Chapter 8 Peru
The next morning I woke up and after all the fighting with the wind the previous day my body was in a heap. I decided to stay on the beach and read a book and just chillax for the day. The place I stayed in the town was right on the beach and as I was drifting off to sleep I remember thinking to myself that there is no better sleep aid than the sound of the sea lapping up against the shore; I’d still have swapped it for a good shag.
I spent the following day aimlessly wandering around Pacasmayo and it was quite an experience. On the face of it, it’s a lovely little sea side town on the North West coast of Peru. Elderly men meet for early morning coffee and discuss the comings and goings in the small town. On the pier, people drop lines into the water to catch crabs to bait their traps for bigger fish, and out in the distance you can see many small boats all fishing, albeit in crafts that look far too small for the height of the seas around them. On the beach near the pier local fishermen work on repairing boats, it all feels very wholesome.
Along the beach front people sell ice cream as they do all over the world in similar locations, with stall sellers selling every manner of trinket imaginable. It seldom rains here; the town is on the edge of the Peruvian desert and the wind never let’s up so there are decent size waves breaking onto the beach for most of the day, a surfer’s paradise or so you would think.
As the day dragged on a thought grew in my mind until I found myself saying "Where the hell is everyone?" I know in these places they have siestas but the town felt completely empty. I went to a restaurant which was recommended by the locals as being the best fish restaurant around and for about $10, I got a whale sized portion of white fish, not sure what type of fish it was but it tasted mighty.
I walked down the beach and saw just one person, a young boy playing with his puppy, and started to see the reason why no one is attracted to the beach, it was full of rubbish. The further you walk you find that the towns sewage is running untreated via an open shore directly into the sea via the beach where people would be swimming. Still further on down the beach; a large gathering of vultures and gulls were feeding off the waste material from an abattoir where the effluent was pouring directly into the sea.
It is hard to believe that the folks there do not get the linkage between pumping raw sewage directly into the sea and people not coming there to swim in the water. As it is a fishing town, don’t the fishermen know that fish prefer water that’s shit free? You ask yourself why they don’t do something about it.
As I walked from the beach along the sea front, kids were playing barefoot on the pavement. The children’s park was empty; all the swings were long since broken. Its only when you look up the side streets where there’s little more than rocks and mud for paving you see that, if barefoot is the way you have to play, the paved area is much more preferable.
I passed a guy who was catching crabs, if they were too small he didn’t just throw them back, he threw them behind him on the pier where they quickly just died in the heat of the sun. It seemed like he didn’t want to have to catch the same small crab again, better to let it die. He seemed to have no sense of tomorrow, just survive today, tomorrow’s tomorrow.
I walked up to a statue of Jesus which most towns have overlooking them in these parts. Beside it was a graveyard; there was no one to be seen either up at the mirador looking down on the town or in the graveyard. Strolling around you see that the graves are above ground, and for a headstone some people just have their name scratched into the cement. I stood there and thought about it for a long time. What if at the end, that is all there was to remember you? How would I feel? Or do people just live on in people’s memories anyway and the headstone doesn’t matter, I couldn’t decide.
The sad thing was that Pacasmayo could be brilliant. It could be a Mecca for surfers, beach goers even just people who love fishing, or even just eating fish and it could be done very easily. How do you inject pride into people, or a sense of passing what they have now onto future generations? From a natural resource perspective the thought process on everything seemed to be, can I eat it? If not, can I sell it? That’s where thinking about the consequences for future generation’s stops and starts.
As the day dragged on it was hard not to feel that this town was doomed and that if folks in these countries don’t imbibe some national pride in their natural treasures that there won’t be any left, I couldn’t help feeling that the clock was ticking.
Later a pair of dweeb surfers turfed out the environmentalist mood in me and replaced it with Machiavellian malice! I talked to these two lads for about five minutes and slowly felt the life force begin to ebb from my body. Two bigger Gobshites you would struggle to meet anywhere in the world. I finished up talking to them and was secretly glad now that the abattoir was pumping its gunge into the sea maybe it would draw in some sharks and trim the herd of these two shitkicker’s.
