The Road to Cusco
Added on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 by Carole Nash Editor
The Road to Cusco
The road into the city was long and straight. The surface was rough as a badger’s bottom and the traffic whippet sharp. In Peru you ride with your elbows out and your finger on the horn. You take deep breaths as you overtake buses behinds belching out black smoke. You brake hard at sudden changes
The Philosophy of Erik
In Sicuani Erik, Caroline and I stop in a restaurant on the outskirts of town. The floors are wooden on one side and tiled on the other. Music is playing and the nicely dressed family who run the place ask us if we want tea. We also order chicharon, cubes of pork. “I came here from up the Arequipa road which was dirt and it took me 10 hours. I was cold and I asked this place for a room and I said I would not argue about the price as long as I got hot water and we agreed. In the end they said it would take three hours for the water to heat up so I brought my bike into the restaurant area for safety. I slept unwashed. In the morning a small boy came up to me and said my bike smelt of petrol and I should pay a parking fee. So I said, ‘look, you promised me hot water and you did not give it to me and I will not pay for parking, we both make a fault so we are fair,’ and with that I left.
The route from Cusco is our third crossing of the Andes. The first 150 kms were full of high mountains and twisting bends. Erik and I led the whole way and was my first time at the front. Intermittent sections of road works interrupted a beautiful stretch of tarmac. In fine weather, this is great ride but in bad rain and wind it would be a journey in hell. At Abancay, Erik and I have a soup by the sign that directs us to Lima, before which is Nazca.
We get a text from Roy telling us the front suspension has broken 20 kilometres from the town. Maybe he hit a pothole, I never found out but Erik jumped up and raced off to find a tow truck. There was only one in town and within 20 minutes he had negotiated a price and he and the driver were soon on its rescue mission. An hour and a half later it brought the back-up truck back down to town and shunted it into his small garage area. The ball joint attached to the wishbone had snapped so causing the suspension and steering to fail. New parts would only be obtained from Lima and today was a Saturday and nothing could be done on a Sunday.
Erik worked with the mechanic and discussed mending the ball joint and when he said it could be done I left him so I could ride the 240 miles to Nazca and connect with the rest of the group.
Roy said the repair was too unsafe and refused to drive it. To be honest I understood his feelings. The Latin American way is not one of the professional mechanic but what was I to do? Not to repair the truck and wait for a new part would lose me three days and that alone would jeopardise our getting to Alaska. This left me with a big problem. I’d have to get the new parts from Lima and ride back 500 miles on the Monday to rescue them. Anyway I couldn’t do anything from 5000 metres in freezing fog so rode across the Pampa racking my head for ideas. Maybe my Peruvian biker mate Jorge could help; surely there was a way around this. Stuck in the Andes trying to rescue the back-up and look after the riders. I could feel a headless chicken moment coming on, I was going to hope about the road like John Cleese does when it all gets too much. At Puquial, a half dead village of the damned full if people who had had relations with their brother, I fuelled up and at a restaurant ate and thought about what I needed to do.
