Constant Movements

Uyuni to Laguna Verde, Bolivia - tales of the most fantastic journey part II

2008-07-15T22:03:00.003+01:00

In Uyuni

I spent 10 days without a shower, in fact, it may have been 11. When I arrived in Uyuni I was feeling somehow below my human condition, the daily use of baby cleansing wipes proved insufficient to establish a more acceptable level of personal hygiene. We stayed in Hotel Avenida since it was there where Antonio Queiroz, a Portuguese adventurer riding the Americas on his motorbike, was. I inspected very carefully the shared showers and at a first glimpse they had seemed acceptable to me. Well, for someone who almost forgot the meaning of the word shower, a few drops of warm water spurt by the head of an electric device that invariably gave electric shocks, seemed reasonable. However, not for long, since once we get used to certain comforts we then tend to become picky. The comfortable feeling of being in a place with a roof and a bathroom soon was replaced by the annoyance of the low water pressure, the inability of the mentioned equipment to perform it’s duties efficiently (it’s to say to warm the water), added to cold strolls through the courtyard of the hotel to get to the shower.

One of the scary electric shower heads, very common throughout South America.

Dressed with my last clean clothes and feeling an atrocious hunger, Me, Nuno and Antuco (Antonio) went in search of the gastronomic specialties of Uyuni which unfortunately were little and expensive. Uyuni, located at 3670 meters, has over 15,600 inhabitants and is somewhat a strange place. It is the capital of the province and was once a mining center of great importance in the early decades of the twentieth century. There, ambitious adventurers and scavengers arrived in search of wealth and glory in the mining business. The fluctuation in the price of minerals slowed the quick growth of that dusty little town. Now is only a shadow of its past and the main entrance door for thousands of backpackers who arrive there on a daily basis to look for a tour to take them exploring the wonders of the Salares, Coloured Lagoons and other well known charms of the Bolivian Altiplano.

There are about 80 travel agencies as a result of this demand. In Uyuni’s town centre you can find the main square, a train station, and some markets. At a 20 minutes’ walk from the main square you can also find a train cemetery with old and dusty locomotives, there you can wonder through and imagine bygone times when those machines echoed through the vast and arid landscape.

In Bolivia, and in all Altiplano, the night of San Juan is celebrated on the 21st of June and is considered to be the coldest night of the year. To celebrate it, locals lit up bonfires, scattered pretty much all over town, and gather around them with their families, friends, neighbours and passersby in an attempt to overcome the cold night. There was one next to our hotel and around it many people who worked for different travel agencies, and although we were not potential customers, we were welcomed and given valuable information about the kilometres ahead of us. They also shared their bottle of Singani (Bolivian national spirit) and led us to a surreal night (from what I can remember) on a shack that served as a disco where hundreds of locals danced to the beat of cumbia and drank copious amounts of alcohol. The scene was so bizarre that the drinks came not in one bottle but in crates full of them, meaning that when someone said they were going to get a drink, they would actually get a crate full of beer. At some point we had about three crates in front of us, and nor well we started to drink a bottle our friends would stuck another one in our free hand. To overcome that alcoholic exaggeration one had to pretend to be drinking and spill most of the beer on one’s chin and not down one’s throat. We were the only gringos in that party and it was good to see the other side of a city that lives mainly of tourists. And it’s not worth describing the state of our heads on the following morning.

The days in Uyuni unfolded slow and lazy, we spent 10 days updating sites and chatting with Antuco a Portuguese from the northern part of Portugal with sweet blue eyes. Who decided to spend his retirement travelling the world on his motorbike.
I think our bodies needed to rest and, above all, we needed to prepare ourselves mentally for the hard days ahead. We said goodbye to Antuco at the end those 10 lazy days and headed to the South Western part of Bolivia.

De Uyuni a Quetena Chico – a aventura continua

Me and Nuno ready to start another stage of our great adventure

From Uyuni to Quetena Chico - the adventure continues

We had, once again, difficulty in finding petrol for the MSR stove so we left Uyuni, heading to San Cristobal in the afternoon, once we had found petrol. The road, despite being paved with “wash boards”, wasn’t too hard to cycle. The landscape around us was dry, and there was a kind of stoicism of the vegetation resisting the attacks of the strong wind. We camped the first night, after 49 kilometers, in the middle of the stars, sand, cold and silence. This landscape was not made to be inhabited by humans because it is too hostile. Here there are no superfluous things, everything is scarce, less the extent and size of what you see around you. We reached the end of the second day, after cycling about 51 miles to San Cristobal, a village which was moved on its entirety including the Jesuit church of the seventeenth century. In the depths of this village was discovered a vein of silver and lead, which is supposed to be the second largest in South America and one of the largest in the world. A Canadian-Japanese multinational corporation, in exchange for exploration and creation of the mine, gave local people not only job opportunities but also a theoretical plan for the sustainable exploitation of tourism resources creating what they called "Pueblos Autenticos" (genuine villages) in a process of revitalization of the surrounding villages since it’s from them that originates much of the workforce needed to operate the mine.

Signs for "Pueblos Autenticos" it is interesting to comment that the road signs are rare throughout Bolivia.

It has been predicted that within 16 years resources of the mine will be depleted and the company aims to equip these villages with infrastructure enabling local to exploit the tourist potential of the region. From the human point of view this mine is the light at the end of a dark tunnel that illuminates the lives of the people of the Bolivian altiplano. And there is not much food these people can extract from the soil. The company provides them a wage and decent working conditions. However the environmental impact is great and it is difficult to calculate the contamination that this opencast mine will cause in the future, to an ecosystem that experiencing the hardships of the environment gets overexposed with human activity. I suppose time will tell.

The Jesuit church of San Cristobal that was moved and completely restored

Kulpina K, more "Pueblos Autenticos" and their houses painted with garish colours such as yellow, Bordeaux and blue...

We cycled through the "Pueblos Autenticos" which are four: Villa Villa, San Cristobal, Kulpina K and Villa Alota. Actually they do not seem very authentic to me, because the authenticity of the poor and desolate altiplano is made of adobe facades and dusty streets with rubbish everywhere. In these villages we found houses painted with colours certainly never before seen in any other altiplano village, rubbish bins, streets with names. We stayed overnight in Villa Alota, the last "Authentic Pueblo", and headed towards Villa Mar or Mallku, as it was originally known.

Across a small stream on a pedestrian bridge made of stones, outside Villa Alota

According to information we had collected, it was from there that the SW of Bolivia began to reveal its unique landscape. We cycled the first mountain slowly as a result of the sand that was in the road and the “washboards”. We then started to be overtaken by tour jeeps that had inside them surprised tourists who stared at us as if we were a bizarre formation of the landscape and leaving behind a cloud of dust that we were forced to breathe.

The fantastic and unreal altiplano scenery and the first rock formations contrasting with the soft clipping of the surrounding mountains

If riding in these landscapes is an extreme challenges for your body and your determination, to see the world passing you by through a window without being able to feel, prisoner of schedules and arrangements of the tour that you bought, is something that doesn’t interests me minimally. I do not like to feel part of the herd, always had the soul a little rebellious.

Dust and washboards - the great contribution of all-terrain vehicles to our already tough adventure in altiplano

We reached up to 4117 meters at the top of the mountain where the profiles of the rock formations started to draw up and to give texture to the smooth and gentle slopes to the mountains of the altiplano. They look to me as if they were layers of lava exposed to extreme weather conditions, but actually I don’t really know the processes that have given rise to these silent giants.

A break for lunch and to enjoy the sights on a peculiar rock, thousands of which followed us during this stage

Rock formation in the "Valle de las Rocas"

We entered the valley known as "Valle de las Rocas " (valley of the rocks) and what I saw there was so striking that it was hard to believe it was real: high rocks rising to the heavens, cut into bizarre shapes, their red and brown tones contrasting with the blue of the sky and the sun that was moving to illuminate the other half of the globe. The shadows were slow-moving on the floor as if they were the souls of these stones making them to seem bigger. That night, after wandering with the cameras trying to capture the magic of that place, we camped, protected from the wind, in the middle of these ancient rocks and made a bonfire. Its heat allowed us to look at the stars and feel the magic of that place, on an otherways cold and dark night.

Campsite in the "Valle de las Rocas," protected by a wall of stones and heated by a bonfire

The wind was cold and kept our senses awake. The human being has an amazing creative ability but the language of nature, for those who have the privilege to reach the few unspoilt places where man hasn’t touched, are surprisingly more beautiful and more real than anything created by man.

In the "Valle de las Rocas"

We reached Villa Mar in the afternoon, there, was a stream of crystal clear waters and frozen banks. At the entrance to the village, the few houses were sheltered by a wall of rocks, continuation of the rock formations that we had seen the day before and were part of the scenario where we had cycled all day. Mallku is the original name of this village but when Bolivia lost its sea in the Pacific War they changed the name in sorrow of the lost sea.

Arrival at Villa Mar, or as it is originally known, Mallku

We were housed in a small residential, off the village near the football ground, the owner was a nice cholita (local woman) with two curious daughters. The next morning I looked through the window of my bedroom and watched two children playing with a small, black puppy, unconcerned and innocent. I captured that moment of pure simplicity using my eyes and memory and was happy that in some way I was also part of it.

Nuno strolling in the streets of Villa Mar

The night before we had met a French tourist who travelled around the world and, like many thousands of tourists, making a tour of the altiplano, she seemed unable to see the intrinsic beauty of things, the only thing that she seemed to be concerned about was the cold, the annoyance of having to wake up early to get to the places included on the package tour that she had purchased and her dislike for the way locals were in general. How different was my experience and how different was my way of feeling things, the bicycle as a way of transport got me closer to reality, allowed me to be part of it and assimilate it continuously as if it were an extension of my being.

It seemed that the rock formations were infinitely extended throughout the South-western part of Bolivia, we camped another night protected from the inclement wind, by these silent companions. The road became steeper and the nights cooler. The human presence was almost nonexistent apart from the occasional tour jeep. The effects of altitude began to be felt in the body. We were quite acclimatized but the ability to breathe was getting reduced, and with loaded bicycles often the only alternative was to push and to stop every 5 minutes.

Nuno watching the stream before his fall

We were crossing over a stream of frozen waters. The weight on my bike is not very well balanced because I have only my back panniers and almost no weight in the front, sometimes when the rear wheels are stuck in some rocks or irregularity of the floor it gets very difficult to hold the bike especially if I am pushing it. When I was crossing that stream the back wheel got stuck in some rocks, my arms could not hold the weight and my bike fell in the creek, the bag from the front, where I have my camera, among other things, was dangerously close to the water. I asked Nuno to help me but when I turned around he was lying on the rocky floor. He had tried to help me but he got stuck on his bike and lost his balance and hit the floor so hard that I was surprised when he got up and said he didn’t have anything broken. We were lucky because once again it would have been very difficult to find help in that desolate place; I think nature was saying once again that she was the “master in command” and that we were dependent on our luck and her wishes to succeed in this part of the world.

Arrival in Quetena Chico, or almost...

A sign announcing our arrival at the National Park Eduardo Avaroa which is characterized by extensive deserts and prairies dotted with salty lagoons of glacial origin. This protected area was established to protect some species that are endangered including the vicuña, the Andean cat, the Suri and three species of Flamingos’ who nest in its sulphurous lagoons.

We arrived to the entrance of the National Reserve of Andean Fauna Eduardo Avaroa at around four in the afternoon, we were charged 30 Bolivianos for entry (about 3 GBP) and continued in the hope of reaching Quetena Chico that day. The park guard had told us that in two hours we would reach the small village. A few miles after we had passed the entrance of the park we had to climb a steep road and that took us almost an hour to complete. The descent was equally hard since the road conditions were absolutely disgraceful with lots of stones, washboards and sand.

The difficult climb after entering the park, our training for Uturunco’s ascension

Already the sun was a half yellow circle in the horizon when we reached a frozen river deeper than we were used to. With the dilemma of moving or camping, we decided to camp. We did not know at what distance we were from Quetena Chico and, above all, what would happen to our feet after crossing those frozen waters at that late time of the day.

A deep river in front of me before arriving in Quetena Chico.

We woke up the following morning with the first rays of sun, but unlike the other days, there was no hurry, Quetena Chico would be close and we could afford the luxury of enjoying a lazy breakfast to the sound the flying birds and waiting for the sun to heat the waters in the river. Around two in the afternoon we made the crossing and finally reached our destination ending the first stage of our SW Bolivian adventure.

We were told by several people that Quetena Chico was a village of some importance and we hoped we could find supplies and accommodation to rest, but what we found was a sad dusty village, with roofs of silver metal; in the church above the main entrance clearly visible in black letters was written "God is Love", but if that is true than God surely loves ones more than others because this place is not the result of an act of love but the proof of the desperate human endurance and their ability to survive in environments that challenge even human life.

Quetena Chico viewed from the distance, a desolate and dust-covered village forgotten by God and by men

We scribbled the few shops that existed for some food such as milk powder, meat paste, coca leaves, pasta and biscuits but they were clearly insufficient for the next challenge - to climb to the Volcano Uturunco, which has a road that climbs to an altitude of 5800 meters, considered to be the highest road in the world. We lodged at Hostal Condor, in front of the Center for Interpretation of Parque Eduardo Avaroa. The owners, Dona Modesta and Mr Marcelino, informed us that within three days the flota (bus) came with vegetables and while we waited for it they kindly sold us some of their own potatoes, onions, carrots and llama meat. At the end of the second day of our wait, a Brazilian couple from Sao Paulo, stayed in the hostal, they were Didiana and Jeronymo.

Mrs. Modesta, her daughter, Me, Mr. Marcelino and his youngest child, Didiana and Jeronymo in front of the Hostal Condor in Quetena Chico (left to right)

Didinana and Jeronymo had come to the altiplano in a luxury tour to celebrate Didiana’s birthday and they had brought with them wine, pâté, cheese and a variety of other ingredients that they kindly shared with us on a cold evening, heated by a small wood burning stove and in the good company of our almost countrymen. There, we talked about the Portuguese-Brazilian history, travels and jokes. Finally the cold took the better of us and around 10 in the evening we got hot under the blankets of our beds. The next day, after a visit to the Center of Interpretation, to which we were invited by our friends, we said goodbye to our kind friends and they headed to Uyuni Salt Flats.

The ascension of Uturunco - will power wins the highest mountain road in the world

Uturunco Volcano

The mentioned flota was a decrepit bus with broken glasses parked in the corner of the main and only square. There we were, trying to find some fruits and vegetables but the lady who sold the fresh foods had not come in the flota. I see Nuno’s expression hardening up, I knew he was getting anxious about the climb, it was one of the highlights of his trip. He saw it as an authentic expedition, a feat never before achieved – reaching up to 5800 meters with bicycles loaded and in total autonomy. But we were in the altiplano, at our own peril, and the glamour of this ascension was clearly unexisting - we would not have cars to support us nor a journalistic team to record our Herculean climb. Our success depended above all on our adaptation to the circumstances and a lot of determination, as we found out later. After Nuno’s panic, his concerns about the food in general and our lack of preparation we headed, in the middle of the morning towards the top of Uturunco. We left everything that we didn’t need in the hostal and told the owners that we were back within four to five days, and although we had left a large part of our things behind, the bags were extremely loaded, especially those of Nuno. We had 15 liters of water and enough food for a week, but we took, above all, many doubts and many uncertainties.

The fascination of the climb, or pure masochism?

