Into Ecuador

Ecuador. The name alone evokes hot steamy jungles dripping with poisonous snakes, face-slapping exotic bugs and palm fringed white beaches. My reality might argue with this as I sit here in a fog that that is more chowder than soup, and temperature that has me wrapped in thermal underwear I didn’t think to see at least until the higher latitudes of Patagonia. And I’m on to my 3^rd roll of dunny paper for my leaking nose.

But I digress. We crossed the boarder into Ecuador with little challenges. After a 5 day marathon in the purgatory of Peruvian customs to get the bike I approached this first boarder crossing with something close to reservations. Short of having to stand by while the Ecuadorian fellow finished his lunch, a frighteningly quick inspection of the bike and we were through. The customs fellow almost signing the last paper from his car window, he clearly had a hot date lined up.

Once into the country we plotted our next leg. I had heard of a great ride from the boarder  north and away we went. The twistys began and the clouds fell in sync with the rain. From 1000kms of boring straight  Pan-American highway this was my personal sliver lining that wasn’t to be. The fog got so think it was hard to even get close to the posted 40km/h. 

Soup on an otherwise great road

Above the clouds

Up until then the road was a brand new ribbon of freshly laid tarmac, winding its snake like way through the densely jungled, steep sided mountains of the lower Andes. Nothing but a tease to my rear braking ways. But things got pretty exciting pretty soon as the fresh road disintegrated into muddy slush, newly churned by the road workers currently taking shelter in last gas station for who knows.

Not happy in the wet weather gear!

Now a small admission might be due here. I’m not so good on the dirty stuff. I like the fast corners, late braking cheap thrills of the black-top and the plan was to slowly ingratiate myself into the muddy stuff, especially with a fully loaded bike complete with a wife suffering my abuse at the road through the helmet intercom. The next couple of hours turned my pristine brand new motorbike into something I am kind of proud of, a real touring bike!

But cut to the chase, we had an appointment to keep that we now had to hustle towards. The result was the need to stick to the torture of the E25 main Ecuadorian highway north. A heady blend of carbon monoxide, crazy overtaking techniques and my own personal game of traffic frogger with the overloaded trucks. 3 days, numerous rain showers and uncountable close calls later we finally start the climb into the cloud forest where we had organised a week or so volunteering in a bird sanctuary/lodge. I should have taken more notice of the adjectives, ‘cloud forest’. We met the man in the small quaint, rain soaked town of Mindo who gave us directions to the lodge. What followed was a road that made the previous muddy track feel like a German autobahn. Once upon a time it was the main road from Quito, the capital of Ecuador. This would have been around the time of the Romans I think. Now it was a slippery, muddy goat track skirting precipitous drops into the wet depths of Hades. At one point I think my training as a whitewater rafting guide came in handy.

I am happy to report that the score of Mark vs gravity is still well in my favour. What I didn’t count on was the cold, both temperature and that expelling itself from my body. For the last 10 days we have been doing odd jobs around the lodge, mine mainly focusing on marketing the property strangely enough. Carlie has been busy in the kitchen and teaching English while every chance we get we get out to checkout the amazing bird life. What the owner dosent know about birds either isn’t worth knowing or would be boring enough to comatose David Attenborough. And he is a great photographer, so good in fact that even I managed to snap a couple of worthy bird shots in his company!

action shot!

some of the guys!

one of three sorts of toucans

a romantic shot

Finally the weather has turned enough to inspire us to head onward. Carlie has booked us a couple of tickets to the Galapagos where we will spend a week or so in the footsteps of Darwin, whose weighty tome I have now made myself a challenge of to digest in readiness. So the bike has copped a clean, a minor service and a stern talking to in preparation of the road out of here. Or maybe it was me that got the stern talking to, I really have to learn to turn the intercom off on the dirt roads!

moto taxis = no lanes

my next steed?

in sunnier times!

Peru - North up the PanAmerican Boring-way

So finally we are underway. We sent our bike by sea, Brisbane to Callao, the shipping agent giving us a 48-53 day wait time. We thought to spent that at a Spanish language school in Arequipa, arm ourselves as it were, with the linguistical weapons for the next year in Latin and Central America. As it turns out, we chose our language school well and our shipping agent exceptionally poorly.

getting our yellow fever shots, don't worry, it was cleaner inside!

