Under the stars, next to the dogs
Bivvying in Peru
Rounding off our first week on the bikes, we followed our by-now habitual pattern — a visit to the mechanic! My bike had started to sound like a bag of old rusty nails so we decided to ask someone more knowledgeable than us to have a listen. Ten minutes of poking around later the mechanic very knowingly declared that my valves were playing up and set about having a tweak. As the other two didn’t want to miss out on this chance of a whopping millionth of a brake horse power, they wanted the same champagne and caviar treatment. As you can imagine, we ended up spending a lot of time with this particularly friendly mechanic. The sun was out so Tibet settled in and got writing a blog post (dressed as E.T. for some reason) while I rented some mugs off an old, enterprising lady to drink some coffee while our Chinese dirt bikes morphed into superbikes.
After frying not-so-gently in the sun, we finally set off across the central valley towards the coast. The bike sounded no better to me, but just to make sure we did some open-throttle fifth-gear straight line power testing to test our fancy tweaked valves. With the speedometers as wildly inaccurate as ever, Tibet’s bike had become the slowest of the three which, thinking about it, may have been the root of some minor emotional friction that day — this was the first day that we sacked off talking to each other and put on the tunes.
Peru, as ever, did not disappoint with lifting our moods. We climbed back up to 4400m through excellent, wide-open twists and turns to emerge at the top. While we were having our desiccated lunch it struck me how similar this landscape was to the Longmynd near my home town of Shrewsbury, despite being so far away and so much higher up! I think this may have been the beginnings of the first pangs of homesickness, but they didn’t last for long as the road back down from the top was more than distracting.
The exciting, seductive tarmac turns soon gave way to terrifying, loose gravel on the way down. For me, switching road surface is nerve-wracking for rather longer than it should be. The other two seem to adjust rather quickly, but they are young and nimble, while I am old and slow. In this section of road, the Peruvians seemed to abandon their usually excellent quality of dirt road and instead went to the effort of piling up loose, soft sand on the apex of each corner. With the front brake handling the sustained torture admirably, we steadily wound our way down into the valley. The sides gradually steepened into the most incredible gorge as we entered the Yauyos National Park. Tucked away in the gorge was a small town by the name of San Tomas, where a child of around 10 filled up our bikes with petrol while I discussed knitting techniques (badly) with her mother who was vaguely watching on. Another few failed attempts of trying to capture the scale of the place with the camera later we pressed on with the afternoon slowly turning into evening.
For me, the next two or so hours were the most enjoyable riding of the trip so far. The downhill gradient was just enough for the bikes to feel quick, but not enough that braking was a trouble, and the curves were tight enough to be challenging without ruining the interior of my underwear at each opportunity, the confidence building with each turn. We did have one incident of over-exuberance as an expertly timed apex caused a pannier to brush the side of an incoming pick up truck. There was a bit of drama and hand-waving from the driver, but we continued with a hand shake and nothing more. We did 50km or so like this, barely encountering another soul. As the sun started to dip behind the steep sides of the valley, we needed to find somewhere to stay the night. The villages were few and far between, and those we did encounter were not set up to handle any sort of tourist. As a result, we took the decision to camp for the first time.
We found a farm track that led up into a canyon on the side of the main valley. At the top was a small prickly pear farm with a small shelter. We set up the tent to house our luggage for the night and cleared a patch for us to bivvy in. Didier set about making a decent fire pit and we tucked into what tasted like some excellent instant noodles (we were very hungry by this time). The weather was warm and dry, so we were excited to watch the Milky Way above us as we fell asleep. I’ll be honest — I was pretty nervous about sleeping out in the open, who knew what would be lurking in the bushes?!
After some gentle ribbing from Tibet and Didier who thought they could sleep soundly if I would be awake all night keeping guard, we gradually began to nod off. Around half an hour later an overbearing smell of petrol started to waft over us. Turning on our headlamps we noticed that Tibet’s bike was leaking petrol like no tomorrow. We fixed this, and in the process of returning to the bivvy bag I noticed a scorpion wondering nonchalantly next to my bag. Tibet very kindly disposed of it, and with my bag very tightly drawn around my face tried to get to sleep again.
Fast-forward three hours and I was woken by not too distant sound of dogs barking. Wide-eyed and lying still I listened as the dogs got closer and closer. It turns out I wasn’t the only one feeling a bit wired at this point. Tibet rather heroically suggested that we move into the tent to ensure that we retain ownership of our respective faces. Didier and I agreed that this was an excellent idea and so the bivvying experience was over for the night.
It ended up being slightly cloudy so we couldn’t even see the Milky Way anyway. Hah.
After a few hours of relatively peaceful sleep and me trying my best not to roll on top of Didier, we pack up, got some shots of us leaving the canyon and continued carving our way down the valley towards the coast and the Pan-American.
