The End of the Road

After Two and a half weeks of wrestling our tricycle across Peru we can now sitback, Relax and be driven about by someone else in a motortaxi whilst making disparaging remarks about their engine revs, overtaking technique or anything else we now feel qualified to comment on.

The day after we left Pimentel we headed off into the scrubby bush of the Sechura desert. after an hour or so Jonno, slumped on the back seat, looked up at Ollie who was slouched over left elbow on the bikes handlebars left hand supporting his chin, we were horribly bored, it was time to call it a day. We decided to go straight through the middle of the Sechura and get to Piura a day early, hand over the keys, have a shower then try and buy some trousers that weren't covered in mud, engine oil and with a massive crotch failure.

We had lunch in a desert restaurant and were served a sort of duck stew, it was a pretty tough old duck, Jonno finished plucking his piece then got all hands and teeth on it, until it became too much and he gave up. Ollie's piece was so unique that after trying to find a part that was edible he stuck his fork into it as a sign of protest and ate the rice with a spoon.

We continued through the desert, dodging the occasional Trucks and Coaches, taking shelter on the hardshoulder if necessary. The strange white lizards that live on the road scattered before us as we rattled on. we came to the delightfully named village of 'New Dark Hole, a strip of makeshift shacks that line this stretch of the Pan-American and completely ran out of Petrol, we poured the last dregs of sludgy petrol from the Jerry can through a makeshift sieve and managed to get about 100meters up the road before the final vapours escaped the leaking fuel tank and the engine died. Luckily the residents of New Dark Hole are very keen on selling Honey, Algorrabina and Petrol and we had stopped right in front of a wild west style shop that sold all three. a man came out with a sieve and a glass Gallon jar filled with petrol which he poured into the tank for 15soles and we headed the final distance to Piura.

 The People of Piura say they are not Peruvian and they proved this by giving directions which made sense, we found the finish line easily, dropped the taxi dragged our filthy bags and selves into the hotel, hit the showers then the pool.

It turns out that drinking cocktails all afternoon in celebration after two weeks of only aniseed tea is not such a great idea, although it is a good way to let off much built up steam. The next day a slightly more subdued group waited by the pool drinking fanta and congratulating the incoming teams.

The evening dinner was excellent, the need to unwind and come together after the whole thing was pretty big, we ate, drank, chatted, and swapped stories of what had happened on the trip. We had a moments reflection for the late Peter Buckley and one of the teams gave a touching Blessing in Gaelic which helped us all give a communal farewell to him. Prizes were given to various teams and revelry continued until the early hours. 

The next day we decided to go the surf town of Mancor spend a few days relaxing then head to Lima for a couple of days before going home.

It has been an absolutely amazing experience, we have driven, eaten and slept in all sorts of strange but exciting places, met all sorts of people and seen many different but breathtaking types of scenery. We have also far exceeded our original target of fund raising and would like to thank all our sponsors for their generosity All together the event raised almost 50,000GBP which will go a long way improving the quality of life of the the Llama and Alpaca farmers of the high mountain and their families.

Thank you for all Your messages of support throughout the event see you when we get back!

 

Sand Boarding sans sunglasses

We left Casma and carried on up the Pan-American, happy that we had ski goggles and shemaghs as everytime traffic went in the other direction we got a rightous sand blasting in the face. We reached Huanchaco a small surf town next to Trujillo home of the UNESCO Adobe city of Chanchan, which we made absolutely no attempt to see. we wondered around the town trying to get food to replace Jonno's flagging energy levels and find sunglasses for Ollie. Even though Huanchaca is a surf town on the edge of a desert in peru no shops sold sunglasses , the only sunglasses that where for sale where two people strolling about vaguely trying to sell them.The Peruvian selling technique is pretty unusual, the seller will generally not come up to you to sell you stuff you need to go to them, they will then offer you an outrageoulsy high price and refuse to budge from it when you point out that it is more expense thatn europe they say "so?" or maybe drop a tiny amount in price if you walk away they don't seem to care at all and carry on. This clash of negotiating styles meant that no sunglasses where bought. on the plus side we did find a street meat center of excellence and had stuffed potatoes, chicken kebabs, beef heart kebabs, chicken foot kebabs (wierdly three feet on one kebab), and a sort of sweet fried thing with a plummmy fruit in syrup. The next day we took a break from driving and whent sand boarding, this was really fun but desperatly hard as you spend about 15minutes walking up a sandune to have 30 secounds of riding down it. on his first go Jonno snapped the board in half which the instructor said he had never seen in the 5 years he had been doingt this, Jonno was unsurpsied that he would perform such an act of unheard of clumsyness, but we carried whizzing down the burning hot sand then, more slowly everytime trudging up again. The rest of the day we hung out drinking lots of home made lemonade and the epic strawberry juice. Today we got up and drove to Pimentel where we ate stingray Tortiallas rotten shellfish which the waitress claimed were totally fresh and ok to eat as she had m,icrowaved them first. It also smells of poo so we are going to head deep into the Sechura tomorrow on our last night before the finish.

