Thursday was another relaxed day, my soreness is healing and we did not have any tours.
We had some repairs to do so we got the reggae going again and hit the shop. My DU bushings are loose as usual so we made some beer can shims to tighten them up. In doing so found some play in my lower linkage for my blow off shock. With Sam being the thorough and very skilled mechanic he is this lead to us doing a full overhaul and rebuild of my frame. This literally took us 4 hours to take everything apart, clean and put back together. This was tough, everything had to be done in a specific order, ran into some road blocks but got it right. I now know my frame incredibly well and must say it is a damn cool design. Got my bike running absolutely tit, cleaned all my gear and got really pumped to get some riding in hopfully Friday. Friday am roles around KB has a Maliga road ride but doesn’t need my help. We hit the hearts café in the main square for their famous banana pancakes and some expresso. I don’t even like banana pancakes but these are some of the best things to enter my world besides maybe the wheel, sub woofers, buffalo sauce, peanut butter and probably also gummy bears. Also found a place to drop of my laundry which is another helpful thing making life here easier. It was a gorgeous afternoon, KB was done riding so Sam and I split a cab ($13 each) up to the top of Maliga pass to ride the mega avalanche course. Plus my bike is working awesome so nothing could go wrong, until pretty much everything did. Top of Maliga pass is kinda rainy and cold, I ride down to the drop zone and discover my fork has once again leaked half its air pressure. God Damn it no worries Sam has a shock pump in his pack. I sit there for 5 mins pumping up the pressure and suddenly it all leaks out. Try a couple more times with the same result – turns out Sams shock pump is on the way out and the seals are dry/worn so under pressure the air leaks out of the pump. I now have a fork with 0 psi so cant even ride the road down. Spent the next 15 mins hiking around this mountain side going up to peoples tiny hut houses “tienes petrolio?” Finally I find a nice family which has a sketchy water bottle full of a black liquid which is apparently petrolio – or some kind of gas/oil fluid. Dismantled the pump and got the seals nice and saturated as rubber seals expand with oil/petroleum based fluids. Hike back down to the bikes and it finally works! Shock pumped up, getting cold and late so we drop. 3 Mins into the drop I hit the Inca road and a nice baby head is flicked up by my front wheel drilling me in the shin going about 30 mph. This is similar to having someone swing a driver at your shin, it feels just awesome! I have a huge black egg sticking out of my shin, looks like a tumor. Next season I am switching back to full shin guards – no trendy knee pad action fuck you very much. 5 Mins later I take a big hit, fork dives, I bail – nice big nick in my stanchions from ditching my bike. My fork once again has lost all air pressure. Nice, I managed to get 5 mins of the mega course in after hours of fucking around, now I get to sit and ride a paved road for 27 miles back to the hostel as it is certainly not safe to ride on the trail. (the road is all downhill except the last 3 miles so not too bad) Oh yea, then it starts poring, get back about an hour after dark. Eat food, time to drown my sorrows of being stuck in biking paradise with no bike, I would say that qualifies for a jack on the rocks night. Bounce around a couple places, between bars had my first experience in a local cantina. These are drinking establishments for locals, basically rooms in people’s houses kinda made into a bar. When you go to take a piss you literally walk back into their house area with kids walking around in towels taking showers etc – you know things that people do in their houses. In a cantina you will most likely see some kind of pathetic drunk scuffle/fight, usually some fully grown men crying their sorrows away and full on families with kids absolutely hammered. We made friends with the tables in there that were amazed at my magical ability to pop a bottle cap with my lighter, they spent the rest of the night running beers over for me to open. What started as a 1 beer thing for the experience turned into many, many liters of beer being pushed on us by the family that owned the cantina. The minute our glasses were close to empty they would fill them. The whole situation became quite ridiculous. I noticed it was real late pretty much when my glass was having trouble finding my mouth and also when I noticed they had padlocked the door from the outside. Sam we may never get out of here, time to start trying to make some moves. I must say very nice people. We headed to the back courtyard which is inside their house (weird?) to find the bathroom, Sam identified a back door hidden behind some plywood which he removed, totally clutch, we yelled our goodbyes promising we would be back tomorrow night and spilled out into the cobble streets with the upmost elegance and grace. I think we headed back to Gonzos for another liter of beer, I actually do remember polishing off the last remnants of their jack which they gave to me on the house, most likely attempted to say one pretty basic sentence in Spanish for who knows how long and good morning I woke up in my bed with no electricity for the day. I had apparently got some “chocos” (the most awesome bag of grahm cracker snaks covered in chocolate with sprinkles all for .25 cense) the night before as a half eaten bag was the first thing I found on my bed side table. Admittedly I was still pretty drunk and dug in, when looking down at my lap absolutely covered in a swarm of ants I realized my hands also were, and even better they were all flowing out of the bag of chocos I had glutinously plowed into. Sweet, I have most likely eaten about a hundred ants, I think I feel sick and slightly disgusted. Showering in the dark when you are still drunk is just as hard as I read it was. We have no electricity for the next full day.
