Greetings from the very fun to say and very difficult to spell town of Ollantaytambo, Peru.
We are trapped in this quaint little pueblo until tomorrow, when tickets are again available to the great ruins of Machu Picchu. There was a train leaving at 8PM which returns tomorrow morning; it was a quite reasonable $173 per person (first class, she calmy explained) for the 35 mile trip, but I suspect that it may be a wee bit creepy to attempt to drift away to the Sandman while nestled on a stone bench under the moonlight with angry Incan spirits circling above. Go ahead. Ask the icy lady working the ticket booth. She´ll tell you the same thing through a forced smile as her eyes flash a more sadistic message: ¨Burn in hell, gringo.¨
The road to this town was a curried journey flavored with freshly roasted haste. Wanting badly to rendezvous with our Wisconsin comrades LeRoy and ¨Slippery¨ Rix before they flew home, we had a lot of ground to cover in just a few days. When Neubz last wrote, we were holed up in a city that reeked of processed trout. From there we headed east away from the PanAmericana and into the mountains near the second highest peak in South America: Huascaron.
The road started out innocently enough, but quickly deteriorated. Within about 20 miles the pavement came to an abrupt halt and the road became a delicious mash of large rocks, gravel, and dust. Luckily I was in front, and I´d be lying if I were to say that I did not relish the thought of kicking up a cloud of silty delight for Neubz to trudge through. Having not showered in about three days, the shroud attached itself nicely to the layer of grease on his face, and within about an hour he looked like Ben Stiller in the coal mine scene in ¨Zoolander¨.
The ¨road¨ wound through a dammed canyon for about four hours, passing through 38 dynamited tunnels that still had debris left behind that had crumbled from the jagged ceilings. Piloting through in total darkness was more than slightly unnerving. Apparently in Peru it is a cardinal sin to use headlights during any time that the sun is up - regardless of the situation - so every once and awhile we would make the acquaintance of the other rare traffic, dump trucks and pickups crammed full of miners in hard hats coming in the opposite direction, while emerging from one of the tunnels onto the one-lane road. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun.
The 20,000 feet peaks of Huascaron and its little brother, Alpamayo, were breathtaking - much like Neubz´s rank socks. We are still in disbelief, but someone actually stole them in the middle of the night while we were in a hotel in Huaras, at the base of mountains. The richness from the mold that was growing in his boots was so robust that they were literally nauseating, which is why Nuebz - always the gentleman - would put them in the hall before we went to sleep: out of courtesy to us both and in a flagrant act of biological war against the hotel´s other inhabitants. Whether it was in fact an incidence of perverse larceny or simply a desperate act of self-preservation by the hotel staff, we do not know. What I do know is that Neubz was too embarrassed to ask.
Embarrassed, too, am I to report that I have at last faltered...not once, but twice, in the fallen bike game. One was the result of shifty gravel in a hotel parking lot; the other was the fruit of a partially extended kickstand that almost felled me, too, as the bike fell. In any event, the score is still 8-2. In baseball, hockey, or soccer, they call that a shallacking. I call it ascendancy. You can call it what you will, but I call the rainbow colored hula hoop Neubz snapped up for me for sixty cents ridiculous. Lucky for me it snapped in two, then three and four, in the high winds and only a small section remains. And, besides, the score is actually 9-2, as Neubz´s bike went down again while he was preparing to change the oil a couple of days ago. The brightly colored womens´ scarf with poofy pink pom-poms on each end that I bought in a Cuzco market has been triple-knotted to the back of his bike. Come rain or come gail, that baby is never coming off, though it does wave gallantly in the breeze.
The accumulation of character is something that is garnered slowly along the way for these bikes, but I´d like to relate a few choice morsels that have found their way onto the beasts in the past month.
1.) While at a market in Ecuador, we locked in on a couple of stickers long enough to go across the windshield of a car. We snipped them into sections and put them onto our gas tanks. Mine reads ¨Gordito pero Agilito¨ (Chubby but agile). Neubz didn´t know what his meant when he bought it, but a glance at a dictionary a week later revealed that ¨Dolce Venena¨ translates into Sweet Venom.
2.) It was extremely cheap to have your clothing professionally laundered in Guatemala. We washed everything we had, and discovered the next day that we were mysteriously one black woman´s cardigan (here I mean that the cardigan itself was black in color; it may or may not have belonged to an African American woman) richer, an item which has since been knotted to the side of my bike.
3.) Under cover of darkness, someone at a hotel in Guatemala peppered our bikes with about a dozen ¨You Did It!¨ stickers. I´m not so sure what it is that he or she was congratulating us for, but if they were referring to the clogged toilet, they should reserved the stickers solely for Neubz. Those stickers fit in well among perhaps ten others, including an apple that reads ¨Oklahoma or Bust¨, a yellow ¨Commando¨ sticker, and the packing label for a mattress.
The road out of the mountains was a ridiculously winding one, and it is clear that it was the work of famed Peruvian civil engineer ¨Curvy¨ Sanchez. It is rumored that when Señor Sanchez lays out a road, he fixes himself a plate of angel hair pasta, twirls it with a trident, and then traces it with a pencil and paper. The road constantly curved so sharply that both of Neubz´s front turn signals flew off about ten minutes apart, one of them skidding about 100 feet and almost going over the side of a cliff.
