The Indulgent Adventures of Bubbs and Bubs

Worrying about crating the bikes

2011-05-18T11:17:00.000-07:00

We knew the end of the trip was near. After two final days of riding we pulled into Valparaiso and up to the Villa Kunterbunt.

[Me thinking hard about getting back on the road with these guys] I suppose this is a good opportunity to write a little bit about what it felt like to be at the end of the trip. For me, it mostly felt empty, like a tank of gas after a long ride. I wasn't ready to be done with the trip by any means. I could have easily filled up the tank and kept going for several more months or years. In fact, at Villa Kunterbunt there were two motorcyclists who were getting ready to pull out and ride north through South America. As they were going through the ritual of packing up their bikes and putting on their riding gear, I felt a very very strong pull to do the same and head off on the road. One of these guys, Fred, has been on the road for 6 years and plans to be on the road for years to come.

But our tank was empty. We had had a brilliant 8 months of adventuring through many many places and meeting countless wonderful people along the way. All along, we knew that at some point the trip had to end at some point and the fact that we are ending it healthy and with the bikes intact is a huge bonus.

So I didn't feel exactly sad. I didn't feel unsatisfied either. I felt more resigned to the fact that we needed to go back to the States. We both have work waiting for us and it will feel nice to get on top of it. I'm not saying I want to go back to work, but the work we have is interesting and if we are going to do it, then I want to get going on it and do the best job possible. Home was calling us and our direction was towards the US (not towards Brazil).

Villa Kunterbunt is a motorcyclist only hostel that helps many people with the import/ export of their bikes. It is run by a german by heritage woman, Martina- although she is pretty darn Chilean now, and her Chilean husband, Enzo. They own a 100 year old Adam's Family style house overlooking the port of Valparaiso and have a few extra rooms available for visiting motorcyclists. We had the tower room with a 360 degree view of Valpo (as the town is called).

[In the tower room] We looked into a few options for what to do with the bikes. Our #1 plan was to sell them in Chile or in Argentina. They are worth far more in South America than they are in the US and we knew that shipping was going to cost us (as well as use a lot of resources to get them home). We made some queries here and there and found quite a bit of interest in buying the bikes, but when push came to shove, it was actually incredibly hard (if not illegal) to sell the ladies. If a person wanted to buy the bikes, that person would have to figure out how to import and then license the bikes and including most likely having to pay someone off to make the papers. It would cost them a lot of time and money. Of course, we don't really care, as long as we get money in the bank, someone could have the bikes but in the end it all proved too complicated.

[proofing the palette in Enzo's workshop] So shipping the bikes home was the option. I suppose in theory we could have done it on our own, but sometimes it is just worth it to have help. Enzo and Martina know how to play the game. That and Enzo has a workshop where he could custom build a crate for our bikes.

The first quote came to $3200 for both bikes, but after convincing Martina that we could get both bikes into one big crate, I think the final bill came to $2500. Enzo was able to get both the bikes into a 2.8 cubic meter box which is pretty incredible and a testimony to his experience crating bikes.

So the process goes like this:

1. Measure the bikes from front to back and side to side (when they are in a head to toe configuration) with the front wheel removed.

2. Built a bottom palette to match these dimension and put the bikes on this to prove they indeed can fit.

3. With the bikes tied down and the panniers in position, measure how tall the crate will need to be.

4. Remove the bikes from the palette and go to Santiago for the weekend to visit friends while Enzo builds the rest of the crate.

4.5 Arrive back in Valpo and realize that we left a passport in Santiago so at 11 at night drive the 75 miles back to Santiago in the fog to get it and then go back to Valpo.

5. Drive 60 miles to the port town of San Antonio with a truck in tow that is carrying the dissembled crate.

6. Go to a large lot where the consolidator will load the crate into a metal container to be shipped to the states.

7. Put the bikes back on the bottom palette, remove the front wheels, tie down the bikes, remove the handlebars and put everything on the palette in such a way as to not have it jiggle around on the voyage.

8. Build the crate up and around the bikes.

9. Spray paint my name and where the bikes are headed on the side of the box.

10. Visit 8 different offices in San Antonio to get all the paperwork in line.

11. Go back to the crate, kiss it farewell, and hope for the best.

We left the crate sitting in a lot without any paperwork attached to it except for my name spray painted on the side. Enzo ensured us that somehow it would be picked up by a forklift, loaded into a container, put on a boat headed to New York, reconsolidated into another container and put on a truck to Seattle and then arrive someplace near Seattle at sometime in the next 6 weeks.

With this reassurance, we handed over $2500 in cash without a receipt and all we can do is hope for the best. We should expect a phone call (or email?) at some point in the next month telling us when and where the bikes will be. At that point we will reassemble the bikes and drive them away.

Now I know what you are thinking: "are you crazy?" But what other choice did we have? One thing we have learned on this trip is that at times you just have to trust people. There are times when you shouldn't trust people, but there are times when you should. Villa Kunterbunt has a good reputation and wouldn't be interested in screwing us. There could be some mistakes with the shipper/ consolidator, but we will deal with that if a problem arrises.

[in the Bolivian Altiplano- wouldn't want to run out of gas out here] Another thing we learned on this trip is to figure out which problems are worth fretting about and which ones aren't. There are many many things that can go wrong on a motorcycle trip from Seattle to Chile. Many of these things you can anticipate and plan for- e.g. normal motorcycle maintenance issues for which you can bring spare parts, lack of gasoline in certain areas for which you can carry extra gas, spats between married riding partners for which you can have a process for dealing with.

But there are many things which you in theory you could worry about and plan for ahead of time but which might be best dealt with when the time comes- places to stay for the night, broken motorcycle pieces which you absolutely can not fix at a particular time and place, roads which may or may not go due to river crossings, shipping motorcycles home once we have left them in good hands.

In short you have to decide what things to worry about and come up with a contingency plan for and what things to worry about when they come up. You can't worry about and plan for everything all the time. You'd simply get nowhere in life.

So that's it, the bikes are [hopefully] on their way to Seattle via New York (again- this crazy route is out of our control) we are headed back to Seattle for our 6 months to get going on our work (me with GORE-TEX and Megan with Montessori 123) and we have to start thinking about what to do next.

A kid is the most likely option but we really want to bicycle around New Zealand too. Perhaps we can do both.

Blueberries from afar

2011-05-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

I've always felt very strange buying produce from half way around the world. New Zealand apples, peruvian asparagus, chilean blueberries.

On this trip we have seen the massive asparagus fields in the deserts of Peru. We have seen the controversial Quinoa in Bolivia (where because of foreign demand, Bolivians can no longer afford to eat this incredible grain). And now we have stayed on an organic blueberry farm in Southern Chile.

Jorge, Cristina and their son Felipe own a 800 acre farm in the fertile lands just east of Villaricca. It is a rainy area with a similar climate to Seattle and perfect for growing things like strawberries and blueberries.

Jorge and Martina used to raise cattle and sheep on their land as well as manage pine and eucalyptus trees and then 10 years ago they decided it would be cool to finish raising their three kids in Gig Harbor (40 miles south of Seattle). Jorge got a student visa for the family and they relocated. Of course, Jorge preferred going to the race track rather than school so Cristina had to get a job as a high school math teacher in order for them to keep their visa.

About 2 years ago, Felipe, their now 26 year old son decided he wanted to return to Chile and start working their land. He planted blueberries and raspberries because they can bear fruit relatively quickly and there is a good foreign market for the organic version. He also planted hazelnuts but those take a while.

[custom charcoal maker] The parents moved back to Chile this year by driving their car down and they all live together on this beautiful piece of property. They are hard workers and Felipe is learning a lot about running a farm. It is cool to see his inventions for organic farming and to learn of his plans for the land.

Blueberries by Felipe

So next time you see organic blueberries from Chile, know that we may know the family that farms them and they are doing cool stuff with their land. You can feel good about that. Whether you want to buy something that had to be shipped half way around the world is up to you. Depends how badly you are craving blueberries in February.

The farm house

Jorge helping me to put Megan's bike back together

Slapped in the face by a monkey tree (or was it a rock) aka the case of the missing bolt

2011-05-14T15:39:00.000-07:00

[fall in the rivers district of Chile] A quick administrative update: We are actually back in the states now but the last two weeks have been a bit adventurous and I haven't had time to blog. My goal is to get caught up in the next week so here it goes...

