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.

Time to leave! We had seen enough of Huaraz and especially in the mornings we’ve almost always had beautiful weather, so we could enjoy the stunning view to the surrounding 6000+ m giants. But we had come here for cycling, right? So, let’s cycle again.

Our target was another crossing of the Cordillera Blanca on 4800 or 4900 m altitude near Pachacoto and the Nevada Pasto Rury. The main road upwards along the river towards Lima lead us in 4 riding hours to Pachacoto where we took a left turn and started cycling up the Pachacoto river. These kilometers from Huaraz were OK for cycling, nothing that would make you enthusiastic, but good cycling. Quite some mad dogs still and many (crazy) car and bus drivers torturing their vehicles through this pothole street. Industy had settled here and gone again, leaving a big environmental mess behind, what a great contrast to the untouched regions of the Huascaran National Park ahead of us.

After an hour or two on the gravel road leading us from Pachacoto (read Pajacoto) towards the park enty named Carpa we decided to call it a day and have some workout of a different kind: Having pitched the green tent in the green countryside 50 m from the road and put on some more insulation promising clothes we started to walk around and sling for a while in this empty place. A nice spot to sling was only 150 m away, namely the drop to the river north of our campsite.

Our technique got better and better and so did our slings. The ones we had built just consisted of a leather patch and two shoe strings, but I had found a website with loads and loads of slinging material, instructions how to build them, how to sling, history about slinging and even small movies of people slinging: www.slinging.org

I tried some Greek style slinging as demonstrated in this shortclip on YouTube:

 

The following morning an early start brought us to the gates of the Huarascan National Park pretty early. We paid the obligatory entrance free without cyclist-discount to get into the park, refilled our water bottles and started a relaxed stretch of cycling through a wide valley. Being inside the national park we found some nice farms at the bottom of the valley while slowly climbing upwards ourselves. A caravan of tiny looking cattle crossed the valley like small ants carrying ant-eggs – a nix mixture of black and white. Slowly they progressed while we went up one s-curve after the other, progressing slowly vertically.

A shepherd came down with a group of 80 sheep and four dogs. He must have been close to the end of his life – maybe 60 or 70 years old, a life spent in this magnificent environment, between the mountains and valleys, always caring for the wellbeing of the animals and moving them to new places where they can find the precious green that keeps them alive.

The huts they’re still living in are really basic. A round fundament of nature stones, built into the uneven hillside, covered with layers of insulating and water resistant grass. A small canopy allowing to sit outside even when it rains. And a mind-blowing view on the valley and the snow and ice covered mountains on the opposite side.
I have to admit that this style of life has something to it. Tempting. Probably until recently there hasn’t been a road, no traffic, no tourists. There’s still no electricity, no tab water and similar excrescenses of modern life.

We, too, continued in our down to earth style of travel, resting here and there for a short slinging or stone throwing session or to photograph what would be a major tourist attraction in other countries: cave-paintings from long time ago just beside the trail!
Further and further we climbed up towards the 5000 m mark and when we had almost reached the top of the pass we took a turn right towards the Nevada Pasta Rury, towards a tattered old man, one of a few glaciers still remaining but having a hard time, like a veteran from a time long ago with a colleague or friend dying every day, getting lonelier and lonelier.

There we cycled, first. But after 2 or 3 km of cycling the car gravel road ended and we had to start pushing our bikes over the bed of this old man who had already retreated to higher, cooler regions and left nothing but a gray and black solitude behind, just an idea of his once so great times when his white veins of ice filled the valleys like water the body of a river and even more glorious times when the giants of the Andes were at his feet like principes to the feet of their king.

Next to a small lake I had to rest, I took the sling and painted nice circles onto the water surface. We tried to catapult the stones over this probably 70 to 90 m long lake and succeeded! Really amazing … and depressing if you pick up a stone with your hand and realize that without this cool tool, the sling, you can only throw 40 to 50 meters!

Now we reached the bottom of the glacier, a massive lake on 5000 m altitude with the ice flowing right into the water and massive pieces of ice crushing into the blue lake every 30 minutes. Still 2 or 3 hours of sunlight left we went for exploration of the nearby area. The bikes were parked 6 or 7 m above the lake surface, so even if a giant piece of ice would crash into the water and start a big wave we wouldn’t lose anything, especially not our lives while camping there later on during the night.

Equipped with the DSC-H5 (Elmar) and Canon Digital Rebel XSi (me) we went for a shooting session and found an icicled ice-cave leading inside the glacier, wonderfully mirrored in the lake in front of it. Only ice, rock in all colors and water. We jumped over the drain of the glacier lake in the knowledge that probably a few months before all the places we walked now, had been covered by tons of deep blue ice, hundreds or even thousands of years old.

When it got colder we fled into the rapidly pitched tent to avoid hypothermia … something you should take serious if you’re on your own and far away from help. Every 20 minutes or so we heard the rumbling from the glacier that was communicating with us through clicking noises all through the night and didn’t have a clue what would expect us the next morning …

 

 

 

 

 

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.

The night was a good one, good sleep with the pleasing sound of the river a few meters away, with the fresh air of the Andes, and relatively warm temperatures. My feet also slept well

Then in the morning the distance to the village where we had planed to catch a bus further down to the south, to Puno on the Titicaca lake, was only a few kilometers, all downhill. The decision was not very easy because generally we don’t like to ride in the bus, but the timeframe we had to get to Chile got smaller and smaller: 50 days were left to go in Huaraz. We definitely had to cycle on the high plateau in Bolivia, on the salt lakes and the laguna route, so we had to sacrifice some parts of Peru, namely the area around Cusco and Machu Picchu. Not an easy decision!

