Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Oliver gets to Peru - the land of shutteling. Preface, traveling and first day of riding

So a little preface to some entries I will start making: I have limited internet time so I have been keeping a little log of my activities almost for just a personal account of my experiences as it is easy for days here to just blend together – it’s all riding bikes. The team, family and friends have all wondered what I am up to so here you go, I will start to enter in some of the things I have jotted down – usually late at night when I am beat from riding and have had a bunch of beers. So if you want to read it click the titles for each entry I make to view the full post. Bear with me, if my ramblings are too long – which they most likely are, go back to facebook or whatever. However, you might find it interesting. I am sure this will all filter down to short posts once I have been here for a week or two, ridden all the spots and the whole thing becomes not so peculiar to me in comparison to my past lifestyle. Also it may take some time for me to get good at this and get pics up as my browser automatically puts everything to do with this website in spanish. Since arriving in Ollantaytambo Jan 6th, I have come to realize the ridiculousness of my situation on many fronts – mainly just finding myself in odd, humorous and breathtaking situations that I would not have expected. All of which I will get too. To start with the traveling, to my surprise all went well getting here. It was a long 26 hours of traveling but all my flights were relatively on time, no luggage lost and I was not questioned or charged for my oversized bags and carry on luggage. The customs official also didn’t seem to care about my lack of visa as I am staying well over 90 days – and when explaining to him I was coming to ride bikes he just stamped my passport and said “ok, ok just get out of here.” I flew from Boston to Newark, Newark to Lima, then Lima to Cusco. I landed in Lima at 10:30pm and had a ridiculous layover until my flight left for Cusco at 5:00am. As this was a domestic flight I could not get through security to my gate (domestic terminal was closed) until about an hour before my flight – I spent this time sitting in a dirty food court trying to stay awake and guard my bags. Once arriving in Cuzco at 6:30 am I got a cab to a street corner called “Pavitos” in a very poor and run down ghetto area in Cuzco. Watch off, cards and money in the shoes, knife in pocket. The cab from the airport to this street corner went around the edge of town, far from any tourist areas; shack type living with more stray dogs than people. Here you are able to meet people and share a cab 5 or 6 ways to various mountain towns such as Ollantaytambo. I managed to cram in a car with two young girls and an old man headed to Ollantaytambo. The ride was one of the scariest 1.5 hours of my life. If anyone thinks that I can be an aggressive driver, or anyone in Boston for that matter, has seen nothing. This hour and a half drive consisted of mountainous roads with continual hair pin turns, blind corners, huge cliffs etc. I literally spent 100% of that time clenching my jaw and holding my breath, except for when I was laughing to myself in sheer unbelief as our overloaded and underpowered deawoo soared past busses, other cabs and trucks at 100+ kph. Various cattle, donkeys, goats, sheep, stray dogs, locals, cyclists also on the road meant nothing as our driver as he simply laid on the horn and threw the car into two wheel slides round corners. The young girls seemed to not have a care in the world as they spent the ride playing with their makeup while the old man in the front seat yelled on his cell phone. This in addition to the fact that this driver must run these roads multiple times a day would be relatively reassuring right? Just so I never have to mention it again, there are no road rules whatsoever down here, and if there are, all are completely disregarded. There are cars driving around with no windshields, doors etc – according to my boss inspections are non existent. Also Peruvians love their horns, in fact they never shut the hell up.