We were still in Peru when Nuno told me he wanted to climb a road in Bolivia that would rise up the 5800 meters and that this road was apparently the highest in the world. At the time I had categorically told him that I would not accompany him on this madness. But as we were advancing towards South I started to imagine myself overcoming one more challenge and to go up to 5800 meters with my Marina (Marin Muirwoods). I admit that I had no idea what that implicated and I think it was that innocence that made me want to climb the big dormant volcano.

The information about this volcano is almost nonexistent. After searching the Internet we found that some French guys had managed to bring their bikes up to 5800 meters with support vehicles and unloaded bikes. We would probably be the first mad cyclists trying to climb with loaded bicycles and in complete autonomy. We did not know how many miles were between us and the top, or the conditions of the road, and was thanks to the information given to us by Mr Marcelino, who led Nuno to a hill in Quetena Chico and showed him the way through the shadows and forms of the mountains.

On the way up, a rocky road to Uturunco

It was in the "Valle de las Rocas" that we sighted for the first time the great colossus and as we followed towards Quetena Chico. We looked at different perspectives of its long slopes, the white of its two ridges from where sulphur was extracted and hence the existence of this road. By far, we could sight the lines marked on the sides and thought that they would be the road we would have to climb. I started to feel affection, respect and develop a kind of intimate relationship with that mountain, as if it was a living being.

The Uturunco and Soniquera seen from Villa Mar at sunset

On the first day, after we advanced about 15.3 kilometers and risen from 4150 to 4477 meters, we camped in the lowest base of one of the slopes of Uturunco. The road was very bad with stones and sand that unbalanced the loaded bycicles and the last kilometres that day were done pushing the bikes.

Nuno struggled with his load, he was taking all the food, most of the water, the stove, gasoline, clothes and the tent, and I saw that this was an excessive burden and if we were already pushing the bikes when we barely had begun to rise, certainly we would not reach the top. We kept on climbing, full of doubts and discouraged.

The stony road that we had to climb to reach the top

The next day Nuno gave me some water and some of his clothes to carry but his load was still extremely heavy. We tried to cycle our bikes but the combination of the stony path, the steep slope, the lack of air that forced us to dismount every 5 minutes, it was excruciating. After 15 minutes, which we probably moved 100 meters, Nuno asked me what we should do. I don’t know very well where my determination came from but I said we should continue and see a bit later what to do. Our bodies became accustomed to the stony path and to the stops at every 100 meters to regain breath, we were moving very slowly, but we kept moving on our way up. I was heading and Nuno was following me about 20 meters behind. Viewed from the sky we looked like coordinated dots in solitary hillside, moving and stopping as the pointers of a clock.

At the end of the second day, completely exhausted, we camped on a road that gave access to the main road, there was no alternative because in the slopes of a mountain the only relatively flat areas where you can assemble tents are precisely the roads. That night I had to force the intake of pasta with tomato sauce, although with every spoonful came a big desire to vomit. Since I was a child that I can’t stand the consistency of pasty food such as cerelac, or nestum, or foods made with flour with a soppy consistency. The pasta we managed to find, after a few minutes on the stove turned into a nasty pasty concoction. But there was no alternative; I had to feed my body after the efforts of those days.

We moved nine kilometres forward, rising to 582 meters, camping at 5138 meters above sea level, and the numbers may not mean much, but anyone who has been above 4500 meters knows that the physical effort triples. All movements are done in slow motion and breathing becomes extremely hard. We did not know if we were on the right track and felt more isolated than ever, in two days of climbing we had not seen a single soul. We went to sleep and left the decision of continuing for the next day.

A moment of happiness, when I reached for the first time in my life the 5000 meters above sea level

Woke up with the noise of a car engine. I thought I was hallucinating, what was a car doing there. I opened the tent and confirmed that it really was a car, an all-terrain with tourists inside. We had been told by our tour leader friends in Uyuni that there was a casual tour to the base of the volcano since from there people could climb to the top up to 6000 meters. I woke up Nuno, who slept like a rock, and while we ate our breakfasts, two more jeeps passed by. We stared at each other and thought that the most desolated road in Bolivia had been converted into a authentic mountain highway. We decided to move forward, our water supplies was getting shorter and we needed to confirm that we were in the right path, so we would try to get some information and some water from the tours.

The first car went by us already in its descent and confirmed that we were in the right road at a distance of 4 to 5 kilometers from the top, they also gave us some water and followed on their way down. We continued, now more motivated, but the road started to have inclinations that neither I nor Nuno believed to be logical or possible at those altitudes (some had more than 25 percent of gradient). I was pushing my bike ahead of Nuno when the other two Jeeps passed me I asked them for more water. I could see the surprised faces of the passengers, their mouths open in amazement. Suddenly I have my hands full of apples, peanuts, chocolate, biscuits and water. It was a family of Mexicans - the son, the father and the grandfather, who had finished climbing to the top of Uturunco at over 6000 meters, and when I saw the grandfather with more than 75 years old, I was the one who had my mouth opened. They left the car to greet us, to take pictures and to chat a little with us.

A familía Zambrano e os seus guias de montanha

They were the Zambrano family,their mountain guides and a few friends from the UK and the US. The father, Oscar, I believe, told us the joke of a guy who flogged his body to feel how well he felt when he stopped. There was a general laughter. Were we also a couple of masochists in search of pleasure after pain? In part, I think that could be true, but there is a kind of feeling, somehow mystical and difficult to explain, intrinsic to the felling of overcoming physical and psycological expectations. The Zambrano and his mountain guide explained us that it would be better not to camp at the end of the road because there were many fumaroles and that their smoke, especially with the strong winds, could be toxic. We said goodbye to the Zambrano and followed, full of motivation, up the mountain.

Things didn’t improve, the gradients and the state of the road were really unbelievable, the day was spent in its entirety pushing the bicycles. At the end of the day, in the midst of a strong wind we reached 5702 meters of altitude. Between us there was a cliff and the slopes of a mountain. We had to retrocede since on that side of the mountain was too windy and there were already a lot of sulphur smokes coming out of the rocks. We camped on the main road, where we were more protected from the wind.

We cooked another creepy pasta. Nuno boiled some eggs but when he opened them a very strong smell of rotten eggs invaded our nostrils and so he threw them away. At the end of the day we realized that they weren’t rotten, it was the smell of sulphur that the wind brought with every gust.

The following morning, and able to cycle the last 500 metres, we finally reached our destination! There we were in the middle of the two hills of the mythical Uturunco, we had made it - 5800 meters on the highest road in the world!

I looked to the top and was determined to climb the two hundred meters required to achieve the 6000 meters. The Uturunco is known as the easiest 6000 meters. I had to be very persistent to convince Nuno to accompany me to the top. I was determined to reach the top, alone if need be. Reluctant and tired Nuno decided to come to the top and slowly, step by step, we reached the top of Uturunco at 6006 metres.

Self-portrait, an authentic smile after taking my bike to 5800 metros

The bikes rest, after the hard climb

It is difficult to describe the feeling felt when you are at the top of a mountain above 6000 meters. The views are impressive but is more than that, is a joy that invades your body and spreads to all the cells, you feel as if you were part of the landscape, capable of doing everything, that there are no obstacles...

Two crazy cyclists at 5800 meters above sea level.

After so many questions and doubts, after so many times we almost given up, there we were - at the top, and we achieved our goal because of the teamwork, we supported each other, and we were as one. We were like a machine where each peace had its function and we worked out in great union together, we were the wonder team, and we felt really lucky to have each other. That day we made it back to Quetena Chico. When we got there it was already dark and the night had fallen upon us. It was an excruciating downhill, the state of the road was simply deplorable, I suppose that during the ascent, as we pushed the bikes most of the time, we had not understood the real state of that road, and how inappropriate it was for cycling.

On our return nature presented us with this amazing landscape - the full moon lighting up the Uturunco

From Quetena Chico to Laguna Verde – defeated by the altiplano

We rested for one day in Quetena Chico and we left the following day. We decided not to go via the Geysers and the Coloured Lagoon since that meant more time in the SW of Bolivia and we had had our share of suffering, sandy, rocky roads and cold. We would head straight into Laguna Verde, close to the Chilean border where we would go to look for some western comforts, obviously not available in that part of the world.

We passed through Quetena Grande, about 10 quilometres from Quetena Chico and the state of the road began to deteriorate in the already foreseeable combination of sand, stones, washboards, wind and steep climbs.

I was tired, it was difficult to ride, the wind was pushing me and my bike backwards, and the stones were unbalancing me, I felt that the bike was too heavy and suddenly the tears began to fell from my eyes down my face. I clearly understood that the landscape was claiming its power, perhaps I had been too arrogant when I reached the top of Uturunco. I felt anger and frustration and an indescribable smallness, around me there was just the silence, that hostile environment, cold, wind, the rocks and stones, and poor Nuno who didn’t know what to do with my tears of desperation. I wanted to quit, wanted to put my bike on a car and never go back there. But how? In total isolation? We pushed the bikes a little further and camped in the middle of a mountain. The next day I woke up feeling more motivated but the gradients of the road were so surreal that the two of us had to help each other pushing one bike at a time uphill.

What place was this? How could human beings live in the middle of this desert of rocks, volcanoes and salt lakes? Why was I there? What was I looking for? What did I want to prove to myself and to others?

That day, after passing Colpa Lagoon from where boro (boranotrocalcita) is extracted, this mineral is used for the manufacture of enamels, ceramics and shampoo, we camped at 4 in the afternoon because the wind was so strong that it was literally impossible to cycle. We set up the tent the best we could, but there was no shelter from the wind, we put some stones around it and we hoped that it didn’t flew away.

Laguna Colpa

I didn’t sleep well that night because the sound of the wind shaking the tent was really scary. In the morning the wind was still very strong and tent that had stood heroically during the night, collapsed as an inert animal fainted on the sandy floor. There ended our adventure in the altiplano. Without the tent and incapacitated to fix it, it was impossible to continue. We went a few kilometres back to Colpa Lagoon and it took us quite a while to convince the responsible for the boro extraction to take us to Laguna Verde where there was some accommodation. I understand that we were not in a good situation, but it disgusted me to see how the man that drove us, took total advantage of our situation, charging over too much for a mere 60 kilometres drive. It disgusts me ever more when I saw him eating a can of fish and giving the leftovers to two little children that waited with hungry eyes for him to finish, and he had plenty of cans at his place. It was a dog eat dog world, if they don’t even respect each other, what may be of this place? Desolation and desertification, the only future for the altiplano.

The tent surrendered to the cyclonic winds

We felt sad and defeated. The landscape passed before our eyes and we could’t feel it with all our senses...but we knew that nature will always have the final say.

We went to Chile the next day. From the hostel, protected from the wind and the cold, we could see Laguna Verde in the distance, at this time of year it didn´t have the shades of emerald green for which it is known. The afternoon was sad and windy.

The Laguna Verde without the green and almost without water.

The next pedal strokes would take us to Chile and Argentina - soon in the next chronicle.

Read this adventure through Nuno’s eyes http://www.ontheroad.eu.com/

Bolivia, Oruro to Uyuni - tales of the most fantastic journey- Part I

2008-06-15T22:51:00.000+01:00

We all have within us a little adventurous soul, an avid Indiana Jones on the cabinets of our imagination. We all want to uncover untapped land, jungles with ancient ruins, meet exotic people. Deep inside, we all want to be free from the trap set by daily routines. We want to live different realities from our own. But in this globalized world there are not many places where man has not trampled, or ruins that have not been discovered...

I also sought adventure, I also wanted to reveal virgin lands and exotic people when I invested on this journey, and I have already many stories to tell, enough to write a book, but nothing felt really adventurous or unique, until I experienced the Bolivian Altiplano. For those who dare to live their lives on surprises, challenges and the unexpected, then the Altiplano is the place to go!

About the Altiplano

To understand Bolivia one has to understand it´s Altiplano. A place at first sight arid and desertic, but where 70 percent of the Bolivian population (most of them between Uyuni and Lake Titicaca) lives. Despite being the place with the highest concentration of population it still manages to be desolated and isolated. By the words of the article that came out in National Geographic of July 2008: "... the Altiplano is a land of superlatives: houses the largest and highest navigable lake in the world, the Titicaca, the largest desert of salt, the salt flat of Uyuni, is the second biggest plateau in the world, after the Tibetan, is a landscape of ice, fire, wind and salt that extends from the septentorial regions of Argentina to the plains of Peru. ... Perhaps, no other landscape on this planet reminds us that there were times when humans didn’t live in it." It is an area with great geological activity and so is rich in minerals, some volcanoes are active or semi-active. It is also a land populated by flamingos using the sulfurous lakes and their margins to build their nests, land of vicuñas, llamas, alpacas, suris (ostriches), foxes and other animals. The Altiplano is a single universe where only the bravest or the craziest dare to really unravel.

From Oruro to Sabaya, let the show begin...

Oruro is the last town before reaching Uyuni, there, we bought groceries, checked the equipment and did the final preparations. When talking with the locals about our intentions to cross the two salt flats (of Coipasa and Uyuni), they said that we were crazy, we would die frozen since it was the coldest time of the year, our tires would erode with the salt, we would be swallowed by the “eyes of water” formed in the salt flats, that we would get lost...what people didn’t realise was that those comments gave us even more desire to unravel with our bikes this much feared salt flats.

An "eye of water" in Coipasa Salt Flat

Popóo Lake

We had breakfast at the market - two sandwiches of roast pork, cut right in front of us, and half liters of fruit juice each, we are cyclists and have adventures to live, we need energy.

The Popóo Lake, in the outskirts of Oruro gives us a sample of what is to come: flamingos and waters that mirror the mountains and volcanoes that surround it. In the mid-afternoon we reached Toledo, a small village, where the tarmac road ended.

Despite being large, the dirt road was infested with washboards, something that neither we, nor our bicycles appreciate. In the end, the road becomes so unbearable that we decide to improvise a way through the pampa where we camped at dusk. We were cooking dinner when, from nowhere, appears a couple of farmers, with their flashlights, they were scared of us that they wanted to know what we were doing there, after they realize that we were only two cyclists on the road, they returned to their homes somewhere in the vast pampa. That night the temperature fell to 12 degrees minus.

Camping site in the pampa

Break for lunch

We woke up for another day of cycling, the road continued with washboards, we decided to follow the paths in the pampa. The sandwiches of canned fish were enhanced by the magnificent site where we decided to have lunch: a small salar which was full of water in its center, in the distance we could see the unmistakable pink dots- the flamingos.

The vast pampa

From the smooth pampa starts to erupt the first hills, we set ou tent on top of one of them and experienced the coldest night of the trip, minus 17 degrees. In the following days the ups and downs and the bad state of the road continue. We reach Ancavari and to our surprise there is a brand new paved road that wasn´t signaled in our map, this road would take us to Huachacallas.

Unfortunately the head wind makes its appearance and the bikes now run at a slow pace, it is difficult for us to move forward because the wind feels like an invisible wall, our bike computers show an average speed of 6 to 7 kilometres per hour, despite the road being almost flat and paved.

Again, tarmac road

We went through another village, Opoqueri, where we bought canned food, potatoes, biscuits and coca leaves, which we learnt to chew with the friends we previously known in Oruru, they supposedly help us to overcome the altitude simptoms, hunger and lack of energy . We camped a few kilometres from the village. The vicuñas, wild relatives of the llama, were our guards that night. Another cold and starry night extends its mantle over our tent and bikes.