 

Finally, after more than 90 days and continual misrepresentations and frustrations later, our bike arrived. The crating performed by the agents' guy in Australia was abysmal. I paid 450 valuable dollars and was able to pull it apart by hand. It only had two sides, was open at the top and seriously, held together with clingflim, it was industrial type however! My pride and joy arrived filthy dirty with bags of belongings just thrown in haphazardly. I’m not sure what I should do about this agent. I want to warn others against his unprofessional service and downright lying ways but don’t want to get bogged down with all the negativity. Short to say, if anyone would like more information on who NOT to ship with, PM me!

look at this crate! And I paid how much for this?

The Peruvian customs was a 4 day nightmare but the karmic gods kicked in with the good stuff and smoothed over the warehouse procedure by providing me with a lovely young lass with perfect English, spare time and a staff pass that jumped all the queues!

Released from bondage and it was time to wrestle with the traffic that I had been a passenger to for the last 3 months. Let it be said that the Peruvian driving technique is a blend of bumper cars, telepathy and blind faith. Here we go, into 6pm nighttime peak hour traffic into the centre of Lima from the very dodgy port suburb of Callao to our hotel. I needn’t have worried, the 12 kms were almost bumper to bumper, horns baring, exhausts exhausting. I didn’t have a crash nor even get lost, I might have gotten lung cancer though!

Next day we pulled all our belongings apart and for the very first and very exciting time packed the bike for her truly maiden voyage right in the courtyard of our hotel of course. Then program the GPS while muttering a short prayer to the gods of satellites and out into the world we headed.

locked and loaded inside the hotel.

took us 20 mins to get 300m from the hotel.

Our first day was always going to be a short one and we made it to Barranca, a seaside town just shy of 

200kms north of Lima. Locate a hotel, unfurl and its was off to the owners recommendation for a ceviche dinner. Ceviche for those who don’t know and should, is a Peruvian version of a dish found in many coastal areas around the world. Basically grab your fresh fish, filleted and chopped, mix with lime and lemon juice and other regional spices and eat. The acidic juices actually cook the fish. It’s great.

After a sleep that closely resembled a coma we were back and up on the road, again heading north. This time our goal was a bit vague, not knowing what colour rabbit we are able to pull out in these early stages, we are powering on up the Pan-American. I know that many of you who have done this trip before will be sitting on there with a tongue-lashing at the ready, let me explain. We have a volunteering commitment in Ecuador which we are now later for, thank you Mr Pretend Shipping Agent. We plan to return back down through Peru in September and stay high in the mountains, in fact we will not see the Pan-Am once on our southward journey.

a comfort stop on one of the more picturesque places

over-loaded? not if you can drive it still.

So after what we thought was a long day, only 360 odd kms, not bad for a second full day on Peruvian roads, we arrived in Huanchaco, just on the seaward outskirts of Trujillo. And here is where a small admission is necessary. I made a rookie mistake. Before I could even get that first beer down I started feeling terrible. By 7pm I was done. I had dehydrated myself during the day, so much so that it was decided to take a rest day the next day. I know, soft huh? Anyway, lesson learnt but it did provide a rather sleepless night filled with vivid hallucinations and flashbacks. Cheap thrills.

Today we have made it to Puira, our last Peruvian sleep before the 130 odd km push to the Ecuadorian boarder and our next country. Our day today filled with low grey skies, intermittent rain and suicidal bus drivers. The scenery has been breath-takingly boring. Apart from some teasing glimpse of the Andes foothills in the very distant background and the worlds largest rubbish dump cum desert in the foreground then you will have to excuse the lack of photos in this post. Tomorrow it's off to Ecuador. Now, it's off to dinner!

And they're off ......

Odometer: 00.0 kms

  

Oh, how I have wanted to type those three words! If patience was a contact sport then I just went to boot camp. At 9:56am on Monday 11^thFeb this year I dropped my bike off at the craters in Australia, 3 months, 5 days, 8 hours later I finally have it now in Lima, Peru. Roughly 97 days, somewhat inflated from the 48 originally promised.

