Project VELAIA

I have reported before about the “sick days” in Chachapoyas and the ongoing tour passing Kuelap towards Cajamarca. Now I’ve taken some time to edit the movie I’ve filmed on the downhill ride in the early morning, leaving Sven, Soren and Brent back in the hostel and taking one s-curve after the other on a wonderful road.

So without further ado, here’s the edited movie. Thanks to the NipperCreep band for putting their Bad Religion song on the www.opsound.org website!

Carhuaz, I didn’t know anything about this town on 2650 m altitude. The previous day we had arrived in the evening and gone straight to the central plaza, we found a small hospedaje (hostel) right there and stayed for the night. Only problem now: We had no Peruvian Soles, the local money, left. There was a bank with ATM, but the machine didn’t accept the 0.5 gramms of plastic we wanted to feed it.

Huaraz, the next bigger town and a big tourist mecca ist not too far away, so we knew that in an emergency we could get some dinero over there. But hey, we still had some plata left. I went on the internet and was surprised about the fast machine. With this small Irvan View programm I started to resize hundreds of pictures for the upload over the bottle neck connection and started uploading when the owners of the small internet cafe decided to go for lunch. Not one at a time, but both together. Not in their internet cafe, but to some restaurant. So they made everyone leave, they made me leave in the middle of the day and in the middle of my work. Great! Wonderful! That’s how you wanna work! That’s how you can keep your readers up-to-date … “Muchas gracias America Latina!”, I shouted out in rage and really frustrated. In the morning I had gone around this 5000 inhabitants town to figure out the best internet cafe with the latest machines and the best I could get was this 384 MB of RAM on a Celeron machine  with a buggy Windows operating system.

“Calm down …”, I told myself and explained to my father that he also had to leave. He was not that pleased about it either. That’s when I decided to not enter an internet cafe that day again and rather do some other things that wouldn’t mess up my day.

We went back to the habitation, our room just to find out that it was locked and we couldn’t open it. We called the 60 year old senora in charge and told her about our ‘small problem’. She assured us that it’d be solved in 5 minutes … 10 minutes … 15 minutes. I told her we’d go for lunch when neither we nor she could figure out how to open the door and we’d come back and everything would (hopefully) be fine.

Wow, that’s exactly the point where some travelers would have gone insane. And I tell you I was not that lejos from losing my own temper, but I recalled the DON’T PANIC! from the Hitchhikers guide and the ancient stoicism philosophers who explained how to keep your tranquilitas animi.

In the garden of this ‘upper price region’ restaurant a massive TV display showed seemingly ever recurring music videos of a fat man singing and playing an instrument in the countryside or in the city. I compared the video to my photography and thought they must be real amateurs. They had alway filmed in bright sunlight, just next to power lines and actually didn’t show a lot of the natural wonders this area has to offer at all!

Happy me when the meal eventually appeared on the four legged table that was wobbling around all the time like 90% of the neighbouring tables as well! We ate, payed and wanted to leave. Then we spotted a strange rasta guy in a even more oddish looking cyclist outfit and his fully-loaded touring bike right behind him near the restaurant entrance.

A ‘must approach’ for us. Can’t let go another being of your kind in this otherwise pretty dismal social landscape of gringo screaming indigenious people and sometimes a backpacker tourist or two. Andi had been touring for two years through the South American continent already and has been all over the place I would say. He could deal wonderfully with the food and just ordered the almuerzo, the meal of the day, everywhere he came to – respect! Adorable.

Together we went to our hostel and he go the room right next to ours. Proudly the senora told us that she had found a way to open the door and that she was angry with us! With us? What the …? Turned out that my father had put his shoes onto the door opener to dry before we had left the room in the morning and therefore she had to call a ‘door opening specialist’ to open the door for her.

Anyway: We spent a interesting and very communicative evening with Andi who is such a rich ressource when it comes to independent adventure cycling not only in South America. Past midnight we said “Good night!” to each other because the comming morning each of us wanted to leave early.