Nuno buying lunch from a street vendor in Ancaravi

Church in Opequeri

We arrived in Huachacallas the following day, the wind had slowed down and there was a store selling vegetables and some food, but our MSR (stove that works with petrol) was empty and the petrol station in the village too. Bolivía is going through a political, economic and social crisis and despite the government denials, the lack of supply of fuel is already affecting much of the country.

Chipaya buildings at sunset

We went to Chipaya, a village of myths and legends, home to the Chipayas - descendants of the Tihawuanaco culture, one of the first and most advanced civilizations of America. Once we got out of Huachacallas we were forced to cook with firewood, because we could not find fuel anywhere. The pots that Nuno maintained so imaculate, became black from the flames, I couldnt stop noticing some comotion in Nuno’s eyes seing his pots being burnt, but I cooked a good dinner and the sky was full of bright starts so what are two black pot in the scheme of things?

Funerary buildings on the way to Sabaya

On the way to Chipaya we found some peculiar constructions, and I suppose it was my spirit of "Indiana Jones" that made me stop the bike and check what they were. To my surprise, within those odd constructions there were skulls and bones, they were funerary buildings of the former Chipayas. That day also, we had to cross one of the many frozen rivers, I remember this event dearly (despite my feet had almost reached freezing point), as we helped some shepperds to cross a huge herd of sheep who did not want, wisely, to cross the icy cold river waters. I put a few small lambs under my arms, they were frignthened and shaking. After many failed attempts, we finally managed to cross the stuburn herd.

Crossing the cold River Lauca with a herd of sheeps

Chipaya still preserves its traditions - women have their hair with braids, and many men wear a quite distinct poncho. We stayed in the meeting hall of the village, next to the Alcalde’s house. The culture of Chipaya is one of the most interesting of Bolivia, they have a language quite distinct from the Quechua or Aymara (the two indigenous languages most spoken in the country) and they are descendants of the Urus, the people of the floating islands of Lake Titicaca.

Sta. Ana de Chipaya village

In the following morning we went in search of food and gasoline but we didn't have any luck with our serches, we managed to find a little more than a tin of canned fish, some eggs, some biscuits and no petrol, - "perhaps in Sabaya," we were informed. We started to get some grips with the reality: small groceries have increasingly less groceries and vegetables or fruit are unexistent. We look to our panniers and the shelves of the stores with concern, would the food that we have, be enough for our cycling needs? It doesn´t seem so.

Children observing something inside a local school in Chipaya

From Chipaya to Llica - On sand dunes and the crossing of the first salt flat

We asked the locals if there was a direct road between Chipaya and Sabaya without having to go back and cross the frozen river of the previous day. The answers are unanimous: there is a trail through the pampa and it is shorter despite having more sand. It seems doable to us, sand is something that we knew that in one way or another would appear along the way. We are told that it is about 30 to 40 kilometres away, and we estimate that one day would be enough to arrive at Sabaya. An elderly man pointed us to a hill showing that Sabaya was at its base, and also showed us where the river was less deep so we could cross it with our bikes, it is the Lauca river that flows to the salt flat of Coipasa. We cross the freezing river, it was a gray and windy day. We did not know that by crossing that river we had also entered a different world where the unexpected and the bizarre were waiting for us.

Between Chipaya e Sabaya

At the beginning there were many paths where one stood out clearly, but after 5 kilometers, the paths multiplied without much order or direction, we looked the distant hill as a reference point to choose our path. Around us, hundreds of round buildings with blocks made of mud and salt extracted from the soil, challenging the winds, the rain, the sun and the time, they were the original construction of Chipayas and we could see them for miles. They don't seem to be used anymore and there is no sign of human presence, the silence is sharp and the feeling of isolation, the biggest I ever experienced.

From multiple trails the landscape changes into flooded areas of water and salt, we can not ride the bicycles, there is mud and sludge everywhere. We had to remove the panniers and move them one by one so we didn´t get stuck in the mud. From nothing, a little black piglet appeared, it started to follow us as if it was desperate for company, but it couldn't keep up with us. It woudld have been nice to have the little piglet as our pet, but surely belonged to someone, so we had to let it go. The wind lifted with frightening strenght. At 4 PM we decided to seek shelter in one of the circular buildings of the Chipayas so we can spend the night sheltered from the wind.

Little piglet in the vast pampa

The following day we looked at Chipaya in the distance, and decided to move forward because we did not want to cross those frozen rivers and swamps again. Surely the path would improve, or so we expected. The soil cycled by our bicycles began to become sandy, we spent the next 20 kilometres pushing the bikes through sand, which given the weight of its panniers was an extremely slow and painful exercise.

Nuno pushing his bike through sand dunes

We weren´t certain that we were on the right track, and the mountain in the distance was our only point of reference. We had lunch, a tin of canned fish, but to my shock, what I see inside is a brown paste that looks like cat food. We drank a cup of coffee each and packed our things. I turned around and I hear a Baaannng!!! A dry sound in the sand - I think Nuno´s bike had fallen and was about to say something when I turn around and realise that it wasn´t Nuno´s bike that was lying unconscious on the floor, but Nuno! I thought, "what a great place to faint, at least it was sand and not rough ground." I ran to him, and try to look as less worried as possible, when he finally awakens in my arms. - "What happened?", he asks me. - "You fainted!, I said. And while Nuno vocalized the reasons why he might have fainted, in my head, the plans of what would be if his condition got worse were taking shape: I would set the tent up where, I would leave him, I would warm the hot water bottles and cook, and would go by foot to Sabaya to look for help.

Sand and more sand

Nuno decided to continue after recovering from the fright. The sand was getting more intense and we made turns to head the way so that the one following behind had to do less effort pushing the bike. The wind was very strong, and this not only made difficult the already difficult task of pushing the bikes, but also was painfull and did not allow us to breathe properly. It was real torture!

...and yet more sand!

I was concerned about Nuno, I felt he was weak, but we had to keep moving, we had no choice. To my dismay a huge dune rose up in our path. We pushed the bikes, one at a time, and after we overcome that big dune we continued our saga through the altiplanic sand. The wind was strong, and the night was falling, we were determined to reach Sabaya that day, but reality stroke back - not one but an infinity of dunes extended right in front of our eyes.

Dunes standing in our way to Sabaya

It was madness to continue. From the top of the dunes in the distance we could see the tower of the church, but we would have to leave the crossing of that sea of sand for the next day, the wind and cold was getting too strong. We looked at our supplies, there wasn’t much left and water was little more than enough to cook something for dinner and breakfast. We thought that the following day would be even worse baring in mind the amount of sand dunes that we had ahead of us. It was obvious that the concept of path to the locals was quite a different one from the one that we had.

The following day were still visible the tracks left by two locals who also dragged their bikes in the evening to Sabaya. We followed the paths that led us to Sabaya in less than three hours, avoiding the larger dunes. We decided that we would take that day to rest our tired bodies and bones. We went to buy vegetables but were unable to find them anywhere, in the end we had to convince the owner of a restaurant to sell us some carrots, potatoes and onions. We also managed to find some gasoline.

Tracks from the bikes the previous night

Crossing an icy cold river (ice on the banks are visible)

Sabaya village

We headed to Villa Vitallina to cycle in our first major salt flat - Coipasa.

Arrival at Villa Vitallina

After we cycled about some 10 kilometres in the salt flat, we reached the island that is located in its center, the real crossing would be made the following day. Some people warned us that the salt flat still had water, we did not know very well what to think of that, nor if that meant that we could not cross it.

Sunset in Coipasa island

The next day we were back in the salt flat and everything around us was pure white, there was no water to be seen, we ventured the crossing. All I could hear was the sound of our tires crushing the salt under it. The sky was blue and the air crystalline, the hills on the horizon silent. We followed the marcs left by car tires but they became less marked and started to disappear, we saw land, but it was impossible to calculate the distance, and at the end of the day, the unexpected happened - water, water everywhere and we did not know how many kilometres and how deep it was. We cycled back where the salt flat was dry. The night fell and we did not want to freeze trying to cross the salt flat. We would camp in it and we would reevaluate our options the following day.

Blue sky in Coipasa Salt Flat

Surrounded by water in Coipasa Salt Flat

We set the tent in the rough ground of the salt flat. We felt the cold coming from the ground, but the night temperatures were not as low as we expected.The sunset was glorious,one of the most beautiful I had ever experienced in my life. The following day, we decided to cross the water, because we did not want to go back. Pedaling the mirror like landscape was just one of the most amazing things I ever done. The water was reflecting everything around it as if it was as a clear echo of the mountains and the the sky. It was like being in a surrealistic painting.

First camp site in the salt flat of Coipasa

We reached land without sinking the bicycles. The brakes, changes and chain were a little stiff from all the salt and water.

We reached water at the end of the day

Mirror reflections in Coipasa Salt Flat

Winter fall fashion for salt flats crossings

In the small village of Tres Cruces we bought a few more canned food and potatoes filled the bottles with water. We asked a local for the best way to reach Challacollo. A motorcycle passes by and the guy says: " - easy just follow the marks left by that motorcycle." This was what we did. Another mistake, the motorcycle took in fact the shortest way, but also the sandiest. We had to push the heavy bikes through the sandy roads all morning, we didn´t managed to advance more than 5 kilometres, until we decided to make a detour and take the bicycle to the edge of the salt flat, which was a sandy but cyclable road.

That road brought us to Challacollo in the afternoon, and I asked another local if we were still far from Llica. He said that it was only 12 kilometres away and gave me directions. Of course, once again these directions were wrong and we found some more sandy paths where we had to push our bikes through. We camped at the end of the day feeling completely lost, it just didn´t make sense. A farmer riding a bicycle with his small daughter in the back, confirmed, what we suspected, we were in the wrong direction. We had to go back to next junction and get the correct road to Llica.

Llica to Uyuni, the crossing of the biggest salt flat in the world

Llica has one of the main entrances to Uyuni´s salt flat in its north part. There, we found food accommodation and even Internet to communicate to the world that we were well and alive. We left the day after for the very expected crossing. The Coipasa salt flat has only 64 kilometres, which compared with the 180 that we would cycle in Uyuni, are insignificant. The Uyuni salt flat is the most visited and therefore the sense of isolation is not as great as in Coipasa, every now and then, a Jeep loaded with less adventurous tourists passes by.

There are several islands in the salt flat, they are the remains of ancient volcanoes. These islands are full of fossils of corals, signs of the times when they were covered by sea. We camped on the island of “Pescado”, the biggest and least visited. In the distance we could see Tunupa, a volcano that is semi-active. The sunsets in the Altiplano, particularly in the salt flats are truly unique: shades of pink and blue sky contrasting with the white of the salt and the silhouette of the surrounding mountains and volcanoes.

On the second day of crossing we sighted in the midst of a vast white surface a ciclotourist – Herve from Switzerland. We set our tents and in the cold night we shared information, adventures and ingredients, preparing pasta with tomato sauce and vegetables - a classic amongst cyclists. We got on pretty well because Herve had the same philosophy of traveling – just taking it easy and enjoying the moment. He was working in Africa as a Safari guide for a few months and was travelling the remaining months around the world, what a dream!

Camp site with Herve

At half past seven at night we were forced to withdraw to our tents, it was too cold even to allow the thoughts to come out and become sentences. I got myself inside my sleeping bag and felt something wet inside it. Panic, red lights flashing inside my brain, my sleeping bag was wet and it was a really cold night, I thought I would die frozen... I put my hands inside the sleeping bag to access what had happened and realise that my hot water bottle had bursted, my sleeping bag could not be used. I look at Nuno and said – “ I think we are going to have to share your sleeping bag!”. We try to get inside it but it was just too narrow, it was obvious that we wouldn't be able to close the zip to the top. We had a laughter attack, trying to move inside it, as we were coordinating our movements. In the end we managed to fall asleep, but it was a really cold night, I think we would have frozen if it wasn´t for the warmth of each others bodies.

The next day, we said goodbye to our friend and left in opposite directions. The white and the silence seemed to be endless. We finished to cross the slat flat at Colchani, there, we spent the night in a hotel made with blocks of salt.

We cycled up to 20 kilometres to Uyuni the following day in more sandy and wasboard roads. Uyuni is a small and disappointing city as the point of arrival for the adventures we had lived the last weeks. In Uyuni there´s a graveyard of locomotives, about 80 agencies, tours and a lots of cold.

Salt hotel in Colchani

Antonio Queiros, a Portuguese motorcyclist was there waiting for us, we is heading North, to Alaska, and it was really nice to catch up with another Poirtuguese adventurer, which seems to be rare these days.

Nuno and António Queirós in Uyuni

In Uyuni we updated websites and prepared the next adventure towards the highest road in the world that goes up to 5800 meters, but that is another story not to be missed.

Check also Nuno’s site on http://ontheroad.eu.com/ for a different view on my stories.

Antonio Queirós adventures are available on http://viajardemoto.blogspot.com/

Peru, Cusco to Bolivia, Oruro - The Crossing of the Most Expected Border

2008-05-25T01:29:00.011+01:00

El Alto – The city of the peasant’s dreams or my worse nightmare

The car horns sounded like angry hyenas. In front of me stops, arrived from nowhere, a combi (local transport), disposing into the street more people than one would think posible to fit inside. I try to turn left but there are queues of cars and trucks transmiting black clouds to an already densely charged atmosphere. People cross themselves in front of me as if I were invisible. On top of my head, hanging signs, announcing the most disparate things as hairdressing, transport companies, universities ... and those who do not count on help from signs to advertise their business, do so in in a high and loud voice, shouting prices of transports, fresh bread, fruit, meat, telephone calls ... There are people sitting on the floor selling cheap Chinese goods, fruit and taking from the road the little space available for movement. Hungry dogs and garbage everywhere, and many, many people walking from one place to another as if they were going nowhere. El Alto is like a city for people who don’t know how to live in a city or the purpose of it. It seems a gigantic machine from which the pieces were released and are uncoordinated, without order or direction!

I had cycled over 90 kilometres that day, I was tired and nothing could have prepared for that apotheotic arrival. El Alto is a satellite city of La Paz. And if La Paz was an eye then El Alto would be its eyebrow, an eyebrow where half a million people live, mostly peasants who abandoned their life in the arid highlands and discover there, some, their luck, and others, like me, their worst nightmare.

We looked for accommodation for over two hours but everything was full and what was available was sub-human. That night we did the great extravagance of the trip: we stayed in a 3-star hotel in one of its suites. There was a porter, who took our dusty luggage, a real treat for us, vagabond cyclists. On the fifth floor with panoramic views over the city of chaos, we felt like fish in an aquarium, protected from reality of the city, but, somehow, still part of it. The extravagance didn’t turn out too expensive, the Hotel Alexander, who was promoted as the best hotel in the city costed us a mere 10 US dollars each, we deserved it.

Machu Pichu - The story of a happy day

My breathing was wheezing. I climbed in less than one hour the thousands of steep that led me to one of the most beautiful sites on this planet - Wayna Pichu, the steep mountain of Machu Pichu, where one can enjoy the panoramic view of the ruins and the lush scenery that surrounds it. Tourists began to arrive and sit on the craggy rocks waiting for the big show to start. All around was covered by dense fog, green and precipices. As if in a dream, the clouds began to move prefiguring the lazy ruins which awoke slowly at our feet. Aahhhh! A unisonous choir of voices sounded, but again came another cloud that covered everything. At mid-morning the sun had imposed its presence and the clouds decided to reveal the show for which all had waited - Machu Pichu at our feet!