You know those days that start out so gloomy and then surprise after surprise comes along and by the end of the day you are on top of the world and feeling as happy as a monkey in a hot spring? Well... we had the opposite of one of those for our first day back in Chile. I suppose it ended up on a high note, but for a while I was feeling quite ready for the motorcycle trip to be over.

View From San Martin to Villaricca in a larger map

We left Argentina on the day before the day I'm about to talk about. Our planned route was to leave San Martin de los Andes and take the route via a long ferry ride that cuts through the mountains. The ferry didn't sail until 4 pm so we lingered around San Martin for the morning and finally got going around 2. We meant to leave at 1 but you know how it goes. This left us with 2 hours to cover 50 km of road and 1 border crossing into Chile.

Lets just say that at 4:01 they had to remove the chain to let us on the ferry. At least we made it although if we hadn't I can think of far worse places to be stuck for 24 hours waiting for the next ferry.

The ferry travelled about 25 km along a gorgeous lake with pristine forests on either side. It was a very nice ride and we even made an intermediate stop to pick some oxen and their load. These big fellows were very docile and obviously the best choice for some of the roads in these parts.

[Practicing my spanish with some Chileans] Once on the ferry we ended up chatting with a wonderful family who happened to live in the Seattle area for 10 years and had just moved back to their farm in Chile. They recognized our Washington plates and immediately invited us to their farm outside of Villaricca to come and stay. Our plan had been to bullet it back to Santiago as fast as possible but we couldn't pass up an opportunity to stay at an organic blueberry farm so we told them we would come to their farm the following night. Our map had a road that we wanted to try to drive and figured it would take us a full day to get to their place via this road (the road goes by 5 different hot springs).

[We could have stayed here but it was $300 per night] The ferry landed, we started to drive and before we could find a place to camp for the night it got dark. We don't like to drive in the dark, particularly on dirt roads but we didn't really have a choice at this point. We kept driving until we reached the Coñaripe Hot Springs resort. We turned down to the hot springs and found a very nice and very empty resort. We inquired inside if we could camp and we couldn't, so we treated ourselves to a very nice night at the springs. After cooking another round of Pasta Panamericana, we took a soak in the springs and fell fast asleep.

The next morning we took another soak and were on the road for the usual crack of noon start. Our map showed what looked like a decent dirt road that went up past an active volcano and then dropped down into the town of Pucon where we could then take good roads through Villaricca and over to the farm. We figured we'd be at the farm by 3 or 4. We were feeling great from the hot springs and ready to drive our last dirt road of the trip.

We passed the Geotermicas hot springs and stopped by to check them out. The price tag of $35 US per person kept us from soaking but this crazy place was super cool just to look at. They must be the project of a quirky person as there are 17 slate pools connected by a red walkway through a canyon with gushing water. They were fun to check out and if we had more money it would have been a great place to pass the afternoon. But we had places to go.

So with our heads high we continued up the pass towards the volcano. We passed a sign saying something about the road being bad and only for hikers and another sign saying something or other about 9 km ahead but we didn't really pay attention as we felt we could tackle any road that lay ahead.
The road got worse changing from a graded dirt road to a muddy track through virgin forest.

We stopped at a particularly nasty river crossing to discuss what we should do. I mentioned that there were some signs a while back saying something or other about a bad road and something happening in 9 km but I just couldn't remember what it actually said. Neither of us felt like turning around and although the road was very muddy in places, it wasn't that bad as long as we drove slowly. My main concern was for the bikes. Unloaded, this road would have presented only a small challenge but with all of our gear on the back, we were definitely pushing the suspension system with roots and rocks on the track.

We pushed on and eventually came across this skinny little dog way out in the middle of nowhere. With winter coming it didn't seem like there was anyway this guy was going to survive for very long. We tried hard to not care and just chalk this dog up to the cycle of life but we couldn't resist giving him all of our food (raw eggs, yummy bread, salami, cheese, peanuts). Of course this set him off to following us and that was ok. We figured we'd eventually end up near some sort of civilization and we could ditch him there.

[my signature head scratch- now what did that sign say back there?] About a kilometer further up we came to a steep rocky section of horrible road. It looked like we could maybe make it up the section, but reversing it could be tricky since it was quite muddy and we would be unable to use out brakes.

Amongst the 100 foot monkey-pinch-me trees we decided to go for it and just see what lay ahead. It was getting late but we really didn't want to back track. In hindsight we should have taken off the luggage and shuttled the bikes up the drop but isn't hindsight so smug and cocky? I got my bike up the section without too much trouble and then came back down to drive megan's bike up.

This didn't go so well. I fell over once in a not too bad of a place but then right in the middle of the most technical part I fell over again. As Megan was helping me back up she noticed a sheared bolt sitting under the bike. And it wasn't a small bolt. We looked everywhere on her bike for where this might have come from but couldn't find anything missing. That said, there are a lot of places that you can't see without taking apart the bike.

That was that. I wasn't about to keep pressing on into unknown territory with something or other coming in 4 km (remember- I didn't really read the sign warning of something in 9km) and a sheared bolt somewhere on the bike. We backed her bike down the drop, I went up and retrieved mine and we sat for a second feeling pretty lame.

[holding the broken bolt] There we were way out in the middle of nowhere with no food (we had fed it all to the dog), an assumedly broken bike, a dog that was about to die and it was getting late.
I kept trying to remind myself that this was the reason we took the trip in the first place: To test ourselves in tough situations and see how we do. That we certainly weren't going to die up here and that no matter what happens we could find a way out of it.
We took a final look at the bike and couldn't find any missing bolts. I bounced the suspension up and down and couldn't hear any rattles. So we made the decision that we really couldn't do much to fix the bike up there. That hopefully the BMW engineers had designed some redundancy into the bike so that it would still be functional even without the bolt.

[the drop that turned us around] We slowly picked our way down the road stopping every once in a while to let the dog catch up with us. Once we reached a few farms down below we started to speed up knowing that it would be hard to leave the dog behind but that hopefully he would find some sort of food source at the farms. At sunset we arrived back at Coñaripe and tried to call our friends who probably figured we had ditched them. A few failed attempts at calling them (why is it so hard to make calls to cell phones in foreign countries- we always seem to epic when trying to place a phone call at a "public" phone) and we kept pushing on.

[meeting Jorge and Cristina on the ferry, I don't who the guy on the left side of the photo is] Finally after arriving in Villaricca we managed to connect with our the blueberry farmers and with incredible generosity they said they would meet us on the main road near the turn off to their farm. A half hour later we met up with Jorge and followed him to their warm farmhouse and a bottle of wine.
So that was our day that went from warm and easy to strained and tense and back to happiness. Looking back on it, it was all happiness. I mean we were driving motorcycles through the back roads of the rivers district in Chile past hot springs and having some good old fashioned adventure. What more could you ask for? We can only hope that it turned out so well for the dog. He was a cute little fellow and I do hope he makes it through the winter.

Oh yeah... the bolt.
The next morning I woke up and started taking apart the bike to locate the missing bolt. My feeling was that it was the bolt that holds the top of the rear suspension to the bike since the bolt was the same size as the bolts that hold the bottom together. The F650 has a cool way of accessing this hard to get to place. You just have to remove two bolts from the subframe, separate the rear of the exhaust system and then you can hinge up the entire subframe (which hold the gas tank and all). And there it was, the other half of the bolt was still left holding the rear suspension to the bike. Just a teeny bit of jiggling and the bolt fell right out making a perfect match to the other half.
As luck would have it, there is a store in Villaricca called the House of Bolts where we found an exact match to the now broken offender. I bought two.

Fortunately, the engineers had built some sort of redundancy into this part. If the bolt had fallen completely out (which we are lucky that it didn't) the the rear suspension would have pushed up into a metal cup and been held there temporarily. Catching air would have dislodged it, but we rarely catch air on the bikes.

I'm not sure when the bolt actually broke. It could have been in the monkey tree forest or it could have been a long time ago and the weight of the bike just held it in. It is hard to say but I have learned of another inspection item on the F650. It is probably a good idea to lift up your subframe now and again and take a look at the bolt up there.

Food!

2011-05-01T06:16:00.000-07:00

I think it goes without saying that on this trip we have eaten food. We'd be dead if we hadn't.
For the most part we have eaten out because it is fun to explore the local cuisines and besides, it was so darn cheap to eat out. We went on a bit of a pizza binge in Bolivia since Bolivian food got a little tiring after a while.
[choosing a Maté tea to drink] When we crossed into Chile, we started cooking for ourselves a lot more. Eating out in Chile is expensive (unless you only want to eat a completo - which is a hotdog with guacamole) and really not that good for you so we started making our own food almost every lunch/ dinner.
Lunch is almost always salami and cheese sandwiches with mayo and savora (a mustard like sauce). The cheese, salami and bread is very nice down here and none of these ingredients really have to be refrigerated. And for some strange reason, I never tire of Salami.