Supposably from the food I got stomach aches again and as we left Carhuaz and Andi the next morning cycling towards Huaraz, a day that would have been a nice ride otherwise turned out to get a hard trip for me. 34.1 km and 2:36 hours of riding with some ferrocious dogs, a lot of cars and pain in the stomach – I didn’t  need more and was happy that we found the suggested hotel pretty fast. Sleep, there was nothing more I could do even though there reportedly was a strong drug available in high doses: internet.

I fell asleep with the nice idea of connecting to the internet the following day causing happiness in my little head. Sweet dreams …

But of course the reality looked different the next day: During a 4 hours session in a nearby cyberface three blackouts effectively detered me from getting anything done. After the 3rd blackout the internet power didn’t come back and I left to explore the city and get some stuff we truly needed but couldn’t get for about two weeks since leaving Banos de Inca behind.

On the top balcony of our hotel with a nice view of the Huascaran mountain I started typing an article or two for my readers. Here I had 2 hours of battery that could take me, no blackout, not hungry cybercafe owner or an internet connection breakdown. Que lindo! How relaxing.

 

 

 

 

 

During the first test stones left our slings in an angle of 270°. Slinging on the right beside our body the projectile could leave the sling to the far left, almost in a 90 degrees angle to the slinging direction but in a few cases it even left the sling to the back or to the right side. No place could be considered to be safe … the helmets had to stay on our heads.

Now two or three busses passed us at the very beginning of this days ride. We had heared that a taxi driver had come back very early in the morning from Raul, so the focus was on whether the busses would come back, too, and whether we then could make it to the pass today at all. But they didn’t come back, not for one hour, not for two hours and even after three hours we didn’t encounter a single one coming the opposite direction. But there was also no traffic coming through from the other side of the pass.

We kept cycling and came closer and closer to the snow. The white seemed to flee from us, it seemed to creep up the mountains to not get in contact with the black pneumatic tires of ours. Maybe it could hurt, who knows. But then small islands of snow got into our range and looking to the ground I squashed out the water of these pretty wet small snow islands on the road that strangely seemed to form in some places better than in other places. Not because of sunshine: there was no sunshine.

Then near one big lagua the sun suddenly appeared on the sky. The snow had gotten to a a closed cover state already and we had to ride inside the tracks of the busses in front of us to get further. But we decided to take this opportunity to improve our slinging skills and have a welcome change to the 5 to 6 km/h average uphill cycling.

Now continuing up the last 390 m in altitude we spotted some vehicles apparently stuck near what seemed to be the pass, Punto Olimpico. Almost like a small hole in the mountain this gate to the other side of the massive Cordillera Blanca seemed to be so close, I could almost touch it with my hands I though. But I realized I was so wrong! The snow on the road should get more and more, the road should get more like a small creek with water running down 10 to 15 cm deep at some places. Big rocks in the middle of the road under the water, and beside the water 10 cm of snow. Hard riding, sometimes unridable, merely pushable! But pushing caused another problem: wet feet. And wet feet in cold water or snow are cold feet – not only the altitude but the steep gradient, the harsh conditions made it harder and harder for us to get further.

We decided to take a break, to have lunch. Every now and then the rumbling sound of avalanches going down nearby glaciers or rocky walls draw our attention towards it. This street was amazing! In the middle of  these massive 6000+ m high mountains, in the middle of glaciers and glacier lakes, leading up steep walls and over gravel terrain, sometimes dropping almost vertical into a turquoise lake. Stunning, scary!

The blue plastic sheet that served wonderfully as a tent footprint got put over a even snow field right beside the road. We parked the bikes in the now 15 cm high snow and unloaded the cooking utensils from the Ortlieb bags. As the meal, spaghetti again, was ready to be cooked, heavy snow showers set in. Suddenly the opposite side of the valley wasn’t visible anymore, the visibility went below 100 m. We couldn’t just continue cooking, we had to act! We had to decide on what to do. The temperatures dropped, the fingers got colder, the weather even worse, minute by minute!

Elmar suggested pitching the tent. I agreed. We started tramping down the snow on an area sufficient for the inner tent, I took the blue plastic sheet over and started unpacking the tent while the three stakes got put together by Elmar. One bike on the front, the other at the back of the tent. “Vamos inside!”