Me and Nuno walked away from the crowds and found a terrace of stone only for us to enjoy in peace the beauty of that site. I closed my eyes and thought about everything I had achieved in my life. In how happy I was. In how privileged I was: was living my dream, traveling the world! And not all dreams that I dreamt gave me what I expected from them. But to travel, to travel is more than a dream is a state of mind that completely makes me be who I am, in my real self! In the midst of divagations I also looked at the map that was taking shape in my mind, this map would take me to ride on the shores of Lake Titicaca, to cycle Bolivia, to reach the big city of La Paz .. and then who knows, the Salares, the Atacama desert, Chile, Argentina ...

Encircled by centuries of history, silent stones, luxuriant vegetation, I thanked my mother to be the wonderful mother that she is, for her unconditional support. Thanked my brother, a tall handsome man with black hair, a childhood friend, and a friend of all times, he accepted to lend me money so that my dream could last for a few more months and to my father with whom I do not share everything I wished to, but whom equally accepted to finance me, on loan basis, for a few months.

We descended the steps, slowly the end of the afternoon started to hide again the ruins of Machu Pichu. Tomorrow would be another day where thousands of tourists would see, what is by right considered one of the 7 wonders of the world. We arrived in Aguas Calientes with tired legs, tortured by walking so much. Our spirits were more fulfilled than ever.

Steep steps

Cycling the banks of Lake Titicaca and entry into the Bolivía

I left Cusco on a rainy morning, a car almost ran over me and my bicycle when I was heading towards the bus station. I had decided to spend a few more days in the Inca capital and meet Nuno in Puno, a tourist city in western shores of Lake Titicaca near the border with Bolivia. My desire to leave Peru as soon as possible and avoid the roads full of heavy traffic was bigger than to cycle 400 kilometers on the arid highlands landscape.

Puno is an ugly city, but unfortunately, this was something that I was already used to in Peru and pretty much everywhere throughout South America. It seemed made of adobe, but that didn’t really contribute to its beauty. It is on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. Puno receives thousands of tourists every day, but the attractives that the city itself offers to visitors are really limited.

The snow caped mountains that surround Titicaca Lake

We were decided to cycle the eastern side of Titicaca Lake. The little information available about that route was that it is land of smugglers and uncertain but quiet roads - perfect! At least when the other option meant sharing a bad road with buses filled with tourists and heavy traffic. We had planned to make by boat the floating villages, but we woke up late the next morning and missed the only boat there was that day. The setback ended up in our favour: that day there was a national strike that resulted in empty roads without traffic. In fact we were not so sure that those islands would be so interesting now that the only real aspect of it are tourists and indigenous selling their souvenirs.

Nuno with Titicaca Lake on the background

The Titicaca lake has dark blue waters, the air around them is very pure and therefore one can see, as if it those mountains were just right next to us. Thousands and thousands of years, when the oceanic plates collided with the continental ones and formed the Andean mountain ranges (eastern and western), a large body of water rose up and became stuck between the mountains creating a lake as big as a sea. The Lake Titicaca and all other lakes that are in the Peruvian and Bolivian altiplano, are what remains of that huge lake that was the birthplace of civilizations. In the altiplano (highlands) rivers and lakes are systems that communicate with each other, since the eastern and western mountain ranges obstruct the passage of water into the oceans. We cycled through small villages that flank the big lake and at the end of the day camped beside it, hearing the sound of small waves caressing the stones on its shores. The night sky was indigo blue and the stars reflected its light in the tranquil waters. These were our last days in Peru, soon we would be in Bolivia, a country that we had great expectations for.

Puerto Acosta, where the invisible line that separates Peru and Bolivia passes through and that gives two nationalities to Titicaca Lake, was the most beautiful border that I ever had crossed. It may sound bizarre; because in reality the international borders do not generally reserve great attractions. But there at the top of the mountain with the blue and the immensity of the lake at my feet, without officers, without confusion, the world seemed an almost perfect place. I thought that would be good if one day all borders of the world were like this one.

From La Paz to Oruro - the altiplano

We had the contact of a couple who hosted cyclists in El Alto, so after we enjoyed our suite at the Hotel Alexander, we stayed with the kind Wilma and Jesus. We stayed in their house for a few days while we updated sites and discovered La Paz.

La Paz is located on a steep and deep canyon, surrounded by mountains of high altitude. The silhouette of Illimani, a large snow caped mountain, behind the urban scene, is the icon image of the city. La Paz is the capital of the Bolivian government but Sucre also disputes the title to be the country’s capital. It seems to me difficult to understand what is the status of this city, the Bolivians are a people divided and plagued by political and social issues and is curious to see how that affects the decision and the consensus even to elect its capital.

Laz Paz and the Illimani on the background

La Paz is 20 minutes away from El Alto, but these cities are years of light from each other. La Paz is somewhat a sophisticated city with colonial and neo-classic buildings, in its streets there are cafes, theaters, promenades, gardens ... the families stroll at the weekends in their best attire, the atmosphere feels a little like being in a European city. But La Paz is also set in the altiplano, where campesinos (peasants), constitute 70 percent of the Bolivian population, and that is why in La Paz, in the midst of all the sophistication, we can see with their black braids, round skirts, coconut hats - the cholitas, or campesinas, mostly selling handicrafts or some other type of informal trade.

Although we were enjoying the hospitality of Wilma and Jesus, El Alto was taking over our patience. Every day we had to cross the city to return to the house of our hosts, fighting crowds of people, unbearable noise, litter, it was truly overwhelming. At night, although we were in the fourth floor, the noise from the streets wouldn’t let us rest. We left after 5 days towards Oruro.

Me and Wilma

Me and Jesus

Leaving El Alto and the Cordillera Real

We cycled 300 kilometers in three days and a morning, from El Alto to Oruro. I cycled, for the first time in my life, 100 kilometres in a day. I was happy and motivated. I knew that the next months of cycling would be tough, but doing those kilometers in such a short amount of time gave me a lot of energy. I felt stronger than ever.

Oruru is a mining town, its centre is pleasant, but the reality of the country’s poverty and lack of infra-structures is displayed on the outskirts of the city. It is also in Oruro where one of the most pouplar Carnivals of South America is celebrated. Once a year, the uninteresting streets, fill up with color, music, beings of mythology, and women in bare legs.

Oruro

Statue from the mythology, represented in the Carnival of Oruro

We stayed in Residential Vergara. The owners' sons were young doctors with whom we became friends. In one afternoon, me and Juan Carlos, one of the son’s, cycled the city and its surroundings to see some of its attractions, Juan explained the meaning of the statues on the entrance to the city, we then visited a huge open sky gold mine, for this it was created an artificial lake used for cooling the machinery used. We ended the day looking and taking photos of the sunset in lake Popóo, where the river Desaguadero flows the waters from Titicaca Lake. Popóo is part of the many lakes in the altiplano that formed a big lake thousands of years ago.

Me and Juan Carlos

The artificial lake from the gold mine in Oruro

Me with Lake Popóo in the background

Lake Popóo at sunset

The next pedal strokes would take us to the Salar de Uyuni Coipasa and we were eager for adventure. We would get more than we actually barged for ... but those are other stories.

Accompain my adventures also on Nuno’s site in http://www.ontheroad.eu.com/

Peru, Ayacucho - Volunteer Work in la Casa Hogar Los Gorriones

2008-04-07T22:11:00.001+01:00

The power of dreams and hope within the future

When I entered it was already dark and I didn’t have the perception of the space. I was meeting Gil, in the orphanage that him and Chantal had created 6 years ago.
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Months before departure to this adventure in South America I had contacted several institutions regarding doing some volunteer work, some answered and from the Casa Hogar Los Gorriones the answer was negative, the time that I was planning to be in Peru, they had enough volunteers. Everything changes and nothing has changed more than my travel plans…

In Gil´s negative answer was a lot of positivity with a passionate description of the project that him and his partner Chantal had developed in Peru – an orphanage where besides abandoned children, they also received children with handicaps and special needs. The story of these two beings is worthy of mention especially as a story of courage, determination and love and what you can achieve with these!

Gil and Chantal are a French-Belgian couple who lived in the French Pyrenees in a idyllic existence with their little sun Aaron, however, that existence started to fill with emptiness because they felt it wasn’t shared. Inspired by Madre Teresa de Calcutta’s teachings they decided to start a project in France, due to barriers imposed by French bureaucracies it didn’t go ahead. They were determined to pursue their dream and went to India, once again, emigration bureaucracies, only allowed the couple to stay 6 months, or else to pay an illegal sum to the authorities for the extension of their Visa. They didn’t want to be accomplices of this corrupt practice and after following a friends advice, they packed their things and went to Peru, were they found out about the extreme poverty lived in this country.

In 2001, without speaking a single word of English, they arrived in Lima and in March 2002 the dream finally came true and they opened the doors of the Casa Hogar Los Gorriones in Ayacucho. In Peru these projects are not supported by the government and soon they started to run out of money, they had to sell their house in the Pyrenees and with that act deciding that their lives would be forever linked to these children and to Peru.

The Casa Hogar los Gorriones is a humble home where love and hope are everywhere. The children who live there were affected buy severe sub nutrition, traumatic experiences and physical and mental handicaps, many of them weren’t accepted in other orphanages due to the difficulty and the cost in dealing with these issues. Some of the children in Casa Hogar are for adoption, but many have parents and the philosophy of the orphanage is to promote the recovery of the family balance and the reintegration of life in family, when possible. They also promote the studies and the preparation of the children for a better future, many attend private schools as that will enable them to have access to better education. There is a new house being planned so they can receive more children and develop ambitious projects such as family planning, especially amongst teenagers, and fosting homes, so children can stay within families.

And maybe these are things of destiny, but for some reason I kept contact with Gil, informing him of the progress of my trip and of my movements in South America and one day I received an email from him inviting me to spend a week in the Casa Hogar so I could see the project and meet the children.

Once again I changed my travel plans and put my bicycle inside a bus and headed to Ayacucho with true willingness to meet and participate in this project.

When I arrived to that Andean city with over 93 000 inhabitants, stuck between the ample valley of the Sierra Central Sul Andina in Peru at 2761 meters, the sun was shinning and the quietness of the urban routine hid the scars of the past that only slowly revealed itself as I was getting more involved with the inhabitants of that city.

Ayacucho get´s its name from the junction of two quechua words (language spoken by the indigenous people and that originates from the Inca culture) – “aya” meaning dead our soul and “cuchu” meaning corner. One can read “corner of the deads or the souls”, and this is an allusion to the many battles fought there and of those who perished as consequence. In fact it was Simon Bolivar who named the city after a decisive war against the Spanish, which lead to the independence. Before it had the less morbid name of San Juan the Huamanga. And maybe it’s the destiny of a name or perhaps that some places are destined to tragedy, Ayacucho was the main stage to an event that shed more blood in the already bloody history of Ayacucho. Reading these details in my guide I didn´t have the notion how these scars are still open in the lives of the people in this city.

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I was told to wait, Gil would come and talk to me. In the middle of the darkness I felt a little body approaching me and who asked my name. She then jumped into my lap and nested in my arms playing with my hair. It was Noemi. And as all the stories, that these children’s past tell, the story of Noemi is a sad one marked by a recent event that the Peruvian government prefers to ignore and take no responsibilities – the recent years of terrorism by the Sendero Luminoso (Shinning Path) a pro-Marxist group, who seriously affected Peru in the Ayacucho Province in the 80´s and 90´s. This terrorist group may not have received the media attention that other terrorist groups receive, but the number of deceived and people that disappeared as a consequence of their acts and of the counter actions of the Peruvian government were devastating for Peru and for the already impoverished region of Ayacucho. And the numbers speak for themselves: 69,280 deaths of which only 22,507 are identified – this leaves a shameful number of 46,773 of Peruvians who are missing.

Noemi, big brow eyes, dark hair, open smile and hand of love is the daughter of a woman who lost all her family in the wave of the terrorist actions of the Sendero Luminoso and the of the not least deadly, counter actions of the Peruvian government. Noemi´s mother lived on the streets affected by fear and trauma, she was hiding. She had Noemi at 15 and ended up abandoning her, she was later received in the Casa Hogar. Noemi has other sisters, one is in another orphanage and the other lives with her mum. Gil told me later that Noemi had a cerebral palsy that made her learning more difficult and her character was could be special as she sometimes was rejected by the other children. For me, Noemi was a sweet child with whom I spent hours doing homework, drawing, playing and telling stories. She was just an innocent being with an open future and with a past that I hoped went away so that its nails didn´t scratch the future.

And in that end of evening I could finally meet Gil. But the hope and the strength in his words were hiding the sad eyes of a being who knew that the separation was close – Chantal, the dynamic strength of the dreams of the Casa Hogar, a mum for those children and his partner was loosing the battle against cancer and there weren’t many days of life left for her.

Initially it was agreed that my volunteer work, scheduled for a week, would consist in me visiting the Casa Hogar and interact with the children as I wished. I would stay in the volunteer house, close to the Casa Hogar. But a week transformed in a month and to Chantal’s request I started doing shift work, after a week. In these shifts we assist the Peruvian professionals who work there and who dedicate long hours (12 hours a day). The children are divided in three groups according to their age and specific needs and each one of these groups has a set routine whereby the senoritas and the volunteers ensure that the children do their tasks and help them with those.

Slowly I began to feel great affection for those children and realizing that in the social and economical context of Peru, those children, despite their traumatic past, receive much more than thousands of other children in the world: they have a roof, they go to school, they have 3 meals a day and are surrounded by people who dedicate their lives to them.

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I woke up with the rays of sun entering the window, I packed my things and put my bags and the bicycle on a taxi and drove to Carmen Alto so I could start my volunteer work: what the darkness, had hidden the night before, the sunny day revealed like a slap in my face. After the almost vertical ascent that the old taxi had difficulty in climbing, the city as it reveals itself for tourists with the Plaza de Armas, 33 churches and cobbled streets, reminiscents of the colonial order, stayed behind and I moved forward to where the Casa Hogar was located, the wholes on the road were so big that they were threatening to disintegrate the car. Carmen Alto was a different part of the city, the streets weren’t paved and the rubbish and the animals roamed free. There was no sewage pipes so a constant stream of dirty water descended the streets. Poverty and privation were everywhere and it was impossible to ignore them!

I left my luggage on the floor of the casa of the volunteers where I slept for 3 weeks, there was 8 of us crammed in one room and it was obvious that comfort would not be a main feature in my stay in that house, but for someone who is camping pretty much anywhere and staying in the most basic accommodation, that would not be a problem and somehow, experiencing life as it is presented to the rest of the people in that area, seemed the right way to fully understand the conditions in which most people live in Peru.

I knocked on the door and one of the senoritas let me in, I could reveal, through the colors of the day the space that hosted those children and those who worked there. It was a simple place where all the space available was used. There were 4 rooms in total, where the children slept according to their ages, a kitchen where food was cooked in a firewood stove, the meals were served outside when the weather allowed, otherwise, there was a play room where the children used to do their homework and used as dining area in the rainy season, there was a playground and a place to keep chickens and rabbits. Gil, Chantal and Aaron had their rooms just upstairs on the same compound. Luxury would not spring to mind, but it seemed to me that the most essential needs of the children were being fulfilled and that the atmosphere was very familiar. It was like being in a big house with a big family.

It was difficult in the first day to know what to do, especially because I wasn’t taking part in the shifts and the children had pretty much set routines, so I entered the room of the Lupe, or the children with special needs, and they are truly very especial children and introduced myself to the senoritas who were working the day shift and felt compelled to stay there for the rest of the day learning about those children, their needs, that due to their disabilities had all the time in the world to receive attention and affection.