A filthy bike on the open road.

After Anchon the plan was to Jet up the Coast to Casma bed down there then head to Trujillo. It turns out the Pan-American is the only road up the coast and Moto-Taxi's are not allowed on it. we drove down the highway until we got to the first payage where the attendant refused to let us through and angrily waved us away. in an attempt to find an alternative rout we spent the next 40 minutes driving around the dirt roads of a shanty town, pushing the bike out of soft sand and breaking then remaking the chain using a penknife when it came off the sprocket. Eventually we realised that the payage was the only way and made an attempt to run through without anyone noticing, this plan totally failed but we did get into a conversation with the payage Boss who was amazed by how far we had come and how far we still had to go, he rang his boss asking if he could let us through. The conversation went on a bit but the deal maker seemed to be when he said

"They say they have come from Cusco, I think they are telling the truth as their bike is filthy and the tyres are covered in Mud"

In the end we were let through on the grounds that if we were stopped by any highway engineers or police we would say that we had jumped the Barrier.

Once on the the highway the situation was much simpler, police didn't care the other payages more or less waved us through and the road was so smooth that we could travel at the dizzying speed of 50km/h, we had a rocking breakfast of chicken stew and tres leches at a petrol station and blazed through the barren rocky desert. As a general rule the Lorries and the Coaches acknowledged our existence driving round us although the seemed to feel our rightful place was the hard shoulder and would cut it a bit fine on some of the overtakes forcing us half onto the hard shoulders they tried to avoid having a head on with the traffic coming in the other direction. Coaches seem the worst doing the most eyebrowing raising special moves a particular favourite is overtake a lorry whilst going up a hill when we are coming down the other side, once whilst we skidded along the hard shoulder the bus driver was talking on the the phone and looking into the cab of the lorry he was trying to overtake, completely unconcerned about the mototaxi bouncing passed him. We may be out of the mountains, but we are not yet out of the woods. 

Coming down the mountains

Having seen quite a lot of mountain passes, avoided quite a lot of trucks coming round blind corners on cliffs, and spent a lot of time being very wet, we realised we were running a bit low on time and so decided to drop down from Tarma and blaze it through Lima and out the other side in a day, this would put on the Panamerican Highway/Alternative small roads and would allow us to go up the coast eat Ceviche and not have to wear thermal underwear all day.

We headed from Tarma to a copper/lead refining town called La Oroya which was pretty quiet as everybody was in Lima protesting at the refinery being shut down. We talked our way through a couple of roadblocks had breakfast and headed off we climbed 2000m from Tarma to the highest point of 4800m which was just below the snow level, the area was full of mines, mining trucks and buses, luckily this meant the road was very good quality and we got down with very little incident apart from a pretty good (but not good enough) effort by a pickup load of police to get money out of us, and a moment in a tunnel when we realised all our lights had failed and the only solution was to hold the bike steady between the break lights of the Lorry ahead and hope the Lorry behind kept it's distance.

We stopped off in a suburb of Lima and got the lights repaired in a weird sort of Garage where Motortaxi drivers turned up fixed their own bikes and left apparently without paying anything. The Taxi driver who was fixing our bike and the mechanic himself advised us a good way to avoid a large part of Lima, unfortunately we still needed to spend about an hour getting through the humid, dirty, insane capital city traffic, Ollie used his London driving skills to avoid the totally bananas private buses which streak around the city streets overtaking undertaking, and suddenly stopping to pick up passengers. We lost the panamerican, found it again and headed out of the city. At one set of lights we had double decker coaches on every side, the driver of one opened his window and shouted at us until the lights turned green. Later we were stuck in the middle of a Hornhonking fight between a coach undertaking a lorry on the hard shoulder and the Lorry trying not to be undertaken. With daylight disappearing we did our best to get away from Lima and to somewhere with a hotel. We ended up in a 'tourist town' called Ancon which had almost no places to stay, no maps, and almost no food or drink after 7pm. Eventually we paid a mototaxi to lead us to a Hostal, the Owner was really helpful and sat in our taxi to show us the way back to the Pan-American gave us tips on how to deal with the motorway and then showed us to a place where we could lock up the bike for the night.

New update from Twitter

Seriously windy in the desert today, a real struggle to keep the bike going straight. Had to remove the roof before we lost.

New update from Twitter

D-e-licious! http://t.co/bYG74P1G

New update from Twitter

Chicken feet for dinner. Mmmm http://t.co/zwJq0aUL

New update from Twitter

Made it to Huanchaco at a most reasonable time. Lovely.

New update from Twitter

This fan is in a cartoon disguise http://t.co/2Al0PBWx