The snowfall was so heavy that within 20 minutes the tent was hanging through, I had to hit the tent walls to get the heavy snow load off the tent. Repeatedly I had to do so and we were lucky that during the night the snowfall got less and less.

The next morning saw everything under a nice white snow cover, the tent, the bikes, some of our cooking equipment we had left outside. Dad didn’t see that much as he had been snow blinded from the 30 minutes of sunlight the previous day – he had a terrible night, I can tell you! Luckily we knew about the phenomenon and knew that it would probably get better again. Only this pre-knowledge helped him to avoid panicing and freaking out on 4700 m altitude.

190 altimeters left. Pretty easy even after this hard night – my feet got cold again and only by putting on all the shirts and other clothes I had could I avoid hypothermia during the night in my less than sufficient sleeping bag. We made it to the pass and only 100 meters afterwards the trail got blocked by a bus being stuck. Skid chain? They probably had never heard of it in this area. So some of the male passangers had to get off the vehicle and push while my father and I were searching for a way to pass in the 30 to 120 cm snow beside the road. First I had to compress the snow, then we had to take one bike after the other to get through. Not a single one of the men standing around helped us and I didn’t want their help either. We were fine carrying the bikes one after one and we had enough time. But in exchange I also didn’t want to help them with their bus. It’s part of the adventure, right?

Now the downhill that followed was long, really long and nothing but a wet and cold mess. The waterproof gloves soaked with the water coming from above, from the front and from below. Everything was wet, the small creek on the road, the foggy air and the rain coming from the sky. I was lucky to have my Gore-Tex Paclite jacket and especially lucky to know my Canon camera secure in the handlebar bag and the clothes and other equpiment in the panniers on the back of the bike. My father forgot to change his jacket, even though we had taken a 10 minutes break to change the disc break pads on the front of the recumbent. So at the bottom of a almost 20 s-curves spanning downhill the weight of his jacket had increased five-fold and he had to take it off and replace it with dry clothes and the waterproof Vaude jacket he still carried in his panniers.

Luckily the road got better and more flat as we continued towards Carhuaz and even the weather got nice for an hour or two on the way down. But then just 30 minutes from Carhuaz it got worse again, rain started and we even considered staying in a smaller village above Carhuaz but abandoned the plan to get to this city on the western side of the Cordillera Blanca.

In the evening we made it into town and found a nice hostal to get some resting time from the adventures and ordeals of these two days.

Now the night was cold, very cold indeed. I had really bad dreams, dreams of losing my hand, I was almost always in a state between sleeping and being awake. At 4:30 am my feet got way too cold in the under proportionate sleeping bag, so I had to get out of the bag, had to put on another 2 pairs of socks and get inside again – takes a lot of overcoming, the fight against your own laziness.

Here a few panoramas my father had taken, from the small island in the glacier lake I had shown in the last Peru posting.

Before these pictures he had climbed up a “hill” to more than 5100 m altitude to take the following panorama which I’ve eked out a bit.

First we pushed the bikes down from the glacier to the path on which we could ride again. The area her is the former bed of the glacier as described vividly in the last Peru posting and admittedly this monster had done massive work over the last glacial period! When we could ride again we jumped on the bikes and cycled back towards the main road, in the background another incredibly big and ice covered mountain chain.

In this world we were the ants and the glaciers sleeping on the backs of their mountains could have played with us in the same way. We had to master a test of courage when one of these white giants was hanging right over the road we had to take and the path was covered with cow sized blocks of stone that had destroyed a big protection wall on our left without any difficulty. How big was the risk. I guessed that statistically it was small, but also that we’d been there probably at the wrong,  the warm time of the year, which again would increase the risk by a fair amount.

I thought I had seen a antenna on the top of a small hill right beside me, but the antenna followed our movements as we continued riding and later I found out that a curious lama or vicunha (wild lama) had actually been observing our paths

The breakfast had been tiny: hot tea and porridge. Now our hunger grew bigger and bigger with every pedal stroke. The legs got heavier and slowly but forcefully we hit the wall. Time to refill and with what a view:

While I proofed my cooking skills by preparing yet another meal consisting of the ever same spaghetti with a tomato, onion and garlic sauce my Dad went for some exploration, to find some nice stones and plants. He brought back some incredibly normal stones and I was confused as I had been cooking right next to this wonderful colleague:

We’re not sure whether the gold layer was real gold and even Lorenzo, a Swiss cyclist with PhD in geology couldn’t tell from the picture.