The Children

Eberson is partially blind although he can distinguish shadows, he has a cerebral palsy that among other things prevents him from walking, he has 5 years old. He learned to recognize me and he used to call me saying “Iana, Iana – mira la pelota” or “Iana, besos, besos!”. I loved to hug him and take him to play with his ball, or to take him to sleep and sing and play games where he always ended up giving so many kisses that I almost chocked. He loved to do these things and his smile and laughter were contagious however denying them would mean crying time where he would knock his head on the floor as if to call attention and to self harm. His story is sad, is a story of abandon and neglect. Eberson is in the adoption list. He is an adorable child who slowly starts to gain some mobility in his legs, it seems that the therapy is starting to work. Maybe he will be a musician one day, since he seems to be so keen in music and playing musical instruments.

Sheila is a shy girl who expresses herself and her wishes in a soft low voice, typical of a very insecure child. She suffers from a light palsy whereby she has some difficulty in walking and talking. Her mother had her when she was very young and she could not look after Sheila’s special needs so she took her to the Casa Hogar. She visits Sheila regularly and takes her out at the weekends. Her plan is to take her back home when her financial situation improves. Sheila and I were friends, she used to keep little things in her pockets like flowers and seeds that she used to show me. We would then agree that was our secret and nobody but me and her knew about those things so meaningful for her.

Ruth Karina was one of the first children who arrived at the Casa Hogar. She was found in the street close to a dump in the middle of rats and dogs – a scenery hard to imagine but that in Peru, and certainly in many other parts of the world, is the reality of those who are born different, because for many, a cerebral palsy is a curse and the children who has got is a burden for the family, someone they have not got a clue on how to treat, and worse, on how to love. It surprises me, a country so catholic like Peru where people display saints everywhere, seem to go to mass and whatnot, the general disrespect for human life. No one knows where Ruth comes from, or who is her family but the marks that she has in her body, of violence and physical abuse, lead me to think that it is better not to know, she surely wasn’t wanted or loved. Today she is the adoptive daughter of Gil and Chantal, and with patience, dedication and love, she enriches everyone’s life with her smiles.

Nilda is a little girl, 4 years old. She has a serious palsy and a chronic disease in her lungs. She was left to die by the doctors, but once again she was taken to the Casa Hogar and by giving her oxygen almost daily she seems to be surviving. Her health is however very delicate and she gets ill very frequently. Her smile and her cheekiness are the ray of light in the house, and her strength and determination to survive are admirable!

Fermin is a very special boy who appears to be 3 years old although he has 8 in reality. His mental handicap was aggravated by the abuse and starvation he suffered at the hands of his parents until he was 6. He was abandoned and found in the streets in a cold, rainy night. He was so sub nurtured that he used to eat his faeces when he first went to the house. He is an hyperactive and autistic child and his behaviors used to be aggressive. Due to the work of two French volunteers, who developed a recovery program for Fermin, he is a different boy and he is starting to have a more normal behavior. It can be hard to work with Fermin, but it surprises me to see how a being that was so mistreated in his life, can reattribute the love and the affection given to him.

Fredy, smiling boy, or a crying one depending on his moods who had a fascination with the fairytales I used to read to him. Deyse, his sister, is also in the Casa Hogar. After their mum´s death, his dad could not look after them and so he took them to the Casa Hogar, he visits them frequently. They are happy and cheerful children with whom is quite easy to interact.

There are in total 35 children and some of them have stories of cruelty on their little backs, stories of abandon, mistreatment, alcoholism, prison, and the list is endless and gory. The main thing to remove from this, is that although you can not change what happened, you can most certainly direct the future. And I do hope that these amazing children may enjoy a different destiny from their parents and may above all have the emotional balance necessary to walk their steps towards the future.

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Funfair day

We left hand in hand walking towards Carmen Alto fair where there were fun rides. It reminded me of the primary school days, wehn we used to go out on fair day, only now I was on the other side, looking after the children ensuring they didn’t get lost, and that nothing bad would happen to them.

Abel, one of the boys stepped over dog’s poo and all the children laughed. I felt sorry for him and said out loud so that they could hear me:
- In Portugal is a sign of god luck to step on poo.
Abel raised his voice over the general laughter and said:
- Did you hear what Joana said? Everybody stepping on poo, is sign of good luck!

I had to explain that it had to happen by accident to avoid having the children stepping on every poo they’d find in the street. Children have their own perception of things and it can be tricky sometimes to make sense of the things we say. But I do wish from the bottom of my heart that these children never have to go on paths full of dirt and experience bad things in life again, I feel they had their share of that! I wish they can grow with love, that they can grow with care, that they find homes and families that respect them and that they become brave men and women. I hope they can help to change the disorientated path that their country seems to lead, but most of all that they help to break the mechanical pieces of the vicious cycle experienced by themselves and their parents.
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Chantal left us a few days after I left Ayacucho. I will not forget the intensity of her blue eyes even when her illness seemed to take all the energy from her. I loved to give her long hugs in the hope that her frail and thin body could absorb some of the energy. A few days before she left us, she was still doing the rota, making sure that all the clothes were well cleaned, and she certainly gave a lot of life to that house, now more empty and sad in her absence. It is a great loss to all of us who were privileged to have met her and most of all for those children and her family. Her work, her dedication, her determination will live forever! In her words: “Without love I am nothing”, and in this statement lies simple but big truth!

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The Casa Hogar los Gorriones is a project that lives thanks to the kind donations that it receives from many people all over the world, since the Peruvian government has got no programmes to assist this kind of initiatives. But children are always in need of school material, school fees,, clothes and other items. Have a look at their website and find out more about the children. You can also make a donation online if you wish.
http://www.casahogarlosgorriones.org/

If you wish to volunteer, particularly if you have any training for children with special needs, the Casa Hogar is always keen to receive your helping hand. Please contact Gil on gil54fr@yahoo.fr

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For a different perspective on my adventures log on to Nuno´s website and checkout his Photos and chronicles http://www.onetheroad.eu.com/

Peru, Lima - From Tujillo to Lima.

2008-03-03T22:06:00.000Z

The urban chaos and the untouched nature

Trujillo

The sharp pain ran like an invisible wire through my skin´s surface spreading like an oil stain on my hips. It was the last injection of apainful treatment that had anchored me forcefully to the city of Trujillo for much longer than I had wished for. The city of the Plaza deArmas that looked like a rainbow was a mere passage place with limited charms that expired after three or four days, and the three weeks thatI ended up staying revealed a city empty of cultural or other entertainments. The days became monotuous and lazy and the asphyxiatingheath left my body in a lethargic and apathetic state.

After exploring the charms of the Plaza de Armas, the pre -Incan ruins of Chan Chan and the touristic beach of Huanchaco, the obscene traffic,the noise levels, much higher than the human ear should or could stand, the ugly and poor architecture of the shanty towns eating thedesert dunes around the city, I couldn't bring myself to enjoy that city.

On the day that we left I woke up early and tired. The night before we had celebrated Lucho´s hospitality at his place, cooking Bacalhau aEspanhola (a typical Portuguese dish funnily enough). After dinner, Lucho improvised a disco and we danced to the sound of cumbias andsalsa. hose sounds are becoming our trip soundtrack and danced to the sound of the improvised cumbias and although we cant really dancethem properly, we still attempted some clumsy jumps and steps, under Luchos amused stare. I think the happiness and the spontaneity was alsocoming from the fact that we were finally leaving Trujillo.

Lucho accompanied us out of the city, as we were cycling side by side, Lucho asked me in a sincere and honest way how my adolescence hadbeen, he wanted to know how to deal with Angela, his daughter and the light of his life, who is going through that stage. Those 10 initialkilometres went very quickly and even the 5 kilometres climb felt like a flat piece of road in Lucho´s company and remembering those gonedays.We said our goodbyes on the top of the dune, Lucho had hosted us in his Casa de Ciclista during those long weeks, I looked for the lasttime to his childish eyes and his warm smile, and saw him going, back to the chaos of his city now silent and distant.

Ahead, the silence, the yellow of the sands and the blue of the pacific, we were back to Sechura desert. A truck passed by andinterrupted that order of things to disappear in the endless Panamericana Norte. We were returning to the Andes and leaving thePanamerican through a private road of a project, that we later found to be of irrigation to the green fields thatsprout in the desert. Mankind proves that that there is not much that isn't doable and plant the pure desert with asparagus or artichokes is one ofthem. But those refined vegetables are for exportation, I don't think there is an interest to use those technologies to feed Peruvians. Thechoclo - one of the many kinds of corn, potatoes, quinua, camote and so many other vegetables typical in this country are still planted andharvested in the traditional way on the steep hills and river valleys, depending mostly on human labour and force and being subjected to theunpredictability of the weather humours.

The silence

The heath was so dry that dried even the sounds. Pedaling after leaving the paved road, we could ear the sound of the tires on theunpaved road dust and stones, our breathing and not much else. The bright blue sky, the red and yellow hills of sediments in formation -it was a transitional landscape between the desert and the mountains. The feeling of isolation was liberating after all the urban intensityfelt on the last weeks and we were happy to be back in nature´s womb, to let ourselves get involved in its long and caring arms, we wereinsignificant dots in the vast surroundings.

We would follow the Rio Santa for the next 300 kilometres snaking its banks on a unpaved road that would take us to Huaraz - the entrancedoor to the Cordillera Blanca which was considered by a geographical society as the most beautiful mountain range on the planet.We didn't´tsuspect that those kilometres would be so beautiful and that we would have to stop so many times in awe with the power of those natural monuments that rose before our eyes.We cycled the bottom of the valley that was the passageway of the river waters. At the beginning the banks were soft and the river waslarge lazily flowing to the sea, but as we cycled upstream the hills gave place to canyons of vertical walls with rocks exposed like awounds, the road that we rode in an almost state of loneliness was like a white hair sculpted in the mountain and the waters werestarting to rebel, debating angrily and furiously against the hard round rocks that stopped their natural flow. We were following thesound of this invigorating battle on the opposite direction of where the waters would meet the sea. We were heading to its cradle up in themountains.

There was hardly any human activity in that remote area, there was only a few Toytas used as mean of transport between the distantmountain villages, trucks loaded with rocks from the mines that existed nearby, around which the few people seemed to live. It was adesolating landscape in what concerns to human existence, the eyes of the miners that we saw on the way, reflected the lack of light intheir lives, the physical endurance demanded by their work and of their resolute determination in extracting from the earth a way of survival.

After 4 days pedaling in what seemed the most beautiful landscape of the whole trip and also the days that I was most distant fromcivilization, we arrived in Huallanca a village that was truly idyllic. Huallanca was an oasis amongst Peruvian villages which are normallymirrors of the poverty existent in the country. In Huallanca the streets had names, no rubbish and there seemed to be some order andfamiliarity. Maybe the explanation for this is the presence in the village of a north American company that explores an hydroelectricproject. Passing by its installations we could see a small village with sports complex and pre-built homes. I really felt I wanted to spendsome more time in there, but we had to leave the next day.

Canyon del Pato

The last part of our route to Huaraz was the only that was mentioned on Lonely Planet but we could not see anymore human presence thanbefore. The Canyon del Pato was the natural continuation of the road we were cycling, but the road started to climb the vertical walls ofthe canyon through the 37 tunnels and offering breathtaking views over the rapids below. Some of these tunnels were too long to enable seeingits end and in one of them I had a close encounter with a speeding car that almost crashed into me. It took me some time to recover from thescare and after that all I wanted was a safe road to ride on.

As we approached our destination the landscape started to have more human presence and becoming less interesting. We were expecting to seethe white tops that gave fame to the Cordillera Blanca but the clouds that we hadn't seen for so long showed up and covered the scenery.Between grey sky, the mototaxi noise and the Andean cold - that´s how we arrived in Caraz a village in Andes supposedly more interestingthan Hauraz. Apart from the Plaza de Armas that was somewhat nice and a colorful market where we could see again people with theirtraditional outfits, there was not much else that was charming in the village and we left the day after we had arrived. We celebrated Nuno´sbirthday in a little village called Carhuaz that was signaled on our map as one having one of the most beautiful main squares of the region. I suppose that you don't argue tastes, but that main square could only be of the liking of a blind person. We spent part of the evening ofNuno´s birthday on the long wait for our dinners. Nuno decided to try roasted guinea pig, or Cuy as it is known here and I had some steakwith fries.Let´s say that Nuno´s cuy looked like an electrocuted rat with its raised paws, its flavour is not as bad as itsappearance but baring in mind all the effort it takes to eat the thing I don't think I will be having some anytime soon. We got back tothe hostal under rain and ended up the birthday celebrations drinkingrum, chatting and listening music till we fell asleep. We woke up thenext morning and cycled under rain the last kilometres to Huaraz.

Back to Chaos - Huaraz to Lima

Huaraz managed to be an even uglier place than what I had imagined on my worse expectations. Its from there where most adventures to thecordillera Blanca are organized, but that city with a past of natural catastrophe (it was almost wiped our by an earth quake in 1970) hasgot absolutely no beauty or framing with the pristine surrounding landscape.We found good lodging away from the chaos of the city centre in Caroline Lodge, we stayed there updating the websites and organizingthe next movements that we would follow separately. I was going to Ayacucho via Lima to do volunteer work in an orphanage.Unfortunately I would have to do this by bus as I didn't´t have anymore time left to cycle to Ayacucho, and Nuno would accompanied me to Limaand return to Huaraz, he had to replace his camera since the one he had was broken and to make sure that I got on OK in the not so wellknow for its safety city of Lima, the capital of Peru.Not even the most luxurious bus in Peru avoided the dinner to end up in a vomit bag. While Nuno slept I was trying to challenge the evasiveneeds of my stomach curve after curve, but the inevitable happened, and I was cursing the need of having to travel by bus instead of mycomfortable donkey. We arrived in Lima at dawn and the city quiet awake hid the real dimensions of it. We went for a stroll in the Plaza deArmas at about 7 AM and there was no living soul around there. Tired and hungry we wanted to eat and find a nice place to sleep in the sun,we ended up walking for hours waiting for something to open and with no luck for our sunny dreams because any piece of grass in Peru isguarded as if it was piece of gold and no one is allowed to rest their bones in the soft green spaces of the parks.

We spent the afternoon in the commercial area of the city and at night we decided to see a show of water, light and sound highlyrecommended by the guide we obtained from the tourism office. The Percurso del Agua was indeed an attraction with some interest - in acity park they installed some light fountains and orchestrated a light and sound show of pure political propaganda and national pride.We were there for a few hours before getting back to the bus terminal, almost forgetful of the fact that we were in one of the most poorcountries in south America. Lima seems to get all the investment and the money produced in the country, it is a modern and somewhatdeveloped city, but it is hard to understand how it represents its country yet so linked to its rural routes. When we returned in theevening to the bus terminal the road that had been so quiet with its warehouses and bus terminals first thing in the morning became thescenery for male prostitution activity. These are the contrasts of my reality, in one moment the total isolation touched by the mostintimate and unspoilt nature and then in the most chaotic surroundings created by human hand.