Dinner is generally Pasta Panamericana or Sopa Austral. Basically the same thing either over pasta or in soup form. Carrots, onions, salami, kale or spinach, olives, spices. Saute these together add in tomato sauce a little dried milk and either put it over pasta or mix it into a soup with some chicken or tomato soup mix, delicious.

It is pretty yummy and it's always warm and nourishing. If the place we stay has a kitchen then we will make our Pasta Panamericana there or come up with some other creation that Megan finds online. If the place doesn't have a kitchen then we will fire up our trusty Optimus stove outside and create our meal.

Argentina is famous for its meats. Barbecued meat is called Parilla and basically you build a fire, take the hot coals and grill your meet over it. I learned how to properly do this when we were in Mendoza staying with my buddy Kevin. Under his watchful eye, I learned how to make the proper amount of coals and how to distribute them properly to cook the meat to perfection.

We found an amazing butcher next door to the mechanic in Bariloche. I walked in asking for a chunk of meat to BBQ and he comes out of the back with an entire side of beef. He asked me which part I wanted and I had no idea. I said "a delicious part" and he took the bandsaw to the beef and cut off a 2 pound strip of meaty ribs. I got giddy with excitement over the idea of cooking these bad boys up. I also took home a blood sausage and a few pork sausages just to be sure.
We cooked for some new friends at the hostel we were staying at because, lets face it, we just can't eat 3 1/2 pounds of meat ourselves. Our friends made up the vegetables and potatoes and together we had a feast.

[Holy Moly, look at that piece of meat] Going with the maxim "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" we went back to the butcher the next day and bought another cut of beef. Again, not knowing what to get, we just asked for something very delicious but without bones. He brought out an enormous piece of red muscle marbled perfectly with fat and cut us off 2 1/2 pounds of it. Again, we threw in some sausage for good luck and grilled it up. I don't really know the cut that we ate, but it was amazing. The fat on the outside browned a nice crisp and there was a gradation of brown to red on the inside that can only be described as yummmmmm. It was another indulgent feast.

For our last night in Argentina, we decided to go out to eat. I had taken a bit too much money out of the ATM and not wanting to exchange it to Chilean pesos, we decided to splurge a bit. Argentinians don't eat until 10 or 11 but at 9 we were starving so we walked around San Martin del Los Andes for and hour trying to kill time and find a place to settle in for the night. We landed at La Casona and it was the right choice.

I got grilled lamb with bbq'd potato on the side and Megan got grilled chicken with a mushroom sauce and fun fried mashed potato balls. Chasing it down with beer and wine was only a formality as we both savored every bite until it was all gone. There we were at 11:30 at night, our tummies full and dreading the freezing cold walk back to the hostel.

What better way to enjoy the walk then to stop for ice cream. The ice cream in these parts is off the hook. It is rich and sort of like eating the essence of whatever flavor you choose. We split a cone of dulce de leche (like a rich caramel) and dark chocolate. Wow! Even though we were freezing cold, we were fighting to get our hands on the cone as we shivered and licked our way home.
Today we head back to Chile and we will probably be back on the Pasta Panamericana diet, but for a few days we ate like we meant it and it was fantastic.

Gear Review of Vasque Mindbender GTX

2011-04-29T06:48:00.000-07:00

Vasque Mindbender GORE-TEX® Footwear

I only get to bring three pairs of shoes that need to work for me for 5 months. Motorcycle boots are a no-brainer. Obviously a pair of flip flops makes it into the mix because they are lightweight and very practical (showers, swimming, easy to put on in the middle of the night to go pee, …).

That leaves one more pair to do everything else. These better be some mutli-purpose shoes and they better be comfortable.

After some deliberation, I decided to go with the Vasque Mindbender GTX shoes for no other reason than they fit my feet so well. That's always a good start when choosing a shoe- fit. The roomy toebox allows my duck shaped feet some wiggle room and the stretch GORE-TEX® Panel across the tongue holds my instep securely in the shoe.

With fit taken care of, I need a shoe that is waterproof because walking and running through wet grass and shallow streams works a lot better with a shoe that doesn't let water in. Of course there is a giant hole in the top of the shoe (where my leg comes out) but keeping water out of the rest of the shoe is a good thing.

Waterproofness and durability are also top on the list since I don't like wet feet and I can't exactly get a new pair of shoes half way through the trip. With a GORE-TEX® Liner, my feet stay dry (unless I fall in a creek and the water comes over the top) and since Gore is always involved in the design and testing of the shoe, it is going to be durably waterproof.

It is hard to get exercise on a long motorcycle trip and running is one of the few ways I've managed to get my heart rate up. The Mindbenders are designed to be trail running shoes (and they are great at doing that) but I've pushed them quite a bit and run on the pavement as well. I've probably logged 150km of street running this trip and so my knees seem to be doing ok.

If there is a downside to these shoes (and every review needs to talk about some place for improvement), the rubber outsole on my right heel came detached from the midsole somewhat early on. It is now a little flapper on the back of the shoe. I could easily reglue this, but just haven't gotten around to it. Also, and this will happen with any waterproof footwear, after I fell into creek and my shoe filled up with water, it took a long time to dry, and in the process got a little stinky.

But with 120 days on these shoes, I'd say they are doing pretty darn well. I'm planning on putting them on my feet today to go trekking in the mountains above Bariloche.

Leaving Patagonia

2011-04-28T07:53:00.000-07:00

We left Tortel in the usual rain and decided to head for a farm that may soon be underwater from the dam project (see previous post). Backtracking on the Austral for 60 km, we came to the turnoff for the Nadis River and headed for the confluence with the Baker. At the end of this track are a few very off the grid farms run by Patagons who worked this land for a couple of generations.

A German/ Chilean couple built a little cabin on their land and allow tourists to stay there for very cheap and enjoy the remoteness of the area. Large glaciated peaks tower over the biggest river in Chile with waterfalls dripping down the glacial cut forested walls of the valley. Just over the crest is the Northern Icefield with its tentacles of glaciers tumbling down valleys to feed the baker. It is a perfect spot to have a farm and to be removed from everything in the world. No electricity, no towns, no roads, no nothing.

We went for a walk around the land through the wet grass and watched birds and glaciers from the confluence of the rivers. This little guy didn't seem to mind us at all as he was staring into the river looking for what must be some yummy fish. After taking some 3000 photos, we decided to leave him alone. Thanks little buddy.

We went shopping for our dinner in the garden by digging up potatoes, and carrots and picking beans and peas out of the autumn garden. We picked up fresh german style bread from the owner. On our way back to the cabin, we saw the dad of the ranch carrying kittens over to the kids because he had just found them in the hay loft.

We fired up the wood stove, cooked a nice meal and enjoyed a relaxing night in a very remote area.

The next morning we woke up with pouring cold rain. With the snow level just 1000 feet above us, we contemplated staying another night, but new that we were running out of time. The Southern part of the Austral had grabbed us and slowed us way down, but after the looking at the calendar and counting backwards from when we have to leave Santiago, we very slowly and reluctantly packed up the bikes and headed off into the rain.

We have very good rain gear. And I will write a review about that later, but even though we stayed bone dry, our feet became little popsicles after 2 hours of miserable rain. We brewed up some tea in Cochrane to warm up but neither of us wanted to push on any further that day. So with only 60km of riding for the day we found a place to stay and warm up next to a stove.

It is a good thing we stopped because the next morning was bluebird beautiful and all the new precipitation had coated the mountains in perfect white. We headed north along the baker river to Lago General Carrera and then along the southern coast of this 100 mile long crystal blue lake. We stopped for a picnic on the beach and ate the rest of our german bread. It was a perfect way to leave Chilean Patagonia.

We crossed into Argentina without incident and for the next 3 days headed north battling Patagonian winds through the desert side of the mountains.

And now we are in Bariloche where we plan to spend three days in this idealistic resort town.

Along the Rio Baker.
This will all be underwater if the dam project goes through.

Drying out our stuff around the heater.

The perfect picnic spot

Bluebird, at last.