That night in an internet cafe a girl the size of a hippopotamus chatted me up in Spanish. I was never happier that I knew the phrase “No Hablez Senorita”
I was glad to leave in the end and I tipped just a bit south. No sooner had I left the town than it was straight back into the desert and wind. It’s such a strange feeling driving through this landscape. As with the previous ride, the wind picks up and throws the sand up for miles around. Mountains and any visible shape just become silhouettes of themselves and driving through it feels like driving in a black and white movie.
It goes without saying that you need to keep your wits about you, as I was driving along a truck which was carrying big sticks just started to shed its load stick by stick, it left me doing a slalom behind it to avoid the debris. The desert was full of rubbish, and the houses and buildings I passed were little more than shacks. I passed a desert town where all the houses had a strange looking receiver sticking out of the roofs; it looked like they were all dodgem cars parked together in the middle of the desert.
The vast majority of the shops serve out goods to you through iron bars, I guess most are worried that the place will be robbed, not too much spontaneous shopping done here then "oh I just went in for milk but passed the cookies and just had to buy them!" When your Spanish is as bad as mine you just do a lot of pointing “no up a little...no down a little.... yep that’s it.”
Out in the desert miles from anywhere some bastard had put up massive Pepsi and beer signs. So there you are driving through one of the driest landscapes in the world with your mouth feeling like a camels heel and what do you see; a sign for Pepsi. My mind started to think about it “mmm, a nice cold Pepsi, mmm, the feel of the cold bubbles hitting the back of your throat, mmm and a lovely belch at the end of a long slug. But can you buy a fuckin Pepsi in the desert? No. Are you even within fifty fucking miles of a Pepsi? No! These signs were pure torture.
I made it to Huanchaco, a surfer town which is famous for the weird crafts that the native folks surf out to get their fishnets in. It was a nice place with lots of backpackers. I went out to the beach and caught another gorgeous sunset.
I met a couple of really cool people, Andy from the states who let me know that you can’t weld aluminium and Flo from France who was over my left shoulder eating a huge pastry as we watched the sun setting. I knew the next day would be very long, I was going to try to get from Huanchaco to ANY town past Lima, so it would be the longest day since I left the United States. In case you don’t know; Lima is where they insert the enema for the world, its famous for having a crime committed every three minutes in the city.
I left Huanchaco at dawn with the plan to keep going south until I got past Lima, some four hundred miles away. Lima as I mentioned above has the reputation of being one place that no matter what you don’t want to end up. However, if you want to go to Cuzco, Nazca, and Machu Pichu it’s difficult without going this way.
As soon as I started it was straight into the desert except in a much grander way than previously. That day was in my mind anyway, somewhere between riding a bike on Mars, and taking a bike into the Sahara to chase down a couple of camels with Laurence of Arabia, all day it was drop dead deadly! The road stays very close to the coast so at regular intervals you get to see the desert run right up to the sea.
The weather started the same as it had for the last four days; high winds with loads of sand in the air with the mountains and oncoming traffic all just vague shadows of themselves. But as the day went on, the clouds burned off revealing more and more of the surrounding landscape and you would´ve had to be Stevie wonder not to utter a couple of "holy fuck’s" along the way. The sand as it sweeps across the road can make driving conditions treacherous and with the wind blowing as hard as it was; at times you couldn’t even see the tarmac.
In the desert you can feel completely alone, and you are; there is absolutely no one around for miles and when you drive through this your mind starts to wander in all sorts of directions. Things you´ve said and done, things you shouldn’t have. It’s weird how you have to force yourself to think of the good stuff, whereas the not so good stuff just floods in all by its lonesome.
Driving on the roads can also be like a turkey shoot in the busier sections, and guess who the turkey is. Two or three times a day I’d get run off the road due to trucks and continuing incidences of dropping debris from trucks carrying junk. All day horns are going, lights are flashing but I think one of the biggest pains in the arse is the fact that many of the buses have a horn that is very similar to a police siren so as you are dodging through traffic you constantly think you’re getting pulled over. If that wasn’t enough, Red lights seem to be just something to consider, not follow, on multiple occasions in small towns I had to swerve to avoid a guy who´d gone straight through a red light.