So I arrive. Wander around town for a few minutes until I identified the view from my hostel roof I had seen in photos (yes this worked for those who doubted the strategy – you dicks.) I walked this direction and found the KB tambo hostel, my humble abode until mid may. Once walking in I was greeted by the two ladies at the desk who did not speak a single work of English. I pointed out my name in the reservation book and they prepared my room as I walked around town. So I had assumed that as a tourist area with its own popular ruins, and so close to Machu Pichu that many locals would speak English as this is likely how they made their living. This assumption was crap. Pretty much absolutely no one speaks English, if so about as broken as my shitty Spanish. It would be great if I could get on the internet to download some Spanish classes but so far this has not worked out in my favor, and yea yea we all know I can be lazy and procrastinate and did not take care of this in the US – big whoop I learnt my lesson. Thursday the 6th was beautiful, low 70’s and sunny. I got a little bit of color as I hiked up ruins as far as I could in pretty much every direction to get acclimated to the altitude. This is hard, very hard. I feel like I weigh a solid 250lbs or am walking with weights around my neck. After hiking I went and caught up with my huge lack of sleep for the rest of the late afternoon. Even when trying to sleep and laying on my back it feels like someone has placed a 7-8lb weight on your chest. Woke up, briefly met KB the guy I am working for, Sam the other fellow guide and built my bike, then crashed.

Jumping right into the first day I was up real early and went out on my first trip. I was guiding with Sam, dude in his late 20’s that works as a forest ranger/climbing exploring person in Yellowstone, also as a professional bike mechanic. We took out a real cool couple called Erica and Rob from Baltimore/DC. What was a sunny gorgeous day in town at 9,500 ft turned to rain and fog as we wound up a ridiculous dirt mountain road up to 14,000 ft. to an area called Pata Cancha. The roads here are hard to explain; they are incredible and consist of constant switch backs winding up very steep mountain sides like a ribbon. We were in the van for about an hour and a half, one lane roads literally on the side of hundred foot cliffs. Our assent was cut short as we entered into very bad weather and the driver lost the rear end of the van while climbing. The rear end swung out very close to a significant drop – I quite literally lost my breath as everyone yelled and we all shifted to the left. A unanimous decision was made that we had come far enough and we underwent the process of reversing the van and helping it do a 15 point turn to head back down. Once unloaded and geared up we were in heavy rain and fog for at least the first 2,500 ft of decent. Unfortunately we had not made it to the trailhead so had no idea where we were. We began riding down what is very comparable to Scottish highlands type terrain. Open, steep, rolling with nothing but grass and some big rocks scattered around. Very firm to ride on despite the rain but if you lock up your wheels you break through into very soft slippery sludge and will be on your ass before you know it. We were literally ripping down a golf course picking the lines of our desire. As we got lower we worked our way to very rocky trails, far out of the ability of our guests. We tried to keep their spirits high and they did a great job considering the elements and that we had no idea where we were going. We had to wade two rivers and were surrounded constantly by packs of alpaca and lama’s - sights that I could not get over. Lama’s quite possibly have the most explanatory facial expressions out of any animal I have come in contact with. I am pretty sure of an expression I call the gringo expression. This is when they just stare at you and chew almost shaking their heads wondering what the hell are you doing up here, and with a bicycle? We also passed and met numerous locals living way the hell up in the mountains, this is an entirely separate topic I will touch on later. Eventually we linked up with the dirt road we had driven up and cruised this for the last stint (4 or 5 miles) so the couple could have more time on their bikes (Sam and I made use of the constant hiking trails cutting out the switch backs to get in some flowy trail riding.) Once the four of us returned and cleaned up we delved right into Cusqueno, the local Peruvian Beer. We went out for a very fancy meal (cost of a delivered sub in Boston) where we feasted on Alpaca meat appetizers and very good pizza. We drank a ton of beer and pisco sours (national liquor drink, pisco liquor, lime whipped egg whites on top.) Once we were pretty drunk we headed up to Ganzos a local bar. Here we crushed a couple more liters of beer ($3.50 a liter) and some pisco sours. We slid down the natural wooden fireman’s pole to the bottom floor of the bar, then tried to climb it a few times (just about made it) and headed home.

I spent the rest of the night and early morning throwing up because I crushed a whole pizza and I guess the cheese up here is weird. Because of this I was in bed the whole next day and missed an epic day of 2 Mega Avalanche course drops – pretty pissed.