70/30 Bikes

2011-04-28T07:37:00.000-07:00

The Austral took its toll on our bikes. The F650 is a great bike on the highway and a good bike on the dirt. It is a 70/30 bike (70% highway/ 30% offroad). After repairing Megan's fork seal, my seal blew the next day. I made the homemade fork boots to try to keep dirt out of them, but my fork is now dripping oil everywhere. It splatters all over me and the bike when I ride. When I park the bike, I have to be careful not to let it drip all over the front tire. Our suspension just isn't built for 1000 km of dirty, bumpy, wet road.

And… I found another problem with the design of the bike. As we take this trip, we slowly learn things that we should be regularly checking in the F650: chain tension, which screws come loose, water levels, suspension. It turns out that there is a small gap between the frame of the bike and the radiator where rocks can get lodged. Over time these small rocks rub on the radiator and will eventually pop a hole in it. A hole in the radiator is bad.

Three days ago we noticed that Megan's bike was dripping blue fluid whenever we parked it. I felt the fluid and it felt oily to me. I made the assumption that her leaky fork seal was splashing back on the radiator (you could see wetness there). Because the radiator is hot, the oil becomes very liquid, flowing along the radiator, and when we put the bike on the kickstand, it dripped down onto the ground. The fluid was blue and having just dumped a bunch of blue oil into her forks this reinforced the idea that this is what we were seeing.

Two days ago, Megan's temperature light came on in the middle of the Patagonian desert. Wisely, she stopped the bike and turned off the engine. For whatever reason, her cooling system wasn't working and wasn't keeping the engine cool. If left unchecked, your engine can overheat and then there goes your bike.

There are a few things that can cause the temp light to come on: Faulty water pump (a very had repair, but I do have the part), clogged radiator (hard to diagnose and fix), riding the bike too hard in hot weather (or just sitting in traffic), or not enough antifreeze/ water in the system.

[notice the small rock] So first things first, we checked the water and sure enough the radiator was pretty much empty. All of the sudden, the dripping fluid made sense. Now we had to find the leak. Was it a hole in the radiator, a loose hose, or something bigger. Megan spotted the problem when she saw the rocks wedged between the frame and the radiator. When we pulled them away, we noticed a particularly worn out spot. Our hope is that this is where the radiator is leaking. Smalls holes can be plugged (although sometimes not very effectively- the plugging compound has to expand under heat at exactly the same rate as the aluminum of the radiator or it will eventually come off). We dumped 750 ml of water into the radiator, put the bike back together and drove on. Bariloche was only 200km away and we figured we could keep refilling the radiator every 50km or so until we found a mechanic who could plug the hole.

So that's what we did and every 50km we needed to dump in 100ml of water.

Hopefully the mechanic here can repair the hole. He's gonna try and he's also going to put new fork seals on our bikes. All for the princely sum of 1000 pesos ($250).

I hope it works. A new radiator is expensive.

So there it is, add to the list of things to check on the bike- inspect the spot where rocks can get lodged. Or better yet, buy or make a radiator guard and keep inspecting.

Update: We picked up the bikes from the mechanic and they seem to have plugged the hole. Hopefully it hold but I'm doubtful. Apparently the plugging compound needs to expand at the same rate as the aluminum of the radiator or it will eventually fail. We'll see.

Patagonia Sin Represas o con Represasas?

2011-04-28T07:31:00.000-07:00

That is the question. If you are like me and didn't know what a represa is but had seen billboards everywhere supporting one stance or the other then let me help you out.

A represa is a dam. And the question is whether to build 2-5 very large dam projects in the region of Patagonia where we just were. Oh course my first reaction is "no freakin' way!" but hold on there cowboy and lets look at the different sides and lets even see if I am allowed to have an opinion as such. For a very one-sided look, but well produced, take a look at this website to see about the projects.

If you have been reading my blog, you maybe can get a sense for how fantastic this part of the world is. We drove and drove and got a peep of a remote and wild landscape that just goes on and on and on and on. Ironic that we saw it from a road which when it was put in dramatically altered the landscape but granted access to it. However, if you look at a map you can see that there is a whole lot more that is not accessible by road which feels really good.

Why does it feel good? I think it incredibly important for our psyche as humans to know there are places in the planet that are incredibly hard to get to and that are relatively unaltered by humans. Places where things can happen "naturally" and where an animal or plant may never know that humans exist. We need these places and there are very few of them in the world. The thing about these types of places is that once we affect them, it is very hard to go back. Or… if we do have an impact then we should try to minimize our impact in small ways.

Patagonian Chile has some mighty big rivers fed by some mighty big icefields and glaciers.
The Rio Baker is a turquoise blue or dull green (depending on how far down river you are looking at it) with a flow of 1000 cubic meters per second. That is a cube of water 30 feet by 30 feet by 30 feet passing by every second. It cuts through a few rock canyons on it 700 foot drop from the second largest lake in South America to the Pacific Ocean at Tortel. Depending on how you look at it, it just begs to have some dams put on it or it is spectacular river unlike anything I have ever seen and needs to be preserved as such. Megan and I both marveled at this river as we drove along it commenting that we just don't have rivers like this in the states- they are all dammed.

[perfect for damming] The plan is to build 2 mega dams along this bad boy and send the energy via high tension power lines thousands of miles up north to Santiago and even further north to the copper mines. There is also a plan to build another 3 dams further south of O'Higgins on the river that drains Lake O'Higgins.

Why does Chile need this much energy? Depends who you talk to, but copper mining is the source of income for Chile and copper mining needs energy. Also, Santiago is a growing metropolis and needs more electricity. The way it is put, they can get it from Hydro, or they can get it from burning gas.

Who wants to see a dam go in? The impact would be huge. Thousands of large construction trucks driving up and down the Austral. New roads put in to create the power lines? Enormous lakes where once there was only a beautiful river.

My thought is this, and it is easy for me to have this thought since I don't actually have to make a decision and since I certainly do not know all of the facts, but thats what we do, make judgements on things without knowing all of the facts and without actually having to be culpable for our decisions, right?

Does Chile actually "need" the energy? Are there energy savings that can be made to put off needing more electricity? I bet there is. If in fact, they do need more energy, can they get it from smaller scale projects like microdams, solar (there is plenty of that in the north), and wind? I know these things cost more money are more of a pain in the butt than 2-3 mega dams, but is it worth the sacrifice to save these parts of Patagonia?

I suspect a few people and corporations have a lot to gain by building these new dams. These people have a lot of power and sway and know that if they keep pushing, the general apathy of society will allow it to happen.

But I'm just a guy who drove through on a motorcycle, burning gas the whole way, using electricity when it was available and who doesn't actually have to live with the affects of the project (or lack thereof). I think it is important for me to get information and form an opinion, but I have to keep an open mind and allow for the fact that I don't know everything and that my opinion could need to change. Or that if I hold my opinion, than my lifestyle could need to change to support my thoughts.

How did we get thrust into the Represas debate so quickly? Well, we drove through Patagonia for a while and were deeply affected by what we saw. But after finally getting gas in O'Higgins we decided to stay a night in Tortel, a town that until about 8 years ago was only accessible by boat. This town is built on the edge of a fjord with no flat land available anywhere. People just built their houses into the hillsides and then connected them by wooden walkways. So Tortel has no streets, only raised wooden walkways that zigzag down 7 km of rugged coastline. It is a interesting place to visit.

It is also a difficult place to find safe parking for the motorcycles since there is generally a large (unsecure) gravel lot where cars park and then you walk into town.

We managed to find a dumpy place to stay that allowed our bikes to be somewhat close to us and since our bikes comfort is more important than ours, we hunkered down here for the night. As we were getting ready to cook our Pasta Panamericana for the night a french guy comes walking into town and also stays in our small little place. Since there is literally no open restaurant in town (it is low season), we offered to cook him food and we chatted. Turns out he is a journalist with a french new agency doing a 1 hour documentary on the dams. His angle is to interview the scientists who are measuring the impact of the project and doing the research on what the ecosystems of Patagonia. He's a very thoughtful, energetic person who has learned a lot about the projects, their impacts, and the implications. For those of you in Seattle, he reminded me a lot of Frank Huster (not only because he is french) but by his throw himself at the world with enthusiasm approach.As any good journalist (not editorialist) he refuses to have an opinion until after he has finished he work. He can see all sides of the story and I think because of this has been granted access to all sorts of interesting people.

We thoroughly enjoyed passing a rainy evening huddled around a small wood stove learning about what Antoin had learned about.