Eventually you just adopt a "fuck you" attitude and keep going until you feel the bite of steel entering your body from a bullet. En route I was stopped without reason by the police twice for speeding, completely bogus charges. These bucks don’t even have speed cameras; they were just stopping me because I was a gringo with money.
On both occasions the routine is always the same "Mucho Rapido, blah blah, more shite more shite" and they leave you sit by the side of the road while they do their best to put on a concerned face. The other thing that became apparent is that they phone ahead to each other to let each other know there is a sucker coming “Get his ass to put out a twenty.”
The annoying part about having to bribe these dipshits is not the money that you have to part with, it’s that if something did happen where you needed their help; if the opposition drops a couple of Benjamin’s you lose. The Police in Peru are pure scum.
I wasn’t having a good time in the country so far. The Peruvians up to this point just were not in the least bit friendly. I’d stopped for gas three times, had three meals and say stopped for some water another three times and not once did I walk away with the impression that these guys were happy to even get the business.
There is an old saying when it comes to travelling and it is that its "people not places" well that’s not true for Peru unless you’re meeting other tourists there. The only sign of caring at all I´d seen in four days was when two lads helped me find my way to Chiclayo. The rest of the time was like selling rosary beads to Protestants.
What you try to do is not change who you are and always try and stay the same. I wondered when I’d meet the nice Peruvians. Most backpackers or normal tourists probably don’t see this side as they go straight to the touristy spots which are well catered to.
After over three hundred miles on the road that day, I arrived in Lima and as it was a Sunday getting through was straight forward. There’s a three lane highway which runs through the city the whole way to reconnect with the Pan-American Highway to the south of the city. So as things turned out it was handy.
I got to a town called Chincha about three hours south of Lima and headed out for a steak. After almost five hundred miles on the road that day I earned it. I was the only one in the restaurant. Half way through the steak I looked up and the movie Titanic was on the TV. It was the scene where Kate is letting poor oul Jack go and he sinks away into the abyss, not a dry eye at the table. I looked around and the two chefs were standing leaning over the counter with their chins on their left hand complete with big tuffty chef hats all glassy eyed, it was a lovely moment.
I was lying in bed the following morning and noticed that there were about twenty or thirty holes in the roof, not a problem when it never rains although when you forgot to put on deet the night before it’s a big deal. I looked like a teenager after too many Easter eggs with all the Mossie bites. Thankfully, I didn’t go to sleep in the buff and all was well with the frankfurter and town halls, so no major damage done.
I set off for Cuzco but gave up early, it was just too far away and I was knackered after the previous day’s efforts. The road turned inland towards Nazca and all of a sudden it was like someone hit the heat switch. To be fair it wasn’t a massive surprise given that the sun was directly over that part of the world when I was there but I was amazed at just how cool the coast was versus inland. I started to hit serious desert again, and it was so vast I just had to stop and try and take it all in. I pulled well off the road and followed a track a couple of miles out into the middle of nowhere. About five miles out I had an argument with myself; not something you´d like the lads in the white coats see you doing. The subject wasn’t new.
For some reason the biker crowd of which I’m a member are a bit touched. I was in the middle of the desert, alone, with no mobile phone and not a soul for miles and miles. I’d about 250ml of water in my bag, a dozen sentences of Spanish and to cap it all was about 12000 miles from home. Like a lunatic, I was heading off into the desert on some track which was last trekked by some Inca with a dose of Rabies who was fucked out of the tribe for interfering with the village basset hound.
I won the argument as you´d expect and said to myself “dude just do the miles leave the trekking for the camels”. Seeing as I was in a remote spot I decided to do a bit or roaring. The desert is unbelievably quiet and for some reason it just seemed that a good roar was an appropriate thing to do. I played Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise in a few good men "You want me on that wall!" and finished off with a bit of Samuel L Jackson in pulp fiction "Listen man giving the Ho a foot massage, blah blah blah blah,holiest of the holies ain’t even the same thing!" I fully recommend it; very therapeutic.
