Family, Friends, Fellow travelling companions, Spam folders...I'm back!

I made the decision to spend 2011 attempting to be responsible, take limited leave from work, not travel, work extra shifts and save to buy a house. To quote a good friend of mine..."A house! My you are a grown up! Or at the very least this financial commitment should fool the non-believers".

Barely 3 months into the year and over a few beers, a work colleague asked me if I'd ever heard of a group called The Adventurists. "No. Who are they?" I asked. After some research later that evening, by night's end, my name was on a waiting list.

The non-believers could be onto something.

The waiting list was for a place on "The Rickshaw Run". This involves driving a motorised Rickshaw (tuk-tuk, bimo) from one part of India to another. Lunacy. It's VERY popular (hence the waiting list) and as a result of the challenges involved in me being available at the last minute, disappointingly, I couldn't commit.

I then discovered the Rickshaw Run has a close cousin...

South America's calling!

Its name is "The Mototaxi Junket" and there were places available! I'd read enough. Leave was applied for (I actually owe them leave so it was a long shot) and approved (incredibly), so I signed up. That, it seems was the easy part. It kicks off January 1st, 2012 from Cuzco, Peru and the aim is to reach a town called Ayabaca, somewhere in the North of the country driving Peru's rickshaw equivalent, the mototaxi (a 3 wheeled motorbike with a sofa strapped onto it)...with 2 weeks to do it...entirely unsupported. Typical of my style of "shoot first, ask questions later", I had a closer look at the map of the country AFTER I'd signed up only then to discover the distance between the two towns, almost 2000km and as The Adventurists describe it, "a small obstacle called the Andes mountains". Uh oh.

I'm hoping my team mate will be Alonso Palesquillo (aka Marcus), although he's still trying to convince work he needs the time off for such a great cause. I've named the team "Los Muchachos Perdidos". Translated = "The Lost Boys". I'm sure there'll be questions asked along the way such as "why the f..k are we doing this?" and "where the f..k are we?". However on previous expeditions, Marcus occasionally referred to himself as "El Humano Brujula". Translated = "The Human Compass" (amongst other titles he gives himself). Future events will prove or dis-prove his theory.

Is there anything responsible about this? Mostly not, however raising money for charity is the grown up part. More information on this will be in the next update.

The following link explains it all:

http://mototaxijunket.theadventurists.com/index.php?page=overview

Has anyone seen the spanners?

Pedro Sanchez (aka Andreas).