Now was time to say good bye to queen Cordillera Blanca: In a long, steep and fast downhill our bikes took us down from almost 5000 m altitude to less than 3000 in a often very narrow valley. Even though there’ve even been sporadic shepherds on 4700 and 4800 m now we really felt the presence of humans again: First the really massive mines for gold and other precious metals, then the poor private miners beside the road who went for coal veins in the rocks on their own.

Here we could buy food again and we stopped at the first tienda to wolf down insane amounts of chocolate. We continued through a valley with overhanging side walls and started cooking next to a 10 m cliff at a nice animal-mown lawn.

Later on Lorenz and Evelyne, two Swiss touring cyclists, passed by and agreed to camp with us at this amazing spot. First they had been a bit concerned because of bad stories from other touring cyclists about robbed equipment or even worse, but then they decided that the possibility to hide was sufficient and it’d be safer as four.

They had cycled 10,000 km in 10 months South America with a tremendous load on their bikes, but also with the best gear available, really nice bikes (Rohloff Speedhub, Ortlieb bags, Magura hydraulic rim brakes).

Weiße Felsformationen stechen hervor

Wir hatten uns in dieser Ortschaft eingedeckt, da wir nicht wussten, wie weit es zur darauffolgenden sein würde – und sicher ist sicher! Noch eine kühle, bolivianische Cola für umgerechnet 20 Euro Cent getrunken, konnte es weitergehen. So sahen die Wege aus, wenn wir nicht die viel zu grob geschotterte “Straße” fuhren.

Viel Spaß auf engen Pfaden

Und hier nun die Verpflegung Station am Mittag: Vier Frauen aus einem ansonsten ausgestorben wirkenden Dorf, die mit ein paar Styropor-Behältern und jeder Menge isolierenden Wolltüchern aus Eigenproduktion die Vorbeireisenden mit Nahrung versorgten. Das heißt, viel Verkehr gab es hier nicht wirklich. Das Geschäft lief gut, wenn alle 10 Minuten einmal ein LKW seine Staubwolke mit sich brachte und anhielt.

Imbiss Stand an der Hauptstraße

Denn das Klima war trocken, Sonnenschein, dünne Luft. Da zog jedes größere motorisierte Vehikel seine Staubwolke hinter sich her. Wir Radler durften entweder Staub inhalieren oder mussten kurzzeitig anhalten … denn Luft anhalten und zugleich weiterfahren, daran war in diesen Höhen wahrlich nicht zu denken!

Steinerne Dorfkirche auf Bolivianisch

Plötzlich fanden wir uns in einer sehr skurrilen Felslandschaft wider, die sich über mehrere Kilometer unserer Fahrstrecke hinzog. Nur für die Straße wurde richtig Platz gemacht, selbst wenn sie sich noch immer in Schlangen-Kurven durch die Felslandschaft zog. Prima Klettermöglichkeiten für Entdecker aller Couleur gab es hier und ich nahm mir natürlich alle Zeit dafür – eine willkommene Abwechslung zu den langen Stunden im Sattel.

Skurile Felslandschaft am Abend

Das Zelt wurde mit prima Ausblick, windgeschützt und mit Sichtschutz vor den Blicken der ab und an Vorbeifahrenden errichtet, direkt neben einem Wegstück der ehemaligen Straße. Mit fast allen verfügbaren Spannseilen gesichert und “ruhig gestellt”.

Bei der alltäglichen Camping-Routine

Danach hieß es nur noch Kalorien bunkern und die überwältigende Landschaft und Atmosphäre auf sich einwirken lassen:

Der Blick zum Rande der Hochebene

Camp inmitten der Felsen

Beim Nachverfolgen der Route bin ich diesmal auf einige Probleme gestoßen. Die Karten-Kacheln bei Google Maps waren leider nicht höher aufgelöst, so konnte ich den Weg nicht gut verfolgen. Ich hoffe, dass ich im nächsten Beitrag wieder Witterung bekomme. Bis dann.