I made my way to Nazca, where the famous lines are. The lines were made by removing the stones and rocks to leave just sand. It’s the usual story; no one knows who or why they made them. Well I have a theory, they were bored. There’s nothing else to do in the desert.
I headed into the town and stopped at a cool restaurant where they were playing traditional Peruvian music, lots of wind pipes and a lovely melodic music. At the next table a retired American lady from Dallas Texas introduced herself; her name was Grace.
Quick summary of the conversation below....
Oisin: So what brought you to Peru? you on holidays? or vacation as you´d call it
Grace: Oh I’m down here with my family showing them the sights I worked here for over twenty five years on and off as an archaeologist.
Oisin: Nice one!....wow... Nice one!....Indiana Jones what!.... plenty to keep you occupied here I´d say... Machu Pichu, Chan Chan....some nice gear alright....
Grace: Oh you don’t know the half-of-it sunny!.... this place is just awash with history....
Oisin: Still they couldn’t have been that great... a couple of Spaniards on horseback killed off the whole thing .....right?.... let’s face it the Spaniards couldn’t box eggs at the best of times...
Grace: Oh your just an ignorant son of a bitch ain’t ya!.... laughing loudly
Oisin: Still... the people are very friendly though eh? ...both of us laughed
Grace: So how come your here...?
Oisin: Blah blah blah..motorbike trip ... blah blah...
Grace: wow sounds fun!....
Oisin: Yep.... having a ball....
Grace: So are you married?
Oisin: Why? you looking for a date?.... you’re a bit old for me!.... (grace didnt laugh, I threw out a Hah!..just to say I was joking....)
Oisin: (bringing in the recovery JCB)...so how many of you are down here?
Grace: Don’t think you can waltz round that "old" remark sonny! (thankfully smiling)
Oisin: Don’t mind me.... I’m an ape at the best of times....
She went onto describe how Machu Pichu is sinking my 1cm a month (I made a joke..that’s fairly slow eh? Another arrow that missed wildly) and how much was lost to conquistadores and private collectors. I got a heap of tips where to go and what to see; but mostly it was brilliant to chat to someone in English again.
I left Nazca not bothering with the plane trip to see the lines. The place was too hot and my mossie bites were itching like I don’t know what. My most vivid memory of the town is the incessant beeping of Taxi horns, they never stopped. If the taxi driver sees a foreigner he just beeps the horn so you see him and then you make eye contact and shake your head and so it continues for the duration of your walk around the town. I wondered if this is what if this is what it felt like to be wolf whistled at.
The next morning I headed for Cuzco and was on the road once more at dawn. The sign on the way out of Nazca says 561km which given the route was going to go over some mountain roads I knew I had at least nine hours of driving ahead of me. With 200km done, I passed a sign that said Cuzco 472km. What the fuck!, it meant riding nearly four hundred and eighty miles, whatever way they measure the distance here it doesn’t work. The road had very few gasoline stations so I filled up at every opportunity. It was hard to get any gas above 84 octanes, which is basically baboon piss, but Sam Gamgee lapped it up and kept going.
The road gradually carved a path through the Andes changing from desert to
rocky planes and finally into mountain farmland. All day I was treated to steep climbs and descents through the mountains, high mountain planes, deep canyons, rolling rivers, lakes, a stunning sunset, snow capped peaks, I really thought I was going to burst, I didn’t realise that anywhere in the world was so beautiful. The most spectacular thing about it is that you’re completely alone. The best way to look out into vast sweeping canyons is when it’s completely quiet, so the less people the better.
I stopped for something to eat in a remote village and sat outside under a parasol chowing down on rice and chicken. As I was eating the grub, three pigs two sheep and a chicken walked by; I swore the chicken gave me a dirty look, “You’re eating my brother you ****!”
With the length of time it took me to do the drive, over twelve hours, I ended up out in the Andes with sixty miles still to drive in the dark. The hazards when it’s dark are many and varied. The amount of cattle on the road made me think Noah was up around the corner, at one point I almost ploughed into a herd of cattle, I’m pretty sure my pannier caught a tail, my heart was all over the place.I was taking my life in my hands and I’d no one to blame but myself.