Follow my adventures also in Nuno´s site http://www.ontheroad.eu.com/

Peru, Trujillo - Macará to Trujillo

2008-02-15T21:37:00.000Z

Unravelling Peru

As me and Nuno walked the shore, our footsteps marked the dark sand and the small waves refreshed our tired feet. I felt an emotion hard to describe, almost childish like...for the first time I was feeling the water of the Pacific Ocean touching my skin, the largest extension of water on Earth, and that made me acknowledge that dreams do come true, that other oceans and other seas will have my footsteps marked in their sands!
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Cuenca was now many kilometres away, the last days of cyclism had been very happy ones. Finally I felt the symbiose between me, my bike (Marin Muirhoods), my travel buddy Nuno and all that surrounded me. Me and my bike rode the mountains and the deserts with pure happiness, in a mutual effort - my energy used on its mechanical pieces as a way of propulsion towards the destinations that we slowly reached.

All the human contact in Cuenca had build up my confidence and recharged mybatteries, and with renewed energies, it was also easy to harmonize with everything else.

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In Loja, 200 kilometres from Cuenca, where after 5 hours on a bus anda sinuous road, I met Nuno, we decided that he would be the "leading man". It seemed that when we studied maps together we could not agree with the routes and destinations. I personally felt that the balance of our relationship as travel buddies depended on each of us focusing on different aspects of the journey and therefore I was very happy to let Nuno analyze maps and choose routes. I admit that my passivity might not be ideal, but on this trip I am just happy to be lead, more than to lead, I want to be to a passenger. I get to the conclusion that my life in London was always made of decisions and choices (well I guess life always is) but it feels good for a change to let things happen randomly, and not to plan more than a week in advance. It was Nuno who
taught me that is more important to live the way than to arrive to the destination, after all, I am not that keen in just collecting entrance tickets to ruins, touristic places or cycled kilometres.

Now that we were "beating to the sound of the same drum", the first day of cycling was rewarding. We left Loja under a scorching sun, and we climbed the first mountain, descending to Catamayo to a valley on the other side of the mountain. We arrived there at the beginning of the afternoon and probably ate the thinnest, hardest and most horrible grilled meat of the whole journey - this was apparently the local speciality, it was called Cecina and if these people enjoy it I dread to think what other niceties they enjoy. After the "delicious" lunch we climbed another mountain on a real challenge to my determination, curve after curve I could see my effort as I ascended the mountain and saw the valleys way below my feet in vertiginous drops.

For the first time on my journey we had to admit that we wouldn´t find a place to camp, we were surrounded by cultivated landscape with impenetrable fences. We took a side road in the hope of reaching a house and ask permission to camp in their backyard. The surprise of the forced hosts was visible, they had never seen cyclotourists on those parts and could not quite believe that our bikes were not motorbikes, but they let us stay for the night. The children took great joy in watching us cook and to play with us. We set the tent onw hat we found the next morning to be the pigsty, as we woke up to the sound of the pig´s hoinks.

The following day rose grey with an endless climb, we left just after breakfast. The rain that was at first only shy drops became heavy and every inch of my body was soaking wet, but not even that took my determination of enjoying my regained energy. We reached the last
village in Ecuador before arriving in Peru, in the afternoon, Cotacocha, and stayed there two nights in the hope that the rainwould stop. The rain didn´t stop and we headed south under frizzly rain. To our surprise the rain was replaced by sunshine and clearviews over the green valley as we descended the mountain.

Jeff

Slowly the small dot became an unmistakable silhouette. He was climbing the mountain as if he carried the world on his bike, but itwas 70 kilos of luggage spreaded between a whole lot of spares, tools, clothes, food and not the world that Jeff was carrying. Each cyclistis a unique being with distinct needs, after all!

In Cotacocha we had agreed to meet him on the way to Peru since we had chosen the same route. Jeff has got very big green eyes that sometimes become blue but who always look shy. His hair is long and burnt by the thousand hours spent under the sun on his bike. With his long hands he holds the inverted handlebars in a position that seems to challenge his back´s health.

His bike is his body extension and it was made to measure, to fit his long legs and his thin body. His height, he says, might be a consequence of the almost 10 months he spent in his mother´s womb. His childhood was spent in the woodlands in Canada and in his youth he was a bass player and a singer in a heavy metal band. This peacefull and calm human being released his anger shouting and screaming to the frenetic sounds of the heavy metal. His joy for music extended to the radio station at his university where he was responsible for the radio programmes. Jeff´s great dream became to cycle the world although he hadnever left Canada whilst he was a teenager. He lived a spartan life for the last 4 years before his trip to save enough money to make his dream come true. His work as a geographer might explain the meticulous way with which he plans his journey. For Jeff, mountains and the places he passes by are a collection of altitudes, kilometres and coordinates. The human aspect doesn´t come easy although he is an extremelly kind human being. How different must Latin American culture and habits seem to him?

One day he asked for seafood soup, he is vegetarian but since being vegetarian can be tricky in these countries Jeff has convinced himsel fthat it is easier to just eat what there is to eat...or maybe not,when he saw some whole prawns, a piece of octopus and some other sea animals floating in his soup he said:-"I cant eat this - my soup is full of cockroaches!"Nuno laughed and ate his delicious cockroaches! It was good to meet him again on the road. We shared the last kilometres from Ecuador to Trujillo in North of Peru. Jeff was expecting Peru to be full of thieves and people trying to con him, but slowly he also started to discover a more human country with less dangerous landscapes and more surprising ones than first expected.

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Crossing the border

The first thing that stroke me when crossing the border of Ecuador in Macará to Peru was the stinky smell of dried faeces. We had to stand the smell in that border crossing for longer than we wished for because Jeff´s wheel was starting to demand a lot of attention and he had to keep mending the tyres due to the constant hole punctures he was getting. After all the bureaucracies that involve crossing a border were dealt with, my senses were distracted by something that was happening in the Rio Calvas who at that time of the year was brown with very strong current: children, some of them who weren´t older than 10 years, fighting against the rebel river, swimming with barrels of petrol from one bank to the another. Later I found that petrol is more expensive in Peru hence the smuggling. The "closed eyes" of the guards from both borders shocked me not for the obvious failure of their duties to the laws of international trade but their cold indifference to the value of these children´s life who daily challenged death without anyone seeming to care.

The stink and the poverty is something that one has to get used to when travelling in Peru. Around the colourful markets that can be found pretty much everywhere in any village or city, the intense smell of the myriad of fruits, vegetables, meat and fishget´s mixed with the smell of those products in an advanced stage of decomposition disposed on the floor sometimes right next to the freshproducts. It is without a doubt a journey of the olfact and sometimesnot a particularly good one! Often in Northern Peru I saw signs askingthe populations to fight the fruit flies, but with the amounts of rubbish that gets thrown in the streets it seems to me that this fight already has a winner - the flies!

And the thousands of children that can be seen everywhere sellings weets, singing in the colectivos (vans tranformed in local buses), cleaning shoes in the streets, doing acrobacies in the middle of the chaotic traffic. Their faces are dirty, their clothes are old with holes and the look in their eyes is sad. Why cant they have a normal existence? Why cant they receive love and affection everyday? Why dont they have food? Why dont they have a safe place to sleep? Why do they have to beg in the streets?

- Because as long as we live indifferent in our daily comforts refusing to realise that our comforts often result in other's discomforts, specially when we buy cheap products, when we elect corrupt and careless politicians, and above all when we keep living an aphatetic and ignorant way of life, nothing will ever change and we will continue to be partially responsible for these childrens lack of hope!

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Other travellers had warned us about the dangers that awaited us once we crossed the border to Peru: the money would be fake even when taken from cash machines, robbers would be at any corner waiting for the right moment to rob us, camping outdoors would be impossible because surely someone would come and rip the tent or do something worse, the plethora of dangers seemed endless but on the forth day in Peru we were still alive, in good health, and with pretty much all our goods when we arrived in Chulucanas a city with 70 400 inhabitants. We were looking for a place to stay for the night, a lady and a young man on a motorbike started talking to us saying that she was a teacher,married to an archeologist and that it would be a pleasure to receive us in their house. We suspiciously followed the lady, where was she taking us? But her contagious smile, her sweet and brown eyes, thealmost childlike voice and her human warmth, vanished any doubts. This being full of light and her husband Mario had a genuin interest in receiving us. Rosita, as I called her, was a teacher who had inherited a private school from her mum and she had the gift of kindness and generosity.

We set our tents in the schoolyard, it was the school holiday, so no screaming children first thing in the morning. Mario, her husband, was an archeologist who worked for the council doing research of the arqueological wealth available in the region and he was also responsible for its promotion in the hope to attract visitors. He took us in his mototaxi to the local ruins and other places that were supposedly of turistsic and cultural interest, however, to my eyes,the tumbs of the Pre-Inca Moche Culture resumed to an abstarct pile of earth like the surrounding ones. The ruins of Piura a Velha, the first city founded by the spanyards in Peru and destroyed centuries ago due to the effects of the El Niño was just a group of decrepit stone walls like the ones that can be seen anywhere in the world in any old abandoned village.

I get the impression that Peru woke up too late for the importance of its history and past, perhaps inspired by Machu Pichu and the resources that it brings to the region, however most of the ruins tha tcan be found in Northern Peru were built with a very perishable construction material - adobe and one needs either to have a great interest in local history or a big imagination, to be able to see the beauty within those silent destroyed stones and walls.

Mario was a man with a very strong character. Big brown eyes occupied his face and his skin was the colour of chocolate, he used to open his hands when he spoke as if he wanted to received the world in them. He was very found of his space, his books and his archaeological discoveries, from there originated some of the ceramic that he so carefully reconstructed bringing them back to life. Our interesting conversations often resumed to monologues where Mario let his mind run free to the many subjects he had interest on such as the meaning of life, spirituality, history and politics, however I had to bit my tongue more often than I would have liked because despite being a man of culture and in a certain way, of science, he was also a very chauvinist one and some comments made specially to his wife, remembered me that I was in the hearth of Latin America were the Macho culture its pretty much "alive and kicking"!

One of Rosita´s main worries was the menu that she kindly would presents us with. Day after day, she would cook us Peruvian delicacies making us travel around the flavours of Peruvian food! On the fifth day we left, not because we wanted to, but because we didn´t think it was decent of us to stay any longer. Once again I said goodbye with tears in my eyes. I felt real affection and love for that family, those friends who had welcomed us from the street,those strangers who became as familiar as someone from my own family...They will remain in my heart and my mind as the proof that Peruvian people are composed by people with good and true intentions,very genuine, very warm and welcoming. The robbers and the bandits may well exist like in any other part of the world but they are fewer and less noticeable than the nice people!

Sechura, the desert

Everything was flat. Everything was yellow. Everything was infinite: the road, the heath, the sand. The blue sky, one or other truck that sounded its honk in the infinite and lost echo of the Pan-Americana. Inconstant intervals we read a sign indicating "Perigo de Morte - Área de Exercícios Militares" (Danger of Death, Area for MilitaryExercises), at a distance of no more than 20 metres from the road. It occurred to me what a sad death it would be if one had to go to answer nature´s call and died doing pee whilst being the target of a military aircraft! Nuno actually wanted us to camp there and experience the Peruvian desert, but neither me or Jeff were willing to prove the threatening sign´s veracity!

Interesting to see how all the villages and cities in Northern Peru were built on the several oasis of green originated by the rivers that flow down from the Andean slopes leaving a trail of green in the dry yellow that dominates the landscape.

Our final destination, to complete this stage of cyclism was Trujillo,the third biggest city in Peu with 768 300 inhabitants, and where we were expecting to be welcomed by a mythical figure amongst the ciclotourists who cycle Latin America - Lucho.

- Hola, es possible hablar con Lucho? - I said a few days before wearrived in Trujillo, anouncing our arrival on the phone.
- Si, un momento... - a feminin voice was heard on the line and then ascream - Lucho es para ti!
- Si, soy Lucho - a coarse voice answerd on the other side of the line.
- Mi nombre es Joana y soy una ciclista de Portugal, estoy con mas dosamigos uno de Portugal, y otro de Canada, y es para saber se podemos quedarnos en su casa?
- De Portugal?! Claro que si, son los primeros ciclistas de Portugalque recibo! Y poden venir quando quieran, seran muy bien venidos.- Bueno entonces hasta pronto, ya nos veremos breve! - I answered in my basic spanish.

A few days later and not in the way that we would have liked to have arrived after such great days of cyclism - we had to take the lift from a van of some engineers stoped by the police and forced to take us and our bikes due to the danger of us being robbed in a village 40 kilometres from Trujillo called Paijan.We arrived to Trujillo safe and sound and when we passed Paijan all we could see was another village on the road like many others that we had passed before. Who knows maybe the bandits were having a siesta...

Casa de la Amsitad is the name that Lucho gave his house, well in reality it is his mum´s house. He rents a room there where he receives cyclists and other adventurers alike. Already 900 and odd cyclists stayed there and left the stories of their adventures written on the visit books. And in reality there are a lot of stories from fake cyclists, to cyclists on tricycles, handicapped ones, cyclists with children and even a walker from Colombia who was supposedly walking to promote Universal Peace, he was there when we arrived, but who was visibly more interested in himself and his adventures than in Peace itself.

I was the 934 thcyclist to stay in the house and the first Portuguese one!

Lucho was indeed a very warm, funny and welcoming man, low stature and brown skin, it was hard to see how old he was because he has a rugratt look on his face. He his very young at heart and is joviality is contagious. One could say that he lives for his passion for bikes and cyclism, he used to be an elite cyclist, but he had more talents awaiting to be revealed. One night we invited him for one of our home cooked meals that funnily enough was seafood rice (the same food that Jeff detests) and after dinner Lucho opened the room where he keeps hisracing bikes and instruments and presented us with an absolutely fantastic drum kit performance. No one escaped from giving their musical contribution: I had to sing, Jeff had to play the bassguitar, Lucho`s friend (a professional singer) had to sing, obviously, and Nuno clapped his hands.

I also took advantage from the fact that Lucho fixed bikes and left my bike (Marin Muirhoods) in his capable hands, after it my bike was brand new and he liked my bike so much that he called it Negrita. Negrita, or Marina as you wish to call it was so pleased that she survived without a scratch to the next part of the trip, but that is for another story.

We remained in Trujillo for three weeks, much longer than we had planed to stay, the weather forecast for our destination wasn't great, some areas were closed due to heavy floods and landslides, on the other hand my bum was being tortured with painfull injections to cure a recurrent urinary infection. We walked the roads of Trujillo back and forth countless times, there is not much to do in Trujillo apart from enjoying the colourfull buildings of the Plaza de Armas thatlook like an electrified rainbow!

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Who knows if those lazy days in Huachaco, a beach close to Trujillo that attracts surfers and backpackers were the last ones where Iwould see the Pacific Ocean on this journey? Huachaco was a smallfishing village where its inhabitants ventured the big waves in small boats called "caballitos de totoro". Now the boats are kept on the seaside, and according to Lonely Planet, they can still be used. I didn´t see any in the sea but they are there witnesses of a past of brave fisherman who in times challenged the waves of the Pacific. Me and Nuno let the sun burn our skin on a lazy afternoon spent at the seaside. The next pedal strokes would takes us to the Andes and the rain would probably keep us company, so we just stayed there and enjoyed with pleasure the smell of the sea, the sound of the waves caressing the sand, the seagulls flying free and the photographicsunset at the end of the afternoon.

Follow my journey through Nuno´s eyes on http://www.ontheroad.eu.com/ and Jeff´s on http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/jk

Ecuador, Cuenca - The Hands of Cuenca

2008-02-01T21:13:00.000Z

Cuenca´s hands and people

The night Water started to fall from the ceiling through an improvised shower. Waves of pleasure electrified the crowd that danced frenetic to the sounds of the beat.
The music - the gathering link.
The night - the time for freedom.
It always surprises me to realise how music unites people. Three hours before, that was just a dark space with Art Pop, Manga paintings on the walls and holes on the wooden floor. The pure enjoyment of music was the reason why people went there and that was just another night were people went to share their joy of music. Pop is a place that toasts to life, friendships, music, dance, and there, an unlike group of people gathered to dance and above all to share the newly formed friendships communicating in a language that we all understood - the language of dance and music!