I look forward to his documentary even though it will be in French. Perhaps I can get someone to translate for me.

Dependence on Fossil Fuels

2011-04-20T11:59:00.000-07:00

[Our Hostel in O'higgins] We have felt more than a little guilt over the fact that we are burning gas pretty much for the sake of burning gas this entire trip. My back of the envelope calculation says that between our two bikes we have burned 525 gallons of gas to get from Seattle to here. (around 17000 miles at 65 miles per gallon times 2 bikes). I justify this in my head in that to fly down here would take more gasoline than this and people fly down here all the time. But then when we flew back to Chicago for just a week a felt very guilty for that gas consumption.

Two main thoughts come to mind about gas.

1) It seems like nothing less than a miracle that we can drive all the way from Seattle to the Southern tip of the Austral and be able to find this extremely hard to find and manufacture substance called gasoline. That even the most remote places of the earth, we can find places every 200 miles or so that allow our machines to keep running for another 200 miles. That the price for this stuff is so inexpensive (ranging from $1/ gallon in Bolivia to $9/ gallon in Chile- ironically there are far more cars in Chile than Bolivia) that we can actually drive all over the place just for fun. I know full well that those times are quickly coming to an end and that in 20 years time a trip like this will be so expensive that almost no one could afford to do it. Look how lucky we are!

2) The was cooler way to do a trip like this would be to do it on bicycles. This would remove most of the guilt of fossil fuel dependance (except for the pesky plane ride home) and would be like our experience times 1000.

This dependence on fossil fuels for our trip was made down right apparent in Villa O'Higgins. O'Higgins is 170 miles south of the last gas station. Although we carry an extra gallon of fuel (60 miles range for 1 bike), the 340 mile round trip is must too far for our bikes. However, we heard that it was possible to buy gas in O'Higgins, so that even if the gas cost $15/gallon we could make it work.

Our plan was to go to O'Higgins, spend the night and then work our way back north the next day and onward to Argentina and the Bariloche area. With about 2 weeks left in our trip we have time to go slow, but we have to keep moving a little bit. We celebrated with our Tequila and coffee, then turned around and went to little place that sells gas. The guy turned on the pump, put the nozzle into my tank, squeezed the trigger and nothing came out. He went inside and got a can of WD40, sprayed it in random places on the pump, tried again and still nothing came out.

He looked at us, shrugged his shoulders and said "Sorry, no gas today." We asked him when there might be gas and he said he didn't know. It depends on when he could fix the pump. We asked about other options and he said we could go to Cochrane which is the town 170 miles north of here. When we pressed him further on the time to fix the pump he said that maybe he could get it working later in the day but that he would probably have to call someone to come down and that could be several days.

[O'higgins] So here we are in O'higgins. Stranded without gas until we don't know when. But this is Patagonia and we are very far from anywhere. The fact that we can get gas at all is amazing so waiting a few days for it is no problem.

In fact we welcome the break. The temptation is to ride everyday and see a lot of things. But as we have been asked a few times-in my paraphrased spanish- No pueden conocer nada si siempre estan manejando. (You can't get to know anything if you are always driving)- ***Side note: I really like the word Conocer in spanish. Spanish has two words for "to know"- Conocer and Saber. Saber is to know something- like in theory or knowledgable. Conocer is to actually know something- like to get to know or know it first hand. There is a big difference and one that english doesn't always make.***

Yesterday we went for a hike up a valley towards a very large glacier. We hiked on a muddy path for 6-7 miles up valley, and then turned around and came back. We saw lots of second growth forest (I still don't understand how they extract the trees without roads) but also saw some amazing Patagonian Old Growth Cypress forest.

At the end of the line for us was a cute little hut where people could stay if the wanted. I ate a yummy can of Salmon and burped fish all the way back.

The trail was extra muddy because a few cows had decided to always go for a hike and they destroyed the trail but we made it to be a bog game of hot lava monster and it was kind of fun.

Today we are going to bake bread and write on the blog, and perhaps tomorrow we will leave, if our dependance on fossil fuels will let us.

Moto note:

We found a mechanic in Coyhaique to "fix" megan's leaky fork seal. They didn't have the part, but they did take apart her fork, clean up the seal, put a firmer spring around it, and replace all the fork oil. It seams to be holding. However, later that day, my fork seal started to leak. And then it really started to leak. The problem is that once there is oil on the fork, dirt sticks to the oil which then gets pushed into the seal and makes it worse.

I fashioned this homemade boot around the telescopic part to keep dirt off by using an old rag, a ziptie and our sewing kit. It seems to be keeping dirt off of the fork which is good, but I am still loosing quite a bit of oil. I hope I can make it to Bariloche on this thing where I hear there is a good mechanic.

A town of one

2011-04-20T11:40:00.000-07:00

There are big towns and there are small towns. Each town has its own feel and this comes from a combination of the place where the town is, the community/ history of the town, and the visitors own personal attitude/ experience in that town.

The pure physical location of a town can very much dictate its characteristics. A town on the ocean with plenty of food will be very different from the same town out in the middle of the desert or high up in the mountains. A town that is surrounded by fertile land will have a different sense of time than a town that exists solely for tourism. What that feel of the town is will be based on the history/ community.

The personality of the town comes from the collective experience of the people in there. How long has it been there? What type of organization is there in the town? How do people interact and do they welcome visitors or do they see visitors as space aliens who can only negatively affect them?

Then there are the visitors. Your attitude upon arrival can have everything to do with how you come to be in that place. What do you expect to find? Are you just taking from the place, or do you have something to share? Do you plan on leaving the place with the attitude that you would like to go back and be welcomed or has it been a long day, you can't communicate with people, and you just get off on the wrong foot?

Of course, I use the word "town" as if it were an entity it itself. It isn't. Each person is their own person, but as a traveler you tend to make generalizations about places base on what you experience. This isn't fair, but it happens. Just read any guidebook and you will see these types of generalizations made about anyplace. Its what we do as humans (west coasters vs east coasters, democrats vs. republicans, men vs. women).

On the southern part of Carretera Austral, there is a section towards the end where they haven't built a road. The government runs a free ferry that travels the 20km or so through a fjord. There is a time schedule for this ferry, but we were so far removed from the concept of time (and getting that information seemed difficult) that we just knew we would show up and take the ferry when we could. Because of the stranded dog episode, our day was getting a bit late but we hoped for a 4 o'clock ferry which would deliver us to the other side by 4:45 which would allow us 2 hours to drive the final 100km of the Austral into Villa O'Higgins before dark. Upon arrival, we found out that the ferry didn't go until 5.

Leaving at 5 would mean either a) driving in the dark in the pouring rain (did I mention it was 40 degrees and raining) or b) finding a place to camp somewhere along the way. We made a at the beginning of this trip to not plan on driving in the dark (we have only had to do it 3 times) and camping in the freezing rain sounded kind of not fun.

The town where the ferry leaves from is called Puerto Yangay. It is an ex-military outpost in the bottom of a glacial valley with snow capped peaks guarding over it. There are 5 government houses and a cement ramp that goes into the water where the ferry picks you up. There is a small kiosko (café/ warming hut/ store) that relies on business from people waiting for the ferry. In the Summer months, she can get 500 travelers/ day but in the Fall she gets 2 (that's us).

We went inside to get some Nescafé, homemade empenadas, and to warm up by the fire. We talked about what to do. Should we just go for it and see what happens on the other side of the ferry? Or should we attempt to hunker down here for the night and play it safe. With her typical smile, Megan asked the women who runs the kiosko about places to stay and the woman said there were none. She also said a bunch of other stuff, but we didn't really understand through her thick chilean accent. The closest town, Tortel, was about 30 km back on the road and we didn't want to go back there. This town also has a reputation (and I get back to the "feel of a town" here) for being not so nice to travelers. We had heard it from a motorcycle guy we ran into and we had heard it from some police we met ("they mix their gas with water- it is a nice place to visit but don't stay there")

We decided not to go for it and we decided we'd talk to the woman again about our options in Puerto Yangay. Maybe we could find a shelter to set up our tent under. That'd be better than camping out in the rain.

It turns out that the woman had told us before that we could stay in her house (one of the run down government houses). Her daughter and husband were not in town (they were 120km north in the bigger town so that her daughter could go to school). We asked how much and she looked at us like we were crazy. Why would she charge us?

So we waited around until 7 (when the last ferry crosses) passing the time and slowing down a bit. I went for a walk around town (this took 5 minutes) and tried to hike up to the weather tower but got bogged down in moss and swamp. We shared some Maté (the local tea) with Ines (the woman) and played with the ferry dog.