So we went to the small village, looked for the bus terminal and asked for the options. All the buses left at 5 or 6 pm, so we had more than enough time left. We went to the city and started cooking. I don’t know whether it was the professional manner that attracted the people, the uncommon spaghetti dish or sauce or just the fact that two gringos on bicicletas were cooking in the center of the village. What I know is that I found myself in the middle of a 50 person crowd explainin everybody what we’re cooking, who we are, where we’ve come from and a thousand things more. The children were happy about this change in their daily routine and even parents watched these strange strangely dressed aliens.

Then we went on the internet where we had a bit of privacy and a bit of internet … probably a sattelite connection again, but the PCs were OK.

The transport to Lima where we had to change buses should get really hard. Not only because of the fast driving style of the driver and the extremely bad road, but also because I had to leave the bus everytime it stopped to pick someone up or let some farmers go. I did that because I was worried about the luggage … a lot of reports about luggage getting lost and I’d rather like to not lose it in a foreign country! Also the handling of the bikes was pretty rough and Elmar and I insisted on putting them onto the bus ourselves!

With almost no sleep we arrived in Lima in the early morning hours and had to find a bus company that would bring us to Puno on the Titicaca lake. We cycled with the sacks in which we had put the luggage around the area of the bus companies while strange people walked through the streets … nothing for the faint-hearted!

Then the morning came and we realized that the earliest we could get a bus to Puno would be in the afternoon! More waiting hours with nothing to do and now already more than 24 hours no sleep – we felt groggy! And we still had to take care for the bikes because of all the people around us. One time we went to a restaurant in the bus terminal of the flores bus company and just took our bikes with us up the stairs. One of the waitresses got really angry with us and even threatened to call the police if we wouldn’t leave! We were the only customers at that time!

Anyway, one hour before getting onto the bus, a man came runing towards us and said something that we had to take an earlier bus because there was not enough luggage space on the bus we had booked for the two bikes! Only problem: the earlier bus didn’t have the cama seats, the comfortable bed-like seats where you can rest properly! I tried everything to get our bikes on the cama bus, but no chance. Then I decided that it was more important to get to Puno and we made a compromise that we’d get two seats each in the normal bus – accepted!

This time the bus ride took about 21 hours! Almost no stop. I could sleep occasionally but it still felt strange: no bike riding, no possibilities to stop wherever you want, no communication with the locals. Just not the real thing for me. On the other hand the desert outside didn’t look too interesting, there were a lot more cars, often no security lanes and it was sooooooo hot.

We arrived in Arequipa, then continued to Puno where we got off the bus and into the nice altiplano weather with a lot of sunshine and blue sky!

To celebrate the new president of the United States of America here a inauguration day post for my readers.

This view is shot directly from our campsite above Lago Titicaca in the morning. The golden fields, the intense blue water and great mountains in the background. Am I still sleeping or is this real?

Morning at Lake Titicaca

Whenever you cross a border in South America you have to fill in the same forms and (sometimes) hope you’ll get a “90 days”-stamp into your passport. This border crossing on the southern side of the Titicaca Lake was particularly crowded and a lot of local people brought goods on their bikes over the river. The sign says “BIENVENIDOS A BOLIVIA – WELCOME TO BOLIVIA”. We really felt welcome now: Not a single time did anyone scream gringo after us, instead very interested people and friendly.

Bolivia, a country with only 9 million inhabitants but an area of more than 1 million square kilometers. 8 people per square kilometer. That’s 3 times bigger than Germany with roughly a tenth of the population! But massive poverty problems … I was curious. My father had read about bad things, Bolivians killing tourists for their credit cards and so on.

Beside the road a truck had crashed. Not an unusual thing here as the technique is antique, the security standards are non existent and I doubt that the drivers have a legal license or have had driving lessons at all.

Like in the countryside of the Andes in Peru there were really really poor people here. I guess if the statistics in books or the United Nations talk about poor people with less than US $2 a day, those are the people. They walk behind their oxen with the pigs searching for the last crumbs of seed in the fields right next to them. When they’re finished, they go home. Home often stands for a poor adobe hut, one room for a whole family, no tap water, no toilets, often no electricity. Don’t even think about A/C. The hygienic conditions: terrible.

At one of the huts in the picture below, where my father and I came really close to this dust and soil sucking tornado, I asked an old woman for the way. She responded in a different dialect … I thought first. I had already met some boys who pronounced the “s” like “sh”, but this time it got worse. I had heard about local languages, indigenous languages and guess it must have been either Quechua or Aymara.

There would have been a paved option to the trail in the picture above, but we thought we had found a nice shortcut. And we had! Better than riding on the solo paved road to La Paz we turned slightly south with target of Chara~na. This was the countryside. All the woolen clothes of the children below had probably been manufactured right here, local, sustainable production. Pure simplicity.

They were soooo cute and I asked them “Hola, como te llamas?“, what’s your name? A shy and quiet reply, too quiet for my ears, like a gentle breath.

Our information from copied on-line maps which we had reviewed during a midday stop in the town of Tiahuanacu, a very important archaeological place, were crap. The map we had in our hands was even worse. The arithmetic means arisen from the two versions didn’t help us much either.

Today mother sun took us by the hand and showed us the right path. In the evening we had come much closer to the planned route than we had thought back then. The campsite was superior: Not recognizable during daylight the city of La Paz flickered in yellow colors during the night like a lake of gold under a clear sky filled all over with tiny diamonds.

The chill on above 4000 m altitude chased me back into the tent quickly though … no chance for a picture let alone build up the tripod!

This emaciated friend of mine coming closer and closer chased by the heavy weighing hunger deep inside his belly hadn’t been a friend at all before. Together with another of its kind it ran towards my father and me furiously, making fun of the replies I sent in their direction in the form of 500 g heavy stones. What a soldier now! Dogs seem to work the same everywhere. Their pay being food.