few weeks I have spruced up my act a bit. My webpage now has: (i) a page in Spanish; (ii) in an attempt to add some limited utility value to fellow cyclists, a good bike mechanics page and (iii) finally I have descended into the murky world of bicycle web-link trading, hence the creation of my Useful(?) Links page. Have also had some business cards printed which I give to people that I meet on my journey. Also received a few preliminary enquiries about people wanting to hire out my tent for corporate sporting events, wine and cheese tasting
evenings etc. So as you can see the marketing is all getting very slick here at Push On North inc.
Anyway I think I have got a bit carried away and this blog has gone on too long.
Push on
Tim
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Tot: 0.305s; Tpl: 0.017s; cc: 23; qc: 101; dbt: 0.2606s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