At 7 we went up to her humble house. She has no electricity but she does have a great wood stove and we watched as she baked bread for the next day. We chatted about this and that and about how she is the only inhabitant of Puerto Yangay. Sometimes some police stay at the military camp and the boat people live on the ferry but they rotate out every 20 days so she really is Puerto Yangay.

When the fresh bread came out of the wood fired oven, we put strawberry preserves on it (which she grows in the summer) and that was dinner. Yummy!

The point being that the town of Puerto Yangay is unique. It is in a very remote location, relies on tourism for it livelihood, and the entire feel of the town is currently dictated by one person. We approached it with open minds and time to spare and the town gave back to us. That's one aspect of traveling that is so great, the times when things don't go as planned but work out for the better.

The end of Austral and setting goals

2011-04-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

Want to know what is at the end of the famous Carretera Austral (translated: Southern Road)? Let me tell you: A small hydroelectric plant.

So we made it to our second goal. The furthest south point on the Austral.

Before we did the calculations and figured out where we were, our previous goal had been to make it to the same latitude as our home in Seattle (47.66). Oddly, when we arrived at said latitude there was a little house which we decided we would buy and call our second home.

Isn't it cute? If anybody wants to visit, just let us know and we'll get you the keys. It is kind of a pain to get to but it in a really nice place.

We have been loosely paying attention to our latitude since Santiago. Santiago is at the same latitude as the California/ Mexico border and feels like it.

Without studying a map, we wondered what the latitude of Seattle would feel like down here. It seems that the climate zones tend to compress a bit in southern Chile. By the time the time we were at the same latitude as San Francisco, it felt like we were in Oregon. By the time we were in Oregon (the start of the Austral), it felt like British Columbia and as we continued south it started to feel more like central BC. The tree line started coming down from what looked like 5000 feet at the start of the Austral to 1500 feet at the end (It is at 6000 feet in Seattle).

So to make sense of it all, I'd say that by the time we hit the latitude of Seattle we were more in the climate zone of the latitudes of the middle of BC (some 1000 miles north of Seattle). I suppose this is because in the southern Hemisphere, there is a lot more ocean than in the northern hemisphere. This makes for colder temps and wetter storms which in turn affects the vegetation and topography (since everything is glacially carved down here).

But back to goals. We abandoned the idea of going all the way to Ushuaia because we didn't want to feel like we had to always be moving south in order to make it in time. We didn't want to get so fixated on a goal that we ended up not being present. Going to Ushuaia was also made more impractical by our trip from Santiago to Chicago in March. It just through the whole timeline off. Maybe I will regret the decision to not go there, but it will be there in the future and we have seen a lot of cool stuff that we otherwise wouldn't have seen had we gunned it down there.

So we needed another goal. As I wrote about earlier, we decided the Austral would be a good goal. We didn't know how far south we would make it on the road. It depended on the roads and the weather. Well the weather and the roads have been very do-able and here we are at the southern end of the Austral.

The Austral was built in the 80's by everyone's favorite dictator Pinochet. Bad guy, but he did invest in a good road. It links up previously inaccessible parts of Southern Chile. It is an impressive road and goes through some amazing terrain. It never stops giving beautiful vistas and the further south you go, the more you feel like you are in a place that you should feel very lucky to be in.

The end of the road is 865 km from the start in Chaiten and currently comes to a big fat dead end because of the Southern Patagonia Icefield and the inability for the Argentinian and Chilean governments to decide to cooperate and build a road that meanders between the two countries (which it would have to do down here).

In the meantime, we find ourselves at the Southern Point of the road in Villa O'Higgins without enough gas to turn around and head back north to where we can cross into Argentina.

Upon arriving in O'Higgins, we saw that the road went through town and continued south. So of course we took the road. It got smaller and started meandering beside O'higgins Lake (the 5th largest in South America). After 15 km or so, it finally crested a hill and came to an end in front of a raging creek. And on this creek was a small, unobtrusive, hydroelectric plant that is the power source for O'higgins (population 450).

And so we broke out our small bottle of Tequila that we have been carrying from Seattle, brewed up a mug of coffee, and enjoyed our farthest south point, more or less the equivalent to the US-Canada border.

Cooking dinner at this small cabaña in Puerto Tranquillo

Megan enjoying the view

This beautiful granite wall reminded me of a smaller Squamish. It looked to be about 8 pitches and stellar granite. If this were near Seattle, it would have 200 routes on it.

More fantastic climbing outside of Coyhaique.
This splitter basalt went on and on with gorgeous columns.

We finally figured out what an Andean Condor looks like and took this picture. Super cool.

It is hard to tell in this photo but this waterfall drops at least 1000 feet from the hanging glacier.

This is the second largest lake in South America and a startling turquoise color.

On to adventure

2011-04-13T18:54:00.000-07:00

As I said in the previous post, we have to create the trip we want to have. We no longer have to make it to a place by a certain time. True, we need to be in Valparaiso on May 10 to ship our bikes home, but that is north of here and we can always just turn around and head there anytime.

However, we do want to ride the Carretera Austral (Highway Austral) through Patagonia. The Autral is a famous road as it winds through the fjords and mountains of the Patagonia region of southern South America. It is mostly dirt and one can go for 100 miles without seeing any sign of civilization. It sounds fantastic… in the summer.

With winter fast approaching, riding the Austral may or may not be a fun/ miserable experience. How much rain will we get? Will we have to ride through snow? Will we see incredible mountains and penguins? Can our bikes take it? These are all things to figure out on the way.

There are two main ways to get to the Austral since it is not connected by roads to the rest of Chile. Most people cross over to Argentina, head south through Bariloche and then jump back over to Chile and the Austral. The option we chose was to take a boat from the main part of Chile 100 miles south to the town of Chaiten. From here you can ride south with little ferry crossings here and there where they just can't build a road.

We had planned to visit an island called Chiloe, but when we arrived at the ferry office we found out that the boat was either leaving that night (monday night) or Saturday. We could also catch a boat on Friday night from the southern part of Chiloe, but we decided that it was best to just get South sooner than later. So we paid the 200 dollars for ourselves and our bikes (we got a cabin which cost an extra 80 dollars but after our experience in Greece in 2006 we have thus vowed to never take an overnight boat without a cabin).

The ferry left at midnight so we killed the day in Puerto Montt by eating some seafood, and buying groceries for the next few days. Somehow that ate up the entire day and by 7 we were ready to board our ferry. But we couldn't board until 10:30 and it was now pouring rain. There is something incredibly disorienting about waiting for a boat in the dark in the pouring rain and not being exactly sure where to catch said boat. Usually by 7 we have a place to stay and are all ready for whatever the night may bring, but not now. We managed to make some sandwiches in a little waiting room and then milked a beer at a local bar.

The boat ride was great. We received very mixed instructions about where to park the bikes on board but after a little confusion we finally just left the bikes unlocked on the side of the boat and ferry dudes said they would take care of them. A year ago, I would have never done this, but after many months of traveling around on the ladies, we have become a lot more lax about the bikes. I snapped this photo just in case we never saw the bikes again. In the background you can see the backhoe which I figured would help to date the photos if we got into it with the ferry company.

The morning came, and after waiting for a big truck and backhoe (there were three backhoes and the boat) to get off, we took off and onto the Carretera Austral.
The weather was pretty darn good and the views were top notch. At times, I could have easily convinced myself I was in British Colombia, but then we'd see a flock of parrots and be reminded we were in Patagonia.

We found a place to camp next to some hot springs and weathered the very rainy night by soaking in the springs and using the more than adequate facility at Las Termas de El Sauce.
So here we are in La Junta waiting out a little more rain and hoping for improved weather. The forecast calls for decent weather for the next three days (depending on which forecast I read) so we should be able to get some great views as we continue south.

[letting air out our tires since we will be on dirt for the next 500 miles] Motorcycle maintenance note: Megan seems to have blown a seal in the suspension of one of her front forks. It is leaking fork oil, and quite a bit. This means that her front suspension will get a little springier over the next few days. It should be ok, but we should also fix it before she bounces all over the road. The problem is that we don't have the rubber seal that we need and it isn't exactly a standard part. We hope to find it in Coyhaigue (the biggest town in these parts) but if we can't then we will have to decide to continue south on the Austral with half of a front suspension, or bail over to Argentina where the roads are paved and then head back up to Bariloche where we might have a better chance of finding the part. We'll just have to see.