That night I tossed and turned all night in the bed, I just could not stop thinking about the altiplano, which I had seen that day. In my mind I'd seen the best scenery that I was ever going to see and I had an uncontrollable urge to see it again. The great thing about having such a long journey is you can do just that, so the next morning I set off at 5am to go back. It took a little over two hours to get there and then two hours back; I was afraid that it would look different or wouldn’t be as good as yesterday but it was exactly the same.
The place is haunting. When you pull off the road and step out onto the trails it feels like your stepping out onto an endless plane. I said already that the silence is the most striking thing; the only audible sound is a cool breeze blowing in your face. In the far distance a grey blue lake sat motionless, and beyond that steep mountains. The roads stretch off into the distance without a bend, if there are any you're far too caught up in the moment to notice.
The clouds paint shadows on the yellow plane, and as if to cap the experience you can see them drift across the sky and plane in unison.
I think it’s only in the most remote and most quiet places of the world that a person really relaxes and unwinds, just sitting there thinking about things you never normally take the time to. Then as you drive on, the hills rise imperceptibly at first but before long you're shaken out of your trance by sweeping right and left hand bends which drive the pulse up into the 160's.
Cuzco is very touristy, and with that, expensive. You can’t sit anywhere but you’re beset by people either begging or selling something, so it’s not a comfortable place to just go out and walk. A lot of the bars sell T-shirts with the words “No Gracias” printed on them as a way of showing solidarity with the beleaguered tourist. The altitude has some interesting side effects. First of all, you do anything at all and you’re out of breath, but the second one is that it gives you brutal wind, just for a while I was farting like an officer’s horse. (Well it’s either the altitude or someone put farting powder in my grub).
Thankfully, all the chambers equalised to the lower pressure and I booked up for Machu Pichu the following day. When I was done with Machu Pichu it would be time to head south to Puno and Lake Titicaca, but all of Cuzco was awash with stories that the road was blocked and you couldn’t get through.
I met a great Irish couple, Fergal and Aoibhann in an internet cafe and we headed around to O' Flaherty’s pub, a real Irish bar. Fergal was probably the biggest Liverpool fan in the world and we were both anxiously waiting to see if Liverpool held out against Portsmouth; thankfully they did and off we went for some grub and pints. Aoibhann was an archaeologist and liked football, a much weirder combination than Inca ruins on a mountaintop if you ask me.
There were lots of negative stories about Bolivia; if half the tales were true the country was starting to unravel, with civil war apparently a certainty in the next year. There were several horror stories on the news and others getting told by the backpacker crew, one was about people getting kidnapped and taken to an ATM every day to empty out their cards until they had no money left. Apparently three Irish folks were kidnapped and held in this way for over two weeks, and when they’d no money left in their accounts they were released.
In the south of Peru there was a farmers strike, and the roads are totally blocked with no way through. The same is apparently starting to happen in the north. At that moment everyone was just flying to La Paz bypassing the problem; however it wasn’t an option open to me on a motorbike. So I decided to stay another day in Cuzco while I tried to plan a route which allowed me to get to Lake Titicaca and to the salt flats in Bolivia.
We met a dead on guy in the pub called Dayna (I know, he knows it’s a girl’s name too) who is a cousin of Fergal and slowly but surely the amount of pints in the system kept climbing. As I went out to draw on the porcelain, I met Sam from Australia who I met in Antigua in Guatemala. He came to join us and the crack was mighty.
More and more folks kept showing up and at one stage there were Germans, Canadians, English, Ozzies, Irish and Dubs all swinging out of pints at the table. We went to a nightclub, and got absolutely hammered, it was a great night. I got back to the hostel at 4am, and was getting collected at 6am to go to Machu Pichu. Man it felt like I just blinked and the door was getting hammered down by the tour guide. I just had time for a wing wash (can’t beat the Boots Cucumber wipes!) and off we went, with me still drunk.