Roy, a man with an eternal smile and the spirit of the modern renaissance, his passion for languages, culture, human beings,travels, Latin America, his country Ecuador, and the city where he lives - Cuenca. I enjoyed his fantastic sense of humour, his stories,his friendship and his company during the 4 days that became 3 weeks, and on that night, I also enjoyed his energy and Latin sense ofrhythm. If our dream becomes true we´ll meet again in 2009 to cycle inTibet!

Cláudia, my long and dark haired friend with eyes that shone like twosuns. Our walks , our conversations, our laughter and that night wherewe danced together with soaking clothes, proving that the Latin feelof the two continents is expressed in the same way: passion for music and dance. Her dreams to travel in Europe this summer will certainly come true, and I hope we meet again in British lands. One day this woman will be fixing the Ecuadorean people´s teeth, but in the next few months she will have to study hard to keep the promess to her dad to pass all her exams to get her air ticket to the Old Continent!

Gael a ciclotourist who with his travel buddy Yves, cycled South America during two years doing an exchange of french games for children with south American games, visiting schools and orphanages. His Robson's Crusoe´s hair style and the unshaven beard are distinct marks of the male tribe of ciclonauts. That night his muscles moved to the sound of the music. Gael has now returned toFrance and I try to imagine how his is life now that he has to adapt himself to his old reality and adjust to the fact that he no longer wakes up in the Andean Mountains?

Geoff, an unlikely traveller, shy and reserved, 24 years old. It is hard to imagine that he is traveling South America on his motorbike spending the savings that he had to open a business and going against his parents disapproval, who were quite worried about him specially after he disappeared in his crossing between Colombia and Panama. But he left out his inhibitions that night and danced surrounded by the crowd and sharing his smile.

Magda, a Colombian student, was visiting Ecuador and the neighbouring countries, was heading to Machu Pichu in Peru. She opted to become a vegetarian in defense of the animals rights. She is from the capital of salsa - Cali, but there, in Pop, she danced regardless of music styles, spreading her happiness and sharing her travel experiences.

Jeff, a Canadian cyclist, also traveling the American continent by bicycle, is a heavy metal fan who also joined the group and danced shaking the dust from the many kilometres of the roads already cycled and is now our travel buddy. When we left Pop, our clothes were soaking and our chests full of happiness. Some of us will never see each other again, but that night had been such a special moment that it will be marked in our memories like a mural standing the passage of time and making us understand that the real reason to travel is for friendship and unique encounter slike this one.

The wait

After cycling the mountains inside what it felt like a constant cloud and not being able to see anything around us or to enjoy the rewards of the hard climbs, we arrived in Cuenca. Cuenca the city that reflected the sun in its colourful walls of past coloniality. The city is a world heritage site by UNESCO and it is an "oasis" of urbanity in the middle of the Andean mountains. It is a very touristic place, full of gringos (what we tourists are called by the locals). Many are just visiting, but fall in love with the city charms and end upstaying forever. Cuenca was marked in our travel map as a place to recover strenghts,wait for my bank cards, and to plan the next moves towards Peru, but my three weeks in Cuenca became days where I ended up getting so involved with the city and its people that when was time to leave I felt an invisible string anchoring me to that land of crossing rivers. My bank cards never arrived and Nuno, who had been cycling for over a week in the jungle, had arrived in Loja a city 200 kilometers south ofCuenca and was waiting for me.

Encounters

Life can be amazingly surprising when we let things happen: on the first days that I was in Cuenca alone I felt bored and was wondering what I was going to do with all that time of wait until one day when I decided to leave the door to my room in the hostel where I was staying, opened, that act, although symbolic, initiated a process where I started to meet all sorts of different people. That afternoon was spent eating cherries with Tomoki, a very beautiful and eccentric Japanese guy. On a sunny end of afternoon we shared our travel experiences, our lives lived in London, our photos, he had an amazing eye to see the bizarre in ordinary things. Later that night we went out to POP with Kaido, a traveller from Estonia, a tall strong men with piercing blue eyes, also a great photographer, he wrote traveling articles for a women´s magazine in his country. We had a great time dancing on a empty dance floor. When one travels one has the feelingthat each moment is unique, that there is no space for inibithions. We knew that we would not see each other maybe ever again and in that brief encounter we made the most of it and enjoyed the moment. Tomoki went south to Peru to meet his sister and Kaido went to the coast of Ecuador the following days.

Like the pieces of a domino that I place in line closely behind each other to observe them as they fall to the touch of my finger, the fact that I left Cuenca reveal itself allowed strangers to become friends and a series of events took place in a way or another and I could reveal the human side of Cuenca, the side that surpasses any otherside of any city.

The hands of Cuenca

When I saw those small leather boots in the middle of the disorganised workshop I felt an irresistible urge to know the story behind the hands who had shaped those two pieces of leather and transforming them in beautiful tiny boots, that reminded me of past times, times where things were made to measure, times where objects had an extended life beyond the first fault. I returned to the cobbler the following day with the wish to meet the hands who had brought to life the used shoes of Cuenca. In Cuenca the objects have an extended life because the city still lives of the resurrection of things more than of the blind consumerism that we experience in the western world. And this process enables several workshops to be kept alive recovering and bringing new life to old and used objects. An old leather jacket could be easily recovered, dresses could be done and redone, a blouse could be embroidered with unique patterns, a guitar could be made and fixed to the wishes of the musician, a hat could be shaped from the more traditional to the more eccentric shapes. It is a real pleasure to find things to fix and watch as they come to life through the skillful hands of these artisans.

Mr Luiz David Billa spent the last two years of his life in a dark and untidy room with shelves full of repaired and old shoes. That room opens to the street and to the noisy sounds of the cars, footsteps and voices of people walking outside. Sometimes there are costumers comingin or neighbours who pop in to say hello. Mr Luiz learned to repair shoes when he was 10 years old but he also tried his luck doing other jobs in the hope of earning more money. He worked as a bricklayer but he gave up after he fell from the scaffolding breaking his hipbone. He then tried his luck in the sugarcane plantations but he used to cut himself frequently and gaveup. He married, had two children, got divorced. Just one of hischildren is alive. He doesn´t keep any contact with his family, he lives on his own. His life is sad. His life is dark. Seated there next to him I started to realise his difficulty to repair the trainers tha the had on his hands. He has cataracts and his small economies will be used in the hope that an operation will bring more light to his life or at least enough light to allow him to see better so he can providefor himself. It maybe that not much light is getting through his eyes, but his smile is full of it! I felt that he was very glad to have someone there to keep him company and to listen to his stories. He showed me the typical shoes that he does with leather and the small leather boots that fascinated me the day before. They were for a little girl who had a disability and she needed the boots to be made to measure to fit her. Later, one of his few friends joined us, hehelps Mr Luis on the more complicated jobs. After 4 hours talking with Mr Luiz, I left. I felt sad because we can also feel the loneliness that others feel.

So many people pass through our life but in reality only a little of their life passes through us. On another of my wanderings through Cuenca I found other hands, the hands of a very friendly lady who embroidered dresses and blouses with the traditional embroidery from Cuenca.

Beatriz Peralta had a littleworkshop on a colonial building where the municipality created a space for artisans to display and create their work. They only pay a very small rent, as the rents on the high streets would be too expensive. Its central location attracts many visitors thus keeping possible the preservation of the traditions the arts and crafts of the region. Beatriz is single and lives with three more women: hers sister and her nieces. Her sister designs the patterns that are later embroidered on the beautiful dresses, blouses, ponchos and waistcoats. There are not many people buying this type of work and specially since the cheapChinese shops invaded the country. People seem to prefer to buy globalized fashion to handmade and bespoke. One day there wont be anyone to do these works. Things will just be trown in the bin as soon as they present the first fault and we will all dress the same clothes presented to us by global companies.

Cuenca has half million inhabitants but after three weeks one can feel the village atmosphere felt in most of the neighbourhoods. We start greeting the familiar faces, start going to same places for food, the owner of the hostel gets worried if you get late home. Strangers star to be known people and you start to get habits and create a sort of routine. Everyone is asking if my parcel has arrived and congratulating me that it hasn't because that way I stay longer inCuenca. I start to feel the same.

And in my search for Cuenca's hands I found the hands of Felipe who works on the Internet cafe during the day and is the DJ in POP at night. He is an engineering student and his life is lived intensely, between the Internet cafe, his school and his work at night, he seems to enjoy that pace. His 22 years of life are full of hope, full of dreams and his latinity is expressed not only in the way he DJ's but also in the way he flirts with the opposite sex. He hopes to travel one day to the old continent when he finishes his degree, but until then he will just cheer the peoples of Cuenca with his electro Latin music!

Rafael, an art student, who told me about his project for his graduation where he intends to recover the corpses that are not reclaimed in the morgue and search for its histories and tattoo them on their lifeles sbodies. This way he wishes to give voice to a life that would pass without being noticed as if in reality it had never happened. Through these silence voices Rafael intends to show how much we ignore those that surround us, mostly those that live on the margins of society.With death, the history of a person is gone, mostly if that person was never acknowledged or died alone. Its not an easy project for many reasons, but most of all because it deals with taboos such as death, bodie and society all in one. I suppose that since art is now more than a collection of strict rules and canones, its important that we question things. In a society growing more and more indifferent to others and more prone to sensationalism maybe that is an effective way to get the message across. We wait for the results.

Stay or leave

The parcel wasn't giving any signs that was going to arrive soon and Nuno was waiting for me for over a week, I had to decide: moving towards south and keep my bike adventure or stay in Cuenca and embrace a new project. I decided to go south, the call was stronger. I didn't say goodbye to many of my new friends because I hate goodbyes and because I wait that one day I will return to Cuenca. On the following days I returned to the Andean Mountains. My adventures heading to Peru will follow!

PS - Sorry I could not put better fotos on my website, my camera got lost and those were some of my fotos from Cuenca that I managed to recover.

Ecuador, Quito to Palmira

2008-01-01T21:10:00.000Z

Where are the Volcano's?

-What´s your name?
-Juana - replied a shy voice grabbing her dad´s arm and hiding her small face burnt by the sun.
-I am also called Joana - I answered.
Juana revealed her big brown eyes again and smiled just before she hid herself again.
- Where are you from and what are you doing in Ecuador? - her dad asked.
- I am from Portugal and I am cycling Ecuador.
- Oh! That´s great I wish you good luck! - he said
I asked if I could take a photo and when he said yes I positioned my camera hoping to frame that moment of complicity between daughter and dad.

There at 4000 metres of altitude the silence reigned, but also there at 4000 metres was the last bastion of human life - a small population formed by 22 families, some of their houses were still built in a traditional way: roofs made of straw and the house itself built on a hole as if to reach for the mother hearth´s warmth. The other few houses were made of cement, they looked unfinished with some of the walls to be built or staircases that lead to nowhere. They are built according to the needs and as the family grows. They look like dream houses that went wrong, constructions perhaps inspired by the thousands of soap operas that portray a lifestyle very detached from the reality of Andean life. The children of that village rehearsed the typical dances on the streets, they would be performing for visitors on Christmas day and their laughter and colourful movements fulfilled with life and sound the atmosphere that otherwise was grey, cold and silent.

After a warm soup and some herbal tea, we followed our way climbing up to 4390 metres. The cold and the fog hid everything around us, just like a mystical experience or as if we shouldn't´t be there, because at that altitude one feels that that space is destined for the goods and not human beings. But it wasn´t a dream, the map indicated that we were standing next to the Chimborazo, the big white colossus that rises above the 6000 metres and that at this time of the year hides itself constantly.

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Life can be made of contrasts if we chose to, one day we are in one of the biggest urban metropolis like London and on the other, on the most complete silence surrounded by snow and fog, climbing distant mountains on a bicycle.

When Nuno dreamt his ciclo adventure from Pole to Pole, his dream slowly started to be my dream...

I remember that at school I was always the last to be picked for the sport teams. I never enjoyed competing or to expose my body to physical extremes and I was never any good at any kind of sports. But I have learned that the physical effort done between you and nature to overcome altitude and the elements gains a new meaning because that effort becomes the mean to continue the journey, to feel the reality closer and slowly my body gets used to the hardship of climbing the Andes.

And I thank Nuno for believing in me (more that I have) and of choosing me for his team without hesitating, to be part of his journey and his dream, and slowly I am conquering my physical and mental mountains in my donkey - Marina (Marin Muirhoods).

I also want to pay homage to the way of transport that is perhaps the most democratic and revolutionary of all - the bicycle. 1880 was a very important year, the year when the bicycle became a way of transport widely accessible to all, and interestingly enough the bicycle was also a way for women's emancipation - they started to be able to go where they wanted to go, when they wanted to go and because they wanted to go - and this is also the big charm of ciclotourism!

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Is this the M4? - No it´s the Panamerican Highway!

After spending the night excluding things to my luggage I finally managed, making Nuno laugh his socks out because of the amounts of things I had and that I thought I would be able to carry, to reduce my luggage to a weight possible to carry on my panniers.

We left Quito late the following morning and the heavy traffic made the way out of town pretty unmemorable: the city and its outskirts extended themselves for endless and uninteresting kilometres. In the middle of the afternoon we finally arrived to the Panamerican highway and when I saw the large road, with large shoulders and little traffic I started to dream about the relaxed cycling ahead. The dream lasted only a few minutes, soon the road became a way for heavy traffic full of trucks and buses that displayed their superiority by sounding their horns and releasing clouds of black smoke in bigger amounts than the ones released by the volcanoes in Ecuador and that we had no choice but to breath. I almost thought that I had cycled too much and I was returning to England doing ciclotourism on the M4.

The first days of cycling tested my will to continue the adventure -the landscape had no interest whatsoever, it rained frequently, the traffic was quite intense and I felt like grabbing my donkey, sticking it on a bus to take me to more interesting landscapes.

On this cloud of boredom and worry I started my dialogues with my grandad Jose, as I was cycling between those heavy trucks and it was hard to keep my bike going straight, when I anticipated a big climb or most of all on the downhills, that like him, are my unfavourite part specially when I have to do them side by side trucks and mad buses I kept asking him to look after me and as I was talking with my grandad in one of these descents the rain started to get quite heavy when I get a puncture. I said to my granddad: - hey grandpa did you get distracted or something? The answer came later in a way that only people that are in other plans of existence can reply. We had to stop to fix the puncture and there where we had to stop the bikes to fix the puncture was a little road that would take us to where we wanted to go away from the heavy traffic. Thanks granddad!

On that night we camped close to a village where we supposedly should have amazing views over the Cotopaxi Volcano, an active volcano shaped in a perfect cone. The clouds that surrounded it, those were perfect, perfectly white and thick. We packed our things next morning and left heading south without even a glimpse of the photogenic volcano!

Unfortunately we no longer had an alternative route and so we had to return to the Panamerican. At the end of the day we reached Ambato. I rose my arms in the air just like a cyclist does, when I saw the sign "Bienvenidos a Amabto". But my happiness was precocious, just like Quito the outskirts of the city extended for miles of downhill and a painful uphill. After all that effort I was expecting and amazing city on the flanks of those steep hills, but on that cloudy and rainy Sunday, it was just another messy and chaotic Latin city with ugly buildings.