The other impediment to the route back to the PanAmericana was wildlife. Now I like wildlife as much as the next guy, but I could have done without the bird that kamikazied my face. Luckily I had my face shield down. Yeah, the little suicide bomber died upon impact (I had to brush his limp carcass off my leg), but his beak put a big scratch right in my line of vision. And shortly thereafter Neubz nearly wiped out a flock of sheep that bounded out of a bush in front of him while he was doing sixty. That would have been an ugly scene: sheep being toted away on gurneys, a contorted Neubz struggling to get his bearings - his toupee jutting curiously out the front of his helmet.
As the sun began to set and we started to roll though small mountain villages, dogs began to get into the mix. They would leap from their posts (laying at someone´s feet or nibbling on garbage, or both) and bolt into the street with reckless abandon. Sometimes they would almost get you, other times they would give up and stand like idiots in the street as the second guy would have to swerve around them. One nearly latched on to my leg, so I gave him a shot to the jowels with my boot. As I drove away, I could have sworn that I heard him whistling Matthew Wilder´s ´80s classic ¨Ain´t Nothin´ Gonna Break My Stride¨...or was it Whodini´s ¨Freaks Come Out At Night¨?
The final push to meet our buddies meant our departure from the main road that traverses South America. This point was at Nazca, which some of you may know on account of the legendary and inexplicable Nazca Lines - elaborate designs of trees and animals made hundreds of years ago, some stretching over miles and miles while still remaining straight and clear. Before you book a flight down there to check them out, I´ll let you in on a little secret. I could have made some of them myself with a gardening spade in about two and a half hours.
The road from Nazca to Cuzco was a slow one. It was in fairly good shape (the Peruvians know the tourist treasure that they have out here), but it wound through two sets of mountain ranges, and it revealed to us the true meaning of the word ¨brisk¨.
Now before I go talking about the temperatures up there, let me first assure you that Neubz´s and my BRCs (Briskness Recognition Credentials) are in good order.
1.) Neubz spent the latter half of an eight-day horse trek through the Tien Shan mountain range of southern Kyrgyzstan last fall sleeping in a tent without a sleeping bag. When the sun went down at around 5:30 and the temperature dropped from around 70 to, say, zero (not taking into account the wind), he slipped into about four pairs up pants, eight shirts, and as many pairs of socks that would fit onto one another and then tried desperately to fall asleep in between a couple layers of the sweaty wool blankets that had been festering all day between the saddle and the hot flesh of the horse. He still blames Ryan Heinemann and me for the mysterious disappearance of his bag, but we lost out nearly as bad from the horse hair that clogged our lungs and stung our eyes as we slept three-wide in that tent.
2.) I spent a winter in Moscow - a place so brisk that they remain the only city in the world to use a de-icing agent on the roads so intense that its caustic vapors actually chew through the electric lines for the cable cars that hang overhead.
So, yes, suffice it to say that it was brisk as we drove into the night over two mountain passes at around 70mph. My hands hurt so bad that I considered asking one of the natives that live in the remote mountain villages if I could sleep on their dirt floor. But we decided to lay on, MacDuff, to a town with a small hotel, though not before being accosted outside of a shack selling hot chocolate by a drunk man in a bright sash that asked us how old we were about twenty times (including one time when he zipped down his fly and took a leak right in front of us before asking Neubz for a smoke), and only after narrowly missing a kid on a bicycle riding down the middle of the pitch black road who in turn swerved and almost hit a donkey in the other lane.
We arrived in Cusco exhausted and sore, but loving the dining options. Indeed, we felt as though the last week through small mountain villages bestowed upon us a certain degree of clairvoyance at the dining table. ¨Wait, wait. Don´t tell me. I see...rice...yes, rice!...be-...yes, beans, and perhaps...chicken...but chicken chopped up casually so that each bite gives you a one in six chance of cracking a tooth on a small piece of bone...¨. And we did in fact find our friends. We watched as Rix dined on alpaca meat and we kicked back a few brews, depite protests from LeRoy that the beer was ¨bubbling up in [his] throat¨. And it was awfully nice to carry on a conversation in English with someone other than Neubz.
So here we sit. We may have caught the early train this morning, but as usual, people we meet think that these motorcycles are faster than fast. We were told that it would take us 20 minutes to get here from Cuzco. It ended up being 60 miles on a mountain road. You do the math. The only way we´d make that kind of time is if I rode Falcor from ¨The Neverending Story¨and Nuebz a six-winged pegasus - something I understood he did quite often in his Advanced Dungeons and Dragons days.
The Machu Picchu racket and the $5/gallon we´re gulping from the Peruvian gas spigot only furthers the financial bleeding that reached its ghastly crescendo with the transportation of our bikes and ourselves from Panama to Quito via Bogota. I´d rather not disclose the actual price tag on that sweet breeze, but suffice it to say that our suspicious joint checking account took substantial hit and that we are lamenting our lack of time in the hurried preparatory stages to secure corporate sponsorship of some kind. Nevertheless, the beat goes on.
- Tom