The only thing I can say about Machu Pichu is that it exceeded my expectations and with everything I’d heard about it I really thought that would be impossible. Even though the place is full of tourists it’s still possible to find places where you can be alone and just soak up the whole experience. As I was sitting there looking off the side of the mountain into the yawning chasm below, a girl from Slovenia came along and started eating a sandwich while sitting up against a rock about five yards away from me. She was a cracker and was working as a tour guide. We chatted for about two hours and really hit it off but we were both heading dramatically different directions; who knows in another place and time we might have been something.
On the way back to Cuzco on the train I met a couple from Uruguay who I took an instant liking to. They were always laughing and joking and telling stories, I wrote in my diary that a good sense of humour is one of the best qualities you can have; I think it just draws people to you. I guess no one wants to be hanging around a bunch of moaning Michael’s.
In the main square in Cuzco I met a young lad of about eight years of age called Nino. He was a shoe cleaner, now normally I wouldn’t get my shoes cleaned not because I’m a tight bastard but because I have a problem with kids cleaning shoes for people at such a young age, but in this case I told him to go ahead.
The care and attention he put into cleaning them was amazing. He carried a box about the size of a small dollhouse with him and it was full of little doors and presses. Every now and then, he would take out a little bottle of some potion or other and use it to clean off a blemish from the well broken in cross trainers. We ended up having the coolest of chats, which started with him saying to me “Do you like Snickers bars?”
I replied “yep but there not as nice as a Double Decker”.
He said that he’d never heard of one so I described it to him in detail. I also said its best out of the fridge and served with a cup of tea, I said that I’d post one over to him. So it went for the next half an hour just chewing the cud about which type of chocolate bar was nicer and did they have this type of bar in Ireland, and did I prefer Mars to Milky way or Twix to Snickers.
The night before I left I met up with Sam again for a couple of beers in a local Irish bar. While we were there chatting we bumped into Vanessa from Belgium. She was touring South America on her own and she was a cracker. The other attractive thing about her was that she could nail a pint as quick as any guy.
We were in rounds and although she kept saying “just get me a glass” we kept getting her pints. She always was the first one to get near the end of the glass and look over with a look which said “Dudes! the tide is out, your twist”. We went back to a party in her hostel, I considered trying to slap the gob on her but decided against it, she was too hot, and too nice; I’d only end up pining my way through Bolivia thinking about her, better to be on my own. Of course, it was much more likely that if I did try and slap the gob on her that she’d respond by giving me a good kick in the nuts.
It was time to leave Cuzco, and it was harder than you might think. The previous night it was Halloween and the Peruvians really go on the slaughter. The car park where I had my bike parked didn’t open till nearly 10am having supposed to be open at seven which is when I showed up to collect it. The lad who was working there, when he showed up was so hung-over looking I didn’t even bother to moan at him, he was suffering enough.
Before I’d got to the car park I’d woke up and one of my Mossie bites had become inflamed, or at least I thought it was a mossie bite and that maybe I’d scratched it during the night. Some people really flare up if they get a bite, I normally don’t so I used the time I was waiting for the car park to open to pop down to the surgery off the square, and get them to have a look at it.
The attendant looked at the bite and started making a weird face, the sort of face you make when you think one of the lettuce leaves in your dinner salad just moved all by its lonesome. He took the arm under one of those magnifying glass platforms and then started a round of shaking his head with lots of tsk tsk tsk'ing. Next thing I knew he had gotten a needle, popped the lump and sucked out the gunge. Then he said a word, a word which turned my face green in 1 second flat "blah blah blah Huevos" Fucking eggs, I nearly turned inside out.
There was an American guy there who spoke English and they were asking me was I trekking or camping in the desert? Some nasty beast had laid eggs into me so next thing the doctor got me to strip off, I hadn’t had a shower so was cringing; the doctor did a full check from head to toe and there were no more around the place, thank Jaysus. "Unusual" was how he summed up
I logged onto the Department of foreign affairs website to see if the roads had cleared to the south of Cuzco and it said the following:
Protesters are currently blocking the main road, near Sicuani, between Cuzco and Arequipa. Travellers should avoid this route. In recent weeks several political and labour-related strikes have been occurring across the country. These demonstrations may lead to violent outbreaks at any time, especially in the departments of Apurímac, Ayacucho, Arequipa, Cuzco, Huancavelica, Huanuco, Junin, Lambayeque, Piura, Puno and San Martín. The armed forces and the national police were recently deployed nationwide in an effort to control civil unrest. Roadblocks may occur on main roads and cause traffic disruptions. Irish citizens should not attempt to cross blockades, even if they appear unattended. Curfews may also be in effect and airports may be closed in response to further unrest.