Starting the Austral in Chaiten- A village destroyed by a volcano in 2008

Look closely at this photo to see why it is not in Squamish, BC

Megan's front fender broke yet again. I put together a quick fix that I hope will last the rest of the trip.

Gigi turns 20000

World's second cutest dog. He just jumped right up into my lap.

I had to visit a thrift store down here to get an extra fleece. I chose a fun one.
Here I am at the "cabin" at the hotsprings.

Our dinner- before cooking. We call this Pasta Pan Americana.
It is pasta with and vegies we can find, olives are a must and you can either add red sauce or cream.
We alternate day to day.

Cooking on the panniers with a Chilean beer nearby.

For our friend Aurelia. Apparently she has a bridge down here.

This was a wall of waterfalls.

Snow just above us. Brrrrrrr.

A moto family without direction

2011-04-13T18:03:00.000-07:00

The trip has taken on a new form post Chicago. We no longer have a goal, per se, but rather are just wandering about until our return date of May 12 from Santiago. It is a subtle difference but one that changes the whole feel. Add that to the fact that the Southern half of Chile feels very much like the west coast of North America and you end up with more of a touring adventure rather than an exploration adventure.

As an analogy, imagine you are the coach of a really kick ass soccer team. With 15 minutes left in the game, you have a 10 point advantage so there is really no way to lose. You have already made your goal of winning the game and you did it in a style that felt great. Now you just have to run out the clock. You still get to coach your team, which you absolutely love, but you just don't have to do it with the same gusto as you did before. You can choose to keep going for it, but you don't have to. There is a difference.

[getting ready to leave Santiago] To keep ourselves motivated, we chose to head over to the coast and do a little camping along the way. Having not seen true forests in a long time, I couldn't really believe that Chilean coast is one large tree farm. It now looks a lot like the Oregon coast. When we hiked through a native forest at one point, we learned that before it was all cut and replanted, it was a little more exotic with bamboo and large deciduous trees, but now it is all pine and eucalyptus for as far as you can see.

We stuck as close as we could to the coast for 3 days before the weather started to turn cloudy and cold. At that point, we decided to jump over to the central valley where we hoped the weather would be a little sunnier.

Along the way, we ran into a Chilean motorcyclist named Germán (pronounced Herman). He lives in the resort town of Villarrica which is next to one of the first of the lakes in the lakes region of Chile. Lago Villarrica is a large lake with an active snow capped volcano looming overhead.

Germán was a saint when we arrived in town and helped us to get situated. He offered up his ranch for us to stay at, but we needed internet so we decided to stay in a hostel in town instead. He dropped two sea Kayaks off at our hostel for us to paddle around in. We could just use them as we will and he would swing by after we left Villarrica to pick them up.

[view from our room] We ended up staying inside most of the day working on Montessori 123 and talking with our friend in Seattle, Dan, who just the day before had broken his femur in an avalanche. Then with about an hour of sun left, we took the kayaks out on the lake for a sunset cruise. Since the wind had been blowing all day, there were actually waves on the lake so we could surf them a bit. It was a pretty nice luxury.

The next morning, we woke up and packed up our bikes. As we were getting ready to leave, the owner of the Hostel through a bit of a fit about the Kayaks. He wanted them off of his lawn asap. If we left them there for Germán to pick up, he would throw them out on the street. Now, if he had a small lawn and the kayaks were in the way of his other guests or impeded his operations in anyway then I could understand to some extent his fit. But we were the only guests (in fact I think we were the only tourists in town) and his 2 acres of lawn were in no way affected by the kayaks. So we took the kayaks off of his property, set them down on the planting strip in front and called Germån to come pick them up right away. We needed to fiddle with the bikes anyway so we sat there for an hour tinkering away while we waited. German showed up, all smiles, and we loaded the boats onto his rig. What a nice guy! We offered to pay him money for gasoline for driving back and forth from his ranch, but he merely replied that motorcyclists are a family and we help each other out whenever possible.

What a great family we belong to!

The coast of Chile

These birds were everywhere in the trees

Tightening the steering head bearing in a shop in Constitution (the hardest hit town of the 2010 Earthquake

Check out the fallen down building from the earthquake. It just plain fell down.

These birds were going nuts over something. Must be fish.

We went for a walk with this dog. He wouldn't cross the bridge, so I carried him.

Stir fried veggies with Thai peanut sauce over rice.

We let this kid Dan ride Megan's bike. Here's me chasing after him to ask him where he was going. He came back.

One of a billion cute dogs. We fed this little guy enough peanuts to make me puke. But he didn't seem to mind.

On the virtues of knowing what you are doing

2011-04-08T05:29:00.000-07:00

We arrived without problems back in the land of sunshine, spanish, and high prices aka Santiago, Chile.

On this trip, we rarely revisit a place, and thus rarely know our way around. Finding our way to a hostel is always tricky.

Is it on a one way street? It is often very hard to tell if a street is one way- on the other hand, we often just drive the wrong way on streets using our "gringo card" as an excuse.

Will it have parking for our bikes?

What is the system for buying a bottle of beer? Some places simply won't sell me a beer unless I bring in an empty bottle. In some places, I can explain that I am happy to pay the deposit on the bottle but I still have to look the owner in the eye and promise to return the bottle when I am done. In some places, they insist I drink it on the spot which usually isn't what I want to do. In some places I have to pay a deposit, but then they refuse to give me back my deposit money the next day because I don't have a little slip which they may or may not have given me. In some really really backwards places, you don't actually pay a deposit for the bottle and then when you are done you actually throw the bottle in the trash and that is that… crazy! Like I said, it is always different.

We had Santiago all figured out. We knew how to get from the airport to the hostel Romandiaz (after paying the hefty $140 USD per person Chilean government reciprocal airport arrival tax). We were greeted by name by the super nice woman who runs the place. We knew how to squeeze hot water out of the shower. We knew our way around the kitchen. We knew where and how to buy a bottle of beer. In this case, you go to a boteleria. You look at the beer cooler and decide what you want. You give one person your empty bottle (if you have one) and they give you a receipt. Then you tell another person what you would like, hand this person your receipt for the empty and you pay this person. Then you turn left and hand a third person your receipt for the beer. This person then yells across the shop to another person who gets the beer out of a cooler and brings it to the third person. You then have to insist that you don't want a plastic bag for your beer and eventually she hands you the beer and you walk out. Nice and easy.

We knew how to hop on the subway and go to our mechanic's house to deliver motorcycle parts which we had picked up in the states (new chain, front sprocket, and rear sprocket for Megan bikes, new steering head bearings for both our bikes, and a new GPS mount for my bike- which Garmin warrantied for me even though it was technically out of warranty). We returned the next day, paid a handsome ransom for our lovely ladies and they should be good to go for the rest of the trip.

We knew how to buy groceries in the largest grocery store I have ever been in. It makes US stores look small. Seriously. And there is a person on literally every isle who is more than happy to help you make a selection. Top this off with shopping cart drivers who have the same sense of space as a Bolivian truck driver and you've got a party. And they've got these cool machines that measure all of you health statistics (height, weight, body fat percentage, blood pressure and heart rate) and then give you a little receipt so you can see how you stack up to the rest.

The one thing we didn't know was that our friend Ruth lives in Santiago and we didn't realize it until our last planned day in the city. We got in touch with her, went out for Peruvian food (you know it is a long trip when you get nostalgic for food from a previous country) and she convinced us in a proper british fashion (by begging with a lovely accent) to stay for the weekend at her place in town.

So we met an expat community of Santiago We went to the horse races and lost money on one race. (we would have lost more but no one could figure out how to turn the lights on at the track and they had to shut it all down after dark). We rented beach cruisers and rode bikes up into the mountains east of town. We drank beer. Ate giant plates of french fries. Worked on Montessori 123. Enjoyed the company of Ruth, a splendid woman who years ago decided she had enough of England and started living abroad teaching English.

So that was our two weeks off from riding. Santiago for 2 days, Chicago for 8, then Santiago for another 4 days. A nice break from riding but it is time to get back on the road before winter arrives in the south.

Peruvian Food

New ways to look at our blog

2011-03-31T07:45:00.000-07:00

Blogger (aka google) made some fun new template for looking at our blog. You have to be running a relatively new browser (like Firefox 3.5+, Internet Explorer 8+, Safari, or Chrome- but I guess if you even know what I was just talking about, then you are probably already running these browsers).