Here are some other statistics for you:

23 – the number of increasingly terse, almost abusive emails written to my incompetent shipping agent in Australia,

4 -  the number of bad excuses provided by said agent. And my definition of bad doesn’t necessarily mean false, but come-on, if you are going to make something up then be creative. At least a story featuring Godzilla would have been entertaining.

6 – times I tried to find a place that would sell me mandatory insurance.

1 – time I found myself in the woman’s underwear department trying to purchase said insurance, it’s a long story….

22 – hours sitting in the customs waiting room spread out over four days. Imagine if you will a doctors waiting room. Now close the doors, turn off any ventilation, send the cleaner on an extended vacation, fill it with overweight men yelling into mobile phones and staff it with grumpy, decidedly unhelpful people who would clearly fit nicely next to the dictionary definition of ‘surly’ and then switch to a language that you can’t understand

13 – the number of times I have contorted and squeezed myself into a 40 minute kombi bus ride to the customs and warehouse locations, which just happen to be in clearly one of the most dangerous locations in Lima. Even the locals walk around with petrified expressions and here I am carrying hundreds of dollars required to pay for my bikes ransom!

Uncountable – the number of times I have had to say ‘hablas mas despacio por favor’ (speak slower please) only to receive the sentence again not slower, but faster and strangely, louder as if I was deaf, not simply stupid.

1 – time I have had to ride my bike in night time traffic and congestion that makes ‘chaotic’ seem positively positive.

But the final statistic is 2 – very big smiles from us, ready to get this adventure truly and literally ‘on the road’

So that’s it, from now on the blog takes on a decidedly more ‘mobile’ feel with more pictures and tales from the road. Finally, I can start my odometer…….

Honesty Time

How do I write this entry? I don’t want to sound like an insensitive wanker (am I allowed to use that word in the blog?) but I want to draw a parallel between us, you the reader, and me, the writer.

 

I started really putting entries here in the blog about the time we departed Oz. My goals to write were; and still are, divided between 3 trash cans. The chance to record for my own prosperity (and I use that word in a completely non-financial sense), the opportunity to share my experiences with those of you bored enough to read, and to form the basis for a possible literary endeavor (prosperity in the capitalistic way).

 

But every now and then I need to indulge in a touch of verboseness which taps a nerve a little closer to home than the occasional funny anecdote.

Carlie and the bike are arriving here in Lima in two days time. In fact Carlie will get on a plane in about 3 hours from now while my bike has taken nearly 3 months to catch up with us. And lo and behold, the gods (Buddha/Allah/a squirrel up a tree – take your pick) has manipulated the perfect storm, both arriving on the same day. My marriage vowels (and most of me) are betting on my wife’s arrive as the harbinger. However, a guy can’t be a guy, without getting excited at the reunion with one’s machine. Long story short, I am excited.

Now I say this like it’s a new thing …. And it kind of is. I don’t run around like a head-less chicken 2 weeks out of an international flight, never have. To be brutally honest, and this is where the you vs me comes into it, I haven’t been overwhelmed, no ‘wow, this is so cool’ kind of moments so far. But I should have.  I know. And you have for me. Again, I know. Thanks. But now, sitting here, completely lost somewhere in a locals run-down, you-can-have-what-I-serve-you-and-you-will-like-it (or-at-least-pay-for-it) restaurant in Lima with the imminent arrivals, it all kind of feels a bit more real than it did! 

OK, score 10 points for ’belated’.

I have spent the day pounding the cracked, hot, sweaty pavements of Lima trying to locate my shipping agent, find 3 ATMs willing to spit out more than my daily allowance will allow, find this mystical being called ‘mandatory motorcycle insurance’ and a hostel closer to the port and airport to save my somewhat tried feet.

Then I stop and the full impact of the above couple of paragraphs smack me over the head like a 3 Stooges skit. And here I was thinking my life was more like a Benny Hill half hour……

…. until next time, with my wife and bike.... (in that order……., she’s going to read this!)

Marco.

A Few Paracas Pictures

My day in the desert, the bike bought back memories of other, much longer, rides

The view from my hostel, no wonder I can't leave this place. 7 days and counting....

My first flamingos, but don't tell Carlie, she will be jealous

The colours of the desert were stunning

I'm a sucker for sunsets and have lived on the east cost for too long!

Too Cool!