The following morning the city woke up with other colours - market colours, where the social life of the people from the Andes happens, where everyone seems to be busy buying or selling something. We entered the market with cameras as our third eye freezing those fractions of time that compose the colourful images that we extracted from the market.

We left the market very happy, I however, was slightly heavier, I had bought some herbs, fruits, spices and some alpargatas (typical shoes) under the excuse of speaking with the vendors and off course, to increase my shoe collection. Nuno was laughing again!

....

We conquered the road that took us to the base of the Chimborazo Volcano in two days. As we cycled our way up, the patchwork of greens that covered the Andean Mountains was occasionally interrupted by the locals in their colourful outfits, they would then disappear up to their part of the "patchwork" where they plant their means of survival. The cultivation in the Andes is made mostly by hand due to the high inclinations of the terrain and by the ingenious irrigation systems that canalises all the water through the mountain.

When we thought that we couldn't´t be more rewarded by the beautiful landscape the downhill at the end of the two days of climbing, revealed a deep valley with colourful canyons and villages full of friendly people who unfortunately were also used to tourists. Tourists by ignorance or negligence give the children sweets or money, failing to understand the real impact of their actions. These children learn from young age to beg. Why would they want to spend their time in the fields working hard when the "gringos" will give them money from doing nothing? I was even more shocked when we did the train ride to La Nariz del Diablo, a ride on a very old train now used mainly for tourist purposes, that runs through a rail track so old that sometimes you can see the pieces of wood missing, but that presents those who dare to go on it (you can ride on the top of the train if you wish) with amazing views over some very steep hills. This journey confirmed the advantages of ciclotourism and of keeping away from the tourist trail. Some of the tourists were trowing sweets to the children that came to greet us, just like you do to the monkeys in a zoo and then taking photos. I feel its an unfair exchange: these tourists get the amazing feeling that these pseudo altruistic actions cause and these children get untreated rotten teeth, at night surely their plates will still be empty of the nutrients that they need to grow healthily and perhaps wondering about the disparities of this world.

....

After the touristic ride we stayed in Riobamba resting and updating websites and enjoying the funny Christmas parades - they were more like Carnival parades. The streets were full of people dressed up and dancing to the sound of repetitive Ecuadorean music.

With 20 dollars we bought our Christmas Eve meal and food for the following days without forgetting the wine bottle. The 24th December was spent cycling a mountain on a off road track and hoping that after the next hair pin bend we would reach the top. We didn´t and we started to get worried because it was getting dark and we couldn't´t find a place to set our tent. When we did, it was on the tiniest piece of uncultivated land, it had great views of the valley that we had climbed, but was also very close to the road where everyone could see us and unfortunately a twisted eye old men passed by, pretty affected by the copious amounts of alchool that he surely had drunk that day, he thought that we shouldn't´t be there and threatened come at night and burn our tent.

We cooked our ciclotourist meal, full of pasta as requested by a cyclist´s body, we exchanged presents and we drank our wine, talked about politics in Latin America, stared at the round full moon and when the fog descended over the mountains and penetrated our bones we went to the tent to sleep. We woke up with the morning dew and not with the flames burning our tent, as I feared it would happen. Ironically the old man passed by us again in the morning without saying more than an embarassed and surely hungover "buenos dias".

Christmas morning was spent cycling the endless mountain and once again at the end of the hard climb we were rewarded with a valley full of little villages with children running after our bikes. We got to the main road at the beginning of the afternoon going up and down when a thick fog settled in. We took a cut to Palmira, a little village where we were trying to find a place to spend the night. Palmira became our true Christmas treat, there we were offered place to sleep in an old convent and when we got there to leave our things, a family composed by children and adults where was difficult to understand the relationships between them, received us with great excitement. One of the ladies had a bad experience in Spain and people there helped her out and so now she feels the has to retribute. They offered us food, we played with their children and we were invited to the annual Gala that they have every year to celebrate the local saint. It was in itself a very bizarre event that consisted of a beauty contest and performances by national artists that seemed to play all the songs they knew instead of the bearable one or two. The beauty contest was something taken out of a comedy, two of the participants were physically ugly and one was more pleasant to the eye, she was the predictable winner.

We woke up in the morning to the sound of a wondering band, we were offered breakfast and then we left. I felt really sad to leave, but this is ciclotourism...full of surprises, of amazing people and of departures!

See more about my adventures on Nuno´s website http://www.ontheroad.eu.com/

Ecuador, Quito - Half of the world

2007-12-17T21:07:00.000Z

Mitad del Mundo – Life Divided (Half of Life)

Quito, Ecuador

There is an imaginary line that defines the world in two parts (North Hemisphere and South Hemisphere) – The Equator line, and that is where I stand now, in the middle of the world with half of my body in the North and half in the South. I imagine that this line divides me as well: the North represents my urban life, my work, my routine; South represents the unexpected, my dreams, my journeys, the search for myself and the world’s truths. I jump to the South part of the line and I’m in the South Hemisphere and it will be south that I will be heading in the next few months!

Quito

I woke up early morning and left the building where the friends that hosted me the first night lived. I had arrived late the previous night after a 16 hour journey and in the Taxi ride on the way to my friend’s house I could hardly grasp the city as its lights merged into the darkness undefined. I was unable to enjoy properly my first hours in Equator’s capital, I had left my passport in the cab the night before, and if I didn’t get it back I would be unable to ´head South´. In the end I got my passport back, the taxi driver kindly kept my belongings and I was very happy to have passed my first ”challenge”, I would be heading South after all!

The first days in Quito turned out to be almost two weeks. After meeting my friend and travel buddy – Nuno we had our bikes to fix and bike parts to find …

Quito is a beautiful and chaotic city, its colourful houses sprang like a rugged carpet through the breathtaking flanks of the Pichincha volcano that occasionally awakes and releases clouds of ashes and smoke through the whole city! The first Spanish colonized the city by building their churches on top of the old Inca sacred places and markets. The old baroque Christian churches are decorated in gold in an almost obscene way as if faith on its own wasn’t enough to convince the indigenous of the new religion. In fact observing some morbid paintings displayed in some of the churches one can imagine that the new faith was imposed by fear rather that by other more valid beliefs!

Quito revealed more than its well kept colonial architecture. Quito is like a gigantic “ant’s nest” spread out into what it feels like the infinite. The human landscape that I had the privilege to unravel was also amazing. After my first night with Francisco and his family in Quito I stayed with the Paredes family a welcoming clan who made me experience Quito and Latin American life in a very special way. Leonardo, the dad is doctor who studied in Russia during the cold war in the 60´s and has worked as minister’s advisor, as vice-chancellor of a university and who currently teaches a subject about herbs at the university. He is the son of Nela Martinez (1912-2004) who was the first Ecuadorean woman to be member of the parliament; she was also a writer and a revolutionary for women’s rights and Ecuadorian people. Leonardo’s passion for his country, its history and nature made for great conversations and his kindness and warmth I shall always remember as one of my best memories from Quito! There is also Gloria, the mum, a sweet, kind and intelligent woman who works for an agency who helps local people to develop their own projects by lending money (the micro-credit idea pioneered by Nobel Prize Muhammas Yunus). The warm afternoons would not be the same without the flute sounds that filled the Parede´s home played by Daniela the daughter. And last but not least, Leonardo the son, a bright young man who showed me Quito and made me try all sorts of unexpected and unknown food and fruits. His intelligence and politic views are seen by me as a prospect for a brilliant future, who knows, maybe as head of his country, which lacks so much competent and honest leaders!

The Men’s Chapel (La Capilla del Hombre)

The steep climb was compensated by the amazing minimalist building with supberb views over the East mountains of Quito – this palce is called Capilla del Hombre and it is a Cultural Centre that was projected by one of the biggest contemporaneous Ecuadorian artist’s – Guaysamin. To the eyes of Guaysamin Ecuadorian faces are painted in colourful and strong colours yet revealing the suffering that this people have endured at the hands of poverty. The black, white and grey tones of some other paintings reveal bone thin bodies of hunger and political repression. He also paints in geometric symbolism reminiscent of the Inca heritage. In this building of objective simplicity remains in my memory a big mural where a Condor, the symbol of the Andes, dominates a Bull. The analogy that I make comes to me as inevitable: may the Utopia be true and may the Condor fly a free flight towards a free existence, free from foreigner manipulations, corruption and interests of those who always seem to exploit and never contribute. An existence away from poverty, away from suffering in balance with nature, a well deserved and worth existence!

United Kingdom, London - Before the great journey

2007-11-27T21:02:00.000Z

Sometime ago I read in a book called ‘In to the Wild’, that happiness only makes sense when shared. The book is now a movie, a movie about an American boy from a well to do family who decides to cut his strings with his family and society a go in search of himself and the supposed existential truth. It is a true story with a sad end, the boy realises too late that the interaction with other human beings is an inevitable part of who we are, and for good or bad, an existence in isolation, especially when one is exposed to the arbitrary acts of nature, can be a gloomy one! (Well at least this is the conclusion I take from it )

It’s now less than two weeks for my departure to South America, a long dreamt journey where I will also somehow cut some of the strings that attach me to many things, specially the comforts of western life, that I feel make me somewhat drowsy with a fake sense of security. When I first came to England I was lucky to have met a Portuguese fellow that had an enviable amount of stamps in his Passport – Nuno. The marks of these stamps were scattered all over his council flat in Stockwell, the photos on the walls, the objects found in his place, each one of them told a story of a remote place and opened the imagination for other stories. In one of the walls there was also a window for a dream – a world map as ‘big’ as all the journeys there projected. How many conversations were had between those 4 walls, with many different people from many different parts of the world? That map was the silent intermediate of many conversations: many travel routes were designed there (some happened, some will happen, and some never will happen), many political and social debates were discussed. When you have the world map as a background it is easy to forget your limitations as a human being and dream, dream that you can achieve, that you will be there, and when you least expect the dream is no longer a dream, it is your reality!

I have asked myself many, many times why I have this need to travel, this need to integrate myself in other realities, this need of not attaching myself to people or places? Maybe I inherited this from my grandfather José whom I never met, he travelled and lived in Brazil and Africa, and was, according to those who met him, a charismatic person, ahead of his time and who never conformed with life’s predictable routine. Even my late found passion for bikes may have come from him since he used to be a cyclist. Where this willingness to travel comes from I still don’t know, but it is to strong for me to ignore it, it is part of who I am!

Now, standing in front of the computer, a few days away from starting my journey to South America I evaluate what my life has been in these last few years and I get to the conclusion that everything I have done ( it feels sometimes I went the long way around) would bring me inevitably to where I stand now- the departure point!

A new phase in my life is about to start. I intend to unravel South America riding my bike, or my donkey as I prefer to call it, and also to do volunteer work – I want to feel closer to those, who unlike me, may not have the choice to leave their lives and go travelling. I wish to participate, to contribute; I don’t want to be a mere tourist taking photos and hoping on and off a bus full of other travellers – I wish to be part of things, to experience and question them, not for the pure sake of entertainment but for the realization of whom I am. To break yet another glass dome that has formed created by the ‘fake comforts of the western world’- this how I perceive the true meaning of life!

As I was saying above, the happiness that I now feel would certainly have a different taste if I couldn’t share it and if I didn’t recognise that there were people without whom this new stage of my life wouldn’t have been possible:

My Mum, who probably would rather have me safe and sound close to her planning a family to fulfil her needs of becoming a grandmother but who despite this supports me unconditionally and gives me strength to go ahead a pursue my dream!

To Ian my friend and partner, who despite not accompanying me on this journey has given me his support, his patience and has run with me several times in my attempts to prepare myself to the physical endurance that awaits me.

To my family and friends and all of those who don’t know me but who are already supporting me and sending encouragement messages!

I need to pack up my things, take the last vaccines, work a few more days, do my farewell do … And I promise that I will be back in touch soon from Quito, Ecuador to tell you all about my adventures in Inca lands!

All my love to all of you and thank you for being part of my Constant Movements!

United Kingdom, London, 27th Novemeber 2007
Joana Oliveira

United Kingdom, London - A little about me

2007-11-04T20:58:00.000Z

The Begining

The beginning of my travels happened on the 22nd July 1978 sometime between 5 and 6 PM, between my mother’s body that hosted me for 9 months and the exterior world that will host me in my earthly life. I had several names during my aquatic existence inside my mother’s womb: Filipa, Sancha, Sofia, Sara, but when I was born my mum thought that I should be called Joana, Joana Sara. The surnames are like stamps that reveal your genetic heritage (Portuguese will usually have mother’s and father’s family surnames resulting in rather large names). Santos from my mother and grandfather that I never met but from whom I suspect having inherited more than the name (the travel bug must have come from him too), Prestes from some overseas Governor from the time of the Portuguese Discoveries (in the sixteenth century – or so I like to think) whom generations later descended into what nowadays is my dad’s family. Oliveira also comes from my dad (and it means olive tree). Joana Sara Santos Prestes de Oliveira – my full name. And a name is a name whether you like it or not. It contains the hopes projected in you by those who named you and mostly because they enable, amongst other things, to know that someone is calling you!

Anyone who knows me must have noticed that I frequently ask why? ‘Why?’ may well be my best known and heard question. When I was 3 years old my mum bought me a book with answers to 500 ‘whys’, from why there are thunderstorms to why there are waves in the sea, however I seemed to be more interested in asking another ‘why’, than in the answer itself (for my mum’s despair). It seems to me that the discovery process is more interesting than the final conclusions, the answers that close the questions. I compare it to a leave when it falls from a tree and it doesn’t belong to the tree anymore, or when you give a present. The actions don’t end when you finish the tasks that originated them, things have continuity just like a leave that falls on the ground initiates a decomposition process and likewise when you answer a question new questions arise, or when you give a present to someone a friendship continues. Inside the precious complex system of nerves and cells that enables my brain to exist, and my brain is truly the only place that I can call home – just like Bob Marley once said, the ‘whys’ keep being formed: why’s about who I am, what I want from life, where I am going to. I am not looking for any final answers to these questions, but the search for those answers are part of the movements that form my life journey that I wish to share with you.

United Kigdom, London, 4th November 2007
Joana Oliveira

United Kingdom, London - The reason of my constant movements

2007-10-12T20:45:00.001+01:00

In Movement

Life is a journey. We are in movement constantly interacting with everything that surrounds us. The Universe is alive like a living being, the planet Earth and all the other Solar System's planets in their orbits and around the Sun, rotating suspended in the infinit of the Galaxies.
We are in movement when we go on holiday and we get into a plane full of other fellow travellers. When we wake up in the morning and go to work. When we move our hands to write love letters. When our father's sperm follows into our mother's uterus. When the oxygen travels from the air that we breath in and out of our bodies. When the blood that runs through our veins and arteries hidden underneath our skin, makes the heart beat, keeping us alive!

... and so all that is inside and outside of us is in constant movement...and that's why life is a journey - a constant journey, a constant movement!

This website is an account of my journeys, of my movements. It's an account of banalities and special things - a diary, written to the pace of each journey I intend to share with other fellow travellers.

And my journeys aren't more special, they are just my journeys, my movements, that reflect me as a human being. They reflect my hopes, my failures and weaknesses, my idiosincracies, my desires, projects and above all they reflect the way my thoughts travel from my mind to my hand with which I write them.

Travel with me, be part of my journey, leave your ideas and thoughts...

Good travels

United Kingdom, London, 12 October 2007