My alarm blares in my ear. It’s 5:20am and I’m in Puquio, Peru. The segue from last nights chilling ride to this morning’s alarm was way too rough. I peer through the blinds out the window. It’s dark. It’s raining. And it’s foggy. Good god. Not again. It takes about 5 long minutes for the […]
“Frio, no?” My fingers numb and teeth chattering as I tried to find a warm spot in the La Estancia eatery in the southern highlands of Peru. The owner and her son huddled around me wondering why I didn’t dress warmer. The biting cold and stinging rain were unbearable enough just walking through this muddy […]
They’ve mystified anthropologists and mathematician’s for years. Only truly appreciated from the air, the Nazca Lines are a 300 square mile anomaly in this rock strewn arid desert in Southern Peru. The Nazca Lines consist of over 800 lines, 300 figures and about 70 animal and plant figures drawn into the earth by removing sun-darkened […]
Armored bike cops in La Paz, Bolivia One of the problems we encountered when riding into Bolivia an hour before the border closed and in the twinkling of moonlight was getting Bolivian currency. We traded the last of our Peruvian soles at the border, but this was barely enough to pay for our room and […]
Consistency. When you have it and it’s good there’s nothing better. But in things like golf, gambling and well.. take a guess, you never attain it. However when it comes to arriving in busy Latin American cities you can bet I always will arrive just as the sun is sinking to the west. In the […]
After hitting the snooze on the alarm a record number of times, I still managed to be packed and ready to hit the road by 7am. However the hotel in Macara received many more guests since I arrived about 5pm last night. My bike was blocked in the small subterranean garage of the Hotel Katrina. […]
Cruising the road into Peru put me into a dreamlike trance with visions of blue sky, warm weather and glorious roads. My eye is still killing me and I think of that doctor in Quito — absolutomente — well, he is wrong. There is something in my eye. Last night my the pain and irritation […]
This morning I surveyed the scene of last night’s accident. Scouring the mud, sidewalk and berm for a bolt, washer or other parts that fell off during the low speed crash, I found one extra part to the grip weight. In the daylight, I noticed that my right front signal light had snapped. The minor […]
The plan was simple and hardly ambitious. Get an early start and take in the monument that marks the equator. Known as the Mitad del Mundo (middle of the world), I figured why not spend a couple minutes in the Northern Hemisphere and then see how the Southern Hemisphere feels. I could even straddle the […]
Quito fascinates me. The city is divided into two parts. The historic colonial center and the bustling energetic modern downtown. With my bike safely nestled into the narrow corridor off the lobby of my hotel I set off to explore Quito at night. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, Colonial Quito is a […]
