Thru Peru

Peru was the fourth South American country we visited.

Coming fourth is the just about worst position in any competition and so it was for Peru.

It suffered. It suffered from our inevitable state of comparison. It suffered from being, in our minds, either more or less.

Its roadside shops were more ordered than those in Bolivia, but less so than those in Argentina or Chile. Its road surfaces were more consistently bike-able than most of those in Bolivia but less so than those there that had been flash and new. It had more agreeable sanitation than Bolivia but much less so than Chile. When it was deserted it was more deserted than Argentina but its outposts when you came across them felt pleasantly less remote. It had more ATM machines than we had seen for an age but many fewer than we had been used to when we had started. There was a much more cosmopolitan and abundant feeling than in the remote Andes but then when people had less they seemed to have much, much less.

More or less, it was more or less.

The Race to Lima

The more observant reader of our Pedalling North drivellings may have noticed that we find ourselves in Vancouver, Canada.  Does this mean that our recent blog drought was on account of a frantic spurt of cycling 400km per day for a month?  Erm, actually no.  The really observant reader may have spotted that the blog has been rechristened as 'Pedalling (from the) North'.  A bit of explanation may be in order...

In mid-August, sitting in a hotel room in Camana, Peru, we did some sums.  It became apparent that Delta's (cheap!) Ecuador-Seattle flight schedule came to an end for the rest of 2010 on September 6th.  We had already decided that the US would be better tackled from North to South (prevailing winds and all that...), so this effectively set us a deadline for our main South American leg.  If we were to squeeze in a few days in the Galapagos Islands before leaving the southern hemisphere, we had to haul our *sses to Lima, as an interim finishing point, in double quick time.  From there we would be able to take the bikes and ourselves to Ecuador by bus.  So it dawned on us... we needed to cover a little over 800km from Camana to Lima in 10 days.  And so began our Race to Lima.

Get that Guinea Pig a Coffee

[This blog was started in mid-August, but alas only just finished...] Since we left the culinary delights of Bolivia in late July (think: strict functionality taking precedence over pleasure or subtlety), Peru's fare raised our collective eyebrows in a number of ways. And they weren't all good. Or, by any means, bad.


For one thing, we were back in the Land of the Menu. In Bolivia, you eat what you are given, with all three courses arriving pretty much simultaneously and the only real choice coming between a single brand of beer versus a variety of improbably coloured liquids masquerading as 'fruit' drinks. In Peru, by contrast, menus are often long and mouthwatering. The problem comes when you actually order something: somewhat like the ubiquitous slot machines in Peruvian towns, it can take a number of efforts before any 'cherries' actually come up, and we frequently discovered that whole sections of menus were unavailable. Take the first night in seaside Camana, where we discovered first that there was no fish at all, and then - even more inconceivable - that there was no pisco!

Twin Peaks

`Who killed Laura Palmer?´...

....was the question on the lips of my friends and I in late 1990 when a cult television show from America obsessed everyone my age.

Twin Peaks.

This surreal drama series centered around a community of odd balls in small town USA where a teenage beauty queen had been murdered.

All the protagonists were unusual and wacky characters. There was a detective with a coffee and cherry pie addiction, a woman who always carried a log in her arms, a man who couldn't stop dancing and singing and an unusually high per-population number of dark secrets, physical quirks and tendencies to violent solutions.The plot twists were bizarre, their daily lives unimaginable. Surely nowhere on earth was this weird?

Cobresol: 1 Bolognesi: 0

It is important to state right at the outset that I am NOT an expert on football.

I am strictly a light weight ´World Cup watching´ sort and even then I am as happy passing round the crisps and sarnies as I am being glued to the box. I have been to exactly two live football matches in my life. A Boxing Day game watching Watford play someone (!) back in the late 1990s and a trip to the Emirates Stadium to watch Liverpool v Arsenal in around 2001. On that last occassion I went with a Liverpool fan but we had to sit with all the Arsenal supporters and so the whole match was spent trying to stop my companion cheering at the wrong moment or punch the surrounding humans when they were celebrating.

So, as you can see a childhood spent watching cricket, rugby and ice dancing little prepared me for my latest experience in Peru. A live football match in Moguequa between the home side and that of the town two biking days back down the road, Tacna.

Desert Rats

Well, we're into Peru.  At the border, amongst a milling group of self-appointed bicycle guardian angels, we met a small, shuffling bespectacled bear, clad in an incongruous duffle coat, a rather unusual felt hat and wellington boots, and clutching a battered old suitcase.  He welcomed us in typically warm Peruvian fashion and insisted that we enjoy a number of his favourite foods whilst we are in his country.  Since that border, now a few days ago, we have run into welcomes of consistently Paddingtonesque warmth and have indeed launched into his favourite marmalade sandwiches among other delicacies.

But there's been more to it than bespectacled bears.