Endlich hatten wir alle Besorgungen erledigt, die wichtigsten Leute zu Hause in Kenntnis gesetzt über unseren Aufenthaltsort und unser Wohlbefinden, so dass es losgehen konnte.

Wie waren die Aussichten am Morgen des 29.10.? Miserabel, wenn man zeitliche Vorgaben hat. Denn wir hatten noch viel vor, jedoch nur noch etwas mehr als einen Monat Zeit für einige der Höhepunkte, wie die Salzseen und Lagunen-Route.

1000 Meter in vertikaler Richtung standen direkt bevor. Verteilt auf vielleicht 25 bis 30 km. Diese Strecke waren wir ein paar Tage zuvor auf dem Weg hinab nach Putre schon gefahren. Noch einmal und dazu noch viel langsamer und mit weitaus mehr Gewicht in den Taschen wollten wir das nicht, auf keinen Fall!

Ohne Anwendung irgendwelcher Überredungskünste überzeugten wir einander also davon, nach 100 zurückgelegten Höhenmetern, per Anhalter weiterzufahren. Und welch ein Glück: Gleich der erste Laster stoppte für uns, wir hievten zusammen die voll beladenen Tourenräder hoch. Hinten auf der Ladefläche fehlten einige Abtrenn-Klappen, so dass wir die Räder zur Sicherheit immer festhielten.

Denn was uns bevorstand, war eine spritzige Fahrt auf kurvenreicher Asphaltstraße, danach ein kurzer Abstecher zu einem heißen Bad, wo die Arbeiter etwas zu besprechen hatten. Nach insgesamt 600 bis 700 gewonnenen Höhenmetern setzte man uns neben einem Militärcamp ab.

Ich glaube, dass dies das erste Mal war, dass ich zusammen mit meinem Vater per Anhalter gefahren bin … und dann gleich so unkonventionell und wie ich eingestehen muss ziemlich gefährlich.

Wir dankten den freundlichen Chilenen und verabschiedeten uns sogleich. Weitere 250 Meter mussten wir hoch, jetzt wieder ganz alleine. Gefährliche Gefährten schleppten sich neben uns den Pass hinauf: Voll be- und oft auch überladene Lastwagen mit Gütern für Bolivien und Argentinien. Einige mit alten chilenischen Autos für die Städte Boliviens, andere gewährten keine Einsicht, sondern verdeckten den Blick auf ihre Güter durch Planen.

Zweimal auf nur wenigen Kilometern kam es zu grob fahrlässigen Überholmanövern, einmal musste ich notgedrungen die Straße verlassen um nicht tuschiert zu werden.

Endlich hatten wir ohne Schaden zu nehmen die Abzweigung nach Guallatire (Gualjatire gesprochen) und zum Salar de Surire (Salzsee Surire) erreicht. Von nun an weiter auf Schotter, mehr Abenteuer und weniger Verkehr.

Doch mit einer Sache hatten wir beim Stricken dieser süßen Gedanken in unseren Köpfen nicht gerechnet: Nämlich, dass die Chilenen am Salzsee unermüdlich Rohstoffe abbauen würden und zwar im industriellen Maßstab. Infolgedessen hatten wir alle 10 Minuten  Konfrontationen mit rasenden Monstern, die hinter sich eine Wolke aus Staub herzogen wie ein brennendes Auto in Hollywood-Streifen eine Fahne aus Feuer und Staub hinter sich herzieht. Eingestaubt wurden wir heute jedoch zum Glück nur wenig, denn Äolus ließ die Winde aus westlicher Richtung wehen – wir waren am rechten Rand der Schotterpiste nach Süden unterwegs.

Diesen weiß gepuderten Vulkan hatten wir immer zur Linken. Während wir von Anstrengung und Höhe erschöpft keuchten emittierte er ihn einer sagenhaften Ruhe immer diese Rauchfahnen. Doch recht trauen konnten wir der zahmen Pafferei nicht wirklich … lieber ein bisschen schneller fahren.