South America, Blowing The Kids’ Inheritence

[daveuprite]

A great read, and pics. Thanks.

[gbags]

After Duck Canyon we rode Dow to the coast as we’d heard it was beautiful. We hit the coast road at Trujillo on the PanAm. I looked at all the acres and miles of crap piled along the route to and from the city and thought, ‘What a shithole!’ Peru in the mountains is lovely, if desperately poor, but they still chuck all their rubbish at the city limits. Just tip it straight on the side of the road or down any convenient hill.
In a city this is multiplied a hundred or thousand fold and the mess, shit and stink is awful. There might be ten miles of rubbish piled up in the approach to town. Lorryloads of rubble, dead dogs bloating in the sun, rotten fish, plumbers waste, human waste, household waste just backed up and dumped. Thousands of piles right up to the verge, some inside town on any flat ground. The road from Trujillo to Chiclayo felt like an eternity in such squalor.
Then we got pulled by a bike cop. We’d only been riding 20 minutes, staring balefully at all the shit and not yet speeding or breaking the law, when a bike with panniers came up behind. I looked and it was a cop waving me in. I pulled in and he pointed to his pocket and said something. We didn’t understand until I realised he was pointing to his name badge. ‘I’m Gutierrez’, he said.
I’m Graham, Hi.
He got out his electronic charge book and typed, then handed it to me.
‘How can I help you?’ it said, on his phone.
He just saw a big bike and wanted to help us. I told him we were looking for a good road to Chiclayo to he typed in Follow me and off we went with siren and flashing lights! Splendid. When we got to the good road he stopped, we shook hands and bade each other farewell, and off we went. The cops often see us doing dodgy stuff but just wave us through, as do the toll people on the motorway. Bikes don’t pay so we just glide down the side. Everyone likes overlanders here, or they seem to like us anyway. We hadn’t seen any other overlanders for ages.
After all the muck on the PanAm we fled back into the hills and chose to cross into Ecuador on the San Ignacio road.

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And this was the border. We had to ask around for the office as we couldn’t find it.
We crossed into Ecuador but lost two pairs of shoes and a waterproof the next day. We rode about three difficult hours and when we stopped found that our shoe and wetproof bags had been shaken from the panniers. We always tied them on but this road was first and second gear over very rough tracks. The Garmin mapping didn’t work and Maps.me told us the route would take three hours. It eventually took eight, which indicates how rough the track was. Anyway, I rode back a way but couldn’t find them. The route was great fun for me but later Yenni showed me her hands, which were blistered from trying to hold on as the bike bucked and bounced about. These wild days were always my favourite but she had a harder time.

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These pics don’t show much as when the going was rough you don’t stop and take pictures.
I also found that my attempts to capture a rocky road on the camera failed because the camera always flattens the image.

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We spent our first night in Ecuador honking our guts up. Terrible sickness all night and we only made about two hours the next day as I was drained.
After that we pushed north, ever north. Sadly, up the wrong road.
This lovely valley was a serendipitous fluke as I’d guessed the wrong road and we were running parallel to the road we wanted but one valley over. Nice ride though and since we weren’t on the clock, who cares?

[gbags]

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This is the equator, just outside Quito. Quito is a nice town and we met an Alaskan guy, Eric, his wife and their small child, all travelling by GS800 and sidecar. This guy was a fire pilot, I think it’s called. When there’s a wild fire, he flies his water bowser type plane and dumps water onto the fire. His Thai wife and small son follow him and they ride their combo ever southwards when there’s a break in the fires! They share the riding. Lovely family.

Next we crossed into Colombia - the country our families were most worried about.
The border was our first bad one. There were thousands of Venezuelan refugees streaming out of their country, just walking away on every trunk road. At the border the Red Cross were set up feeding people and vaccinating children. The queues were awful and some people had clearly been there for days. Most borders up until this point had been fast and friendly but this was going to be challenging and it surprised us as we’d again chosen a small crossing.
We got through far quicker than most.

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We were running at probably 70mph on a fast dual carriageway when we came upon this very laid back bloke, pinching a lift on the back of a truck. He was holding on with one hand, seemingly without a care in the world! We gave each other a thumbs up and then he gestured to the front of the waved me on. He didn’t want the driver to see me talking to someone on the back of his truck. I still can’t get over how blasé he was.

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The lovely village of Salento. There was a festival coming up so we stayed four days and made the most of the beautiful hilly area. Trekking by horse down steep hillsides, with river crossings; drinking games that included throwing rocks onto wraps of gunpowder, a great fiesta with thousands of Colombian revellers all made for a welcome break.
Colombia turned out to be Yenni’s favourite country and, like all the other fourteen countries on this trip, proved extremely safe and welcoming. At no point did we feel threatened or uncomfortable.