If I did manage to get through the protests in Southern Peru it said the following of Bolivia:
Currently the situation within the country is very tense and there is potential for social unrest, particularly in the eastern provinces. It is possible that flights to these areas may be cancelled. It is recommended that travellers exercise caution and monitor the media for developments. We are advising against travel to Tarija and Santa Cruz regions for the present. There is also the risk of violent protests in Pando and Beni regions
Fuck em! I went anyway.
I set out with a bit of a knot in the stomach, I’d met a lot of people there and it was time for goodbyes again, but the road cured my mood of any doldrums very quickly. The initial part of the journey followed the course of a river through green valley’s hemmed in by massive brown mountains. Slowly but surely, the roads started to climb and I was back onto another section of altiplano.
I've never felt as at home in any landscape in my life. For me this was a mirror image of Rohan in the Lord of the Rings and instead of riding a horse it was me and Sam Gamgee the bike. I like an old ruin as much as the next guy but it just raises a couple of hmmmmsss's, interesting's, really's and ok's, for me anyway. Whereas natural beauty is what I really love. It was like my feel good meter was absolutely maxed out. The only thing that could have made it better would be watching Liverpool win the European cup while getting fed marshmallows by a nude Brittney spears.
By the time I got to the blockaded area, the road was clear bar a lot of rubble, but you could tell things had got nasty as the area was heaving with police. I continued down the road and got to Puno, the last town I would visit in Peru. I went out for dinner in a lovely restaurant on the square and just above the church you could see the moon and a very bright star, it was all very romantic but it was just me and Sam; Man I needed a woman.
The tour bus collected me at the hotel at 6am to head to Lake Titicaca. To be honest I wasn’t really expecting much, a big lake at high altitude with some people living on funny islands, not really my bag but you can’t come to this part of the world without doing it, and so off I went. The trip started bad, the boat that was taking us stunk of a mixture of crap and diesel fumes so there was a scramble to get up top. They only let ten up there at a time so with ten hours to go on the trip the atmosphere on the boat was going downhill quick.
Early on in the trip before everyone was either barfing from the smell of crap or unconscious from diesel fumes; we pulled into one of the reed islands. The islands are built on the roots of these reeds that float like corks. They then pile lots of reeds and stuff over it; it’s squishy to walk on and it was all very different from anything I'd encountered so far. The initial part felt unbelievably touristy as the family on the island sang a couple of songs, so a bit naff, but cool at the same time.
As it went on it got a lot better. Apparently the people who live there suffer terribly with rheumatism and after the age of fifty most can’t walk. You can’t help but notice that the people’s faces are etched with hard work; all have unbelievably deep wrinkles on their faces with most people very bent over. They took us out on a reed boats which was paddled by only one guy, carrying twenty tourists, he still managed to keep up a good gallop.
We then went to an island where with the altitude was over 4000m above sea level; I was out of breath just tying my shoe laces. The island was touristy as hell but nice at the same time. We had a trout lunch and the locals put on a couple of dances and stuff, it’s the sort of place you'd bring visiting aunties and uncles really. As the air is so thin you can see for miles and the sun is unbelievably strong, and because of that the lake is unbelievably blue.
On the way back the sun was setting through a storm, I felt so calm I could have given Buddha a run for his money. I went out for dinner in the square and ended up talking to a girl from Russia who was travelling as well. Her English was about as good as my Russian so the conversation was mainly taken up with polite nodding.
I thought to myself which nationality of women have a penchant for hairy arsed Irish bikers out on a world trip with a beard that Jesus would be proud of? The answer was no more apparent than on any of the previous 114 days of the trip through 25,000 miles.
The next day I was going to Bolivia.
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Ride on!
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Review posted, keep it coming 
