Misery loves company

Saying that the ride from Nazca to Cuzco was miserable isn't really fair. I'd say that about 80% of it was sheer pleasure, but those other 20%, well that was challenging
Now before I go into this I do want to make a philosophical point. I'm sure that in 6 months when I am back in Seattle, daydreaming of riding motorcycles I will look back on the challenging bits and think about how much I would like to be there. However, while you are in the midst of it all you really want is to get through it safely and honk out to the other side where curved roads and spectacular scenery abound. The key is to remind myself during the challenging stuff that this is actually a good thing, that we will get through it and that I should enjoy pushing myself.
I also have to remember that I could be a lot worse off, like these mummys at a very old graveyard near Nazca. We were told not to miss this graveyard, so we rode about 30km out of Nazca (about 10km on a sandy road) and checked it out. About 2000 years ago the locals buried their dead out in the desert using pretty swell mummifying techniques. The lack of water helped to preserve the mummies. Then, about 75 years ago people figured out that there were huge burial grounds out here and tore apart all of the tombs looking for gold (they didn't find any) spreading bones and cloth all over the desert. Then... about 10 years ago, someone decided it would be proper to protect these mummies made and protected the site. Then about a week ago we walked around it looking at very old people. One thing that really stood out for me was how long their hair was and how dreadlocked it is.
Speaking of challenging times, we bumped into Robert sitting in the square in Nazca. Robert is about 2 years into a trip bicycling around the world. He started in his home country of England by quitting his teaching job, selling off his flat and just leaving. He is in his mid 50's and of course is about as fit as a person can be. Look at his website if you have any inkling of doing something like this. It really isn't that hard to make it happen. What I liked about Robert is that you often think of people who do this type of thing as intense and very driven. He isn't really like that. He just sort of started riding and is still going. He takes it day to day which is really the only way to do it if you are riding your bicycle around the world.
On to our story... We left Nazca for the the 400 mile trip to Cuzco. We had heard rumors that this stretch of road is one of the most lovely riding experiences in all of South America. The first 30 miles went well enough as we made our way steeply up perfect twisting road, past a 5000 foot sand dune and into the clouds that lay ahead. And then the fog hit. The thing about riding in the fog is that we don't have windshield wipers or a defrost on our helmets. Riding in the rain isn't so bad because the drops are large enough that they pool together and stream off the helmet, but this doesn't happen in the fog. So between 10 foot visibility and a faceshield full of condensation it was pretty hard to see. We managed to get behind a police car for 20 miles or so which was nice because all we had to do was follow the flashing read lights.
Here's an aside. Why don't drivers down here ever drive with their lights on during the day, or during the fog? In fact, many many drivers will flash their lights at us to tell us our lights are on (at least I think that is what they are saying). This is annoying when visibility is good, but down right dangerous when it is bad.
So for a while we drove at 15 mph cutting through the fog. With 350 miles to go, this was going to be a long ride. At about 13,000 feet we finally broke out of the fog and rode along side a Vicuña reserve where we spotted many of the cutest animals I can imagine.
The we dropped a bit and the fog came back. This time for about 70 miles. It sucked. And it was cold. At about 3 in the afternoon I started to wonder if we were going to need to camp somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. I found a trucker on the side of the road who was coming from the other direction and asked him how much longer the fog was going to last for. To my relief he said 20 minutes. But he also said that there was going to be lots of rain.
Rain we can deal with. We have really nice Arcteryx GORE-TEX® Outerwear (I have to write the Gore logo that way). We both have the Sidewinder AR jackets and Beta AR pants which so far have kept us 100% dry in extremely heavy rain.
As we were mounting back up to drive the 20 more minutes of fog, a large BMW motorcycle zoomed past us on the road. Even in the fog, you can tell a BMW motorcycle by the sound. Misery loves company and we thought it might be fun to ride with this lone soldier out here. But he was ahead of us now and it was not like we could drive fast to catch him.
About 20 minutes later, when the fog did indeed turn to pouring rain we saw a rider on the side of road changing into warmer clothes. Rudolf is a german who parks his motorcycle over here every year and spends some months riding it around. A mid 50's soft spoken professor type (he's a psychologist at an alternative jail in Switzerland), we immediately enjoyed riding with him. We finished up the day in pouring rain across 14,000 foot plains and then a deep gorge down to the half point between Nazca and Cuzco.
The next day was more great riding (with no fog but lots of rain) along swollen rivers, broken down road cuts, and twisty passes into Cuzco.
After quite a bit of looking we found a garage for our bikes and a very nice Hotel near the center of town.





Then at about 1 am Megan's little friends who live in her stomach (we didn't know they were there) reared their ugly Giardia heads and sent us off to a 24 hour clinic where we had to knock on doors and wake people up. Two hours later with an assessment of Giardia as well as some type of infection we were back in our hotel room with drugs and a Megan in a lot of pain.