Anyway, visit http:indulgentadventures.blogspot.com/view to take a look.

You can change the views on the upper right. My favorite is timeslide and sidebar.

And here is a photo of us contemplating crossing a river in southern Bolivia to keep you entertained:

How to run a successful online business

2011-03-29T19:44:00.000-07:00

Actually, I have no idea how to do that. But I now know how to coordinate a conference booth, get together 10's of thousands of dollars worth of education materials and create a marketing program while riding motorcycles through south america. The good news is that future conferences will seem as easy as catching a cold from a baby. As I sit here in the Chicago airport waiting to return to our previous life of motorcycle riding (after only a week and a half I have already forgotten what it feels like) I want to take the time to reflect on what we just went through… and what better way than to do it in verse:

(if this seems like a silly gimmick to you than I have to apologize;

but sometimes writing a blog can feel like my demise;

So I have to keep my mind entertained and happy;

otherwise my writing won't feel so snappy)

8 days in chicago, oh what a dream;

it should be so fun, or so it would seem;

the art institute and a chicago dog;

a deep dish pizza and some lake michigan fog;

but when you fly back to the states for a short time;

to work a conference for our business online;

the inside of hotels is about all you see;

that and a thousand faces of teachers montessori;

which is to say it is truly a pleasure;

montessorian hearts are something to treasure;

when we arrived in Chicago we jumped on the train;

found our hotel room with very little pain;

we tracked down all the boxes that have come from near and far;

assembled it all in our room without the use of a car;

we called our connection like our friends at Hello Wood;

to ensure our small booth would look tidy and good;

we came up with a plan on how to create a small shop;

and at 6:00 am got our boxes and ourselves to the Marriott;

Through Megan's good taste and with my sales history;

we set up a fantastic display for all to see;

we were ready to take credit cards, cash or check;

we had our receipts and hoped the whole thing wouldn't turn into a wreck;

The doors opened and it was on;

we worked out tushies off to dusk from dawn;

And so it went for 4 days in a row;

Selling our goods at the montessori trade show;

We met administrators, teachers, and even nuns;

They all loved our stuff but teachers are perpetually short on funds;

We held our ground and kept our prices fair;

we needed to break even, so the discounts were rare;

They all loved our cards, said they were the most beautiful;

The gave us suggestions, we wrote down it all;

We sold culture bags made in ecuador;

The teachers, they loved them, the bags they adored;

All those proceeds go to school;

We are raising money for a scholarship, now that's pretty cool;

Some were nervous to spend 40 bucks;

So we didn't sell them all, being left with 15 more sucks;

Wanna buy a bag? They have fun things, you can see;

All you have to do is visit montessori123;

At the end, we had sold quite a bit;

A little shy of profitable, but so it went;

We were so very tired but needed to break down the booth;

With our minds numb, we felt our lack of youth;

We looked around and realized we were the last around;

In a stupor and a daze we tried to take it all down;

It took us two hours to load it into boxes;

Our minds were numb, like two tired foxes;

Then for two more days, we processed our orders;

We calculated our wins and our losses in our hotel quarters;

We thought about next time and what we would do;

We sent our boxes home. Fedex, we love you.

So that was it and now here we are

Flying back to Santiago which seems really really far.

We'll jump on the bikes and have time to ponder

about what we just went through over yonder

in chicago for just over a week

and that was my poem, now its your turn to speak.

Drop us a comment and let us know where you stand

Did you like the verse, or does it sound sort of canned?

Why are we in the US?

2011-03-23T08:36:00.000-07:00

It all started last September. Megan went to a meeting of Montessori teachers and learned through the grapevine that an online Montessori Materials business was up for sale.
For the past 3 years we have worked pretty much exclusively with W.L. Gore teaching people who sell GORE-TEX® products how to sell said products. It is fantastic work and takes us all over the country meeting fantastic people and we can just barely squeak by a living by working this job for 6 months and then traveling for the other 6.
However, we will need a little more stability and perhaps a little more income in the future and besides, the outdoor industry is my passion, not Megan's.
So when the opportunity to plug back into the Montessori community but not having to be in the classroom full time presented itself, Megan became very excited.
We hemmed and hawed over the wisdom of owning an online business since neither of us know too much about it and for sure it would be much more work than we could anticipate.
But in late November we bucked up and bought the business. This post talks a bit more about it.
Starting tomorrow, the annual AMS Montessori conference starts in Chicago. 2600 Montessori teachers from around the US will converge at the Marriott for 4 days of Montessori Mayhem. Part of this conference includes an area for vendors to hawk their goods. We can't pass up this opportunity so for the past 4 months we have been prepping for this conference while in Seattle and on the road. During the evenings of the moto trip, we would both hunker down in front of our computers and work on things like a catalog, pricelist, figuring a way around the $100/ day internet convenience fee that Marriott charges... things like that.
So here we are in Chicago for the next week. We had 18 boxes of goodies sent to Chicago and they are now spread out all around our hotel room. Tomorrow at 6 am we will jump into a taxi with everything and roll down to the Marriott. We will have 5 hours to set up our booth (hopefully the display materials show up at the Marriott- that vendor actually has a booth at the show and he said he will bring them to us) before settling down for 4 days of selling.
We have no idea how this will go. We could be out a lot of money, we could break even, or we could actually profit somehow. I'm at least hoping for the middle choice.
Either way, we will learn a lot. We will learn how to be more efficient at future conferences. We will learn how to sell to Montessorians. We will get to meet our customers face to face. We will see where we can grow, and places where we can cut back.
Then, in a week, we will be back in Santiago.

Here we go!

Reconnecting with my high school nerd self

2011-03-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

You can tell from the intermittence of posts that we are in the midst of the trip. At the beginning of the trip, I am excited because all is new and I want to post a lot. I anticipate that at the end of the trip I will depressed and will want to write lots of posts so that I can remember the trip, but right now? Well, I should probably be writing more.
So here is the summary:
We stayed a week in Mendoza, Argentina with a childhood friend of mine. Kevin and I were quite tight from 7th grade up to 12th grade. In 1984, when I returned from a year abroad in 6th grade in Holland, I had missed the key social group formation that happens in the first year of middle school. That, and living in Holland had changed my perspective on things a little bit. For whatever reason, Kevin was kind enough to show me the ropes of middle school and we became very close friends. We both excelled in computers and we were drawn to the Commodore Pet 32 computers that they had at school.
As you can probably guess, this accelerated us into the cool group at school and we couldn't keep the ladies off of us. That, and being good at wood shop really had us running the school. We pretty much stayed nerds for the rest of our school careers. I remained sub 100 pounds until my junior year in high school which didn't help any either.
Even though High School kind of sucked for me, I do believe that being somewhat of an outsider has made me who I today and Kevin was a big part of forming that person.
I hadn't seen him in about ten years and was looking forward to hanging out with his family (Belen and his 2 year old daughter Chloe) in the wine capital of Argentina.

Upon arriving at Kevin's he showed us to our room and then we quickly adjusted to the Argentinian way of life. This involves drinking beer and wine, eating dinner at midnight and sleeping in quite late the next day. Not so bad, really.
We BBQ'd, we toured the area a bit, and we got reacquainted. When they had to work, Megan and I visited wineries and went up into the mountains to explore. The mountains in the area are enormous and come straight out of the valley. They form a 15000 foot wall and the canyons that go into them are amazing. It is a nice area and one I could see going back to for sure.
It was a pleasure to hang out with the family and somewhat scary and exciting to hang out with a two year old for so long. She is incredibly cute and fun to watch, but she is also a lot of work and needs constant attention. Kevin and Belen do a fantastic job juggling their personal lives with Chloe and it makes me nervous to consider having one of these of our own. But it'll be ok, right?
Having a deadline to be in Santiago by friday afternoon, we packed up our bikes on Thursday "morning" (which was really 1 o'clock) and headed for Chile.

The road climbed up through an incredible deep and dry canyon which can only be the Andes. We experienced some serious wind and passed 100's of Harley Davidson Motorcycles coming the other direction from Chile. From what I can gather, there was a rally in Mendoza and people in Chile own a lot of Harley's. It might have been fun to go, but we needed to be in Santiago.

[You can see the wind in this video blowing me over] We drove past Aconcagua national park (the highest peak in the Americas) but the snow clouds obscured our view of the giant. We did see some glaciers and some beautiful countryside. All the limitless valleys and peaks kept me looking around and wondering what it might be like to explore all of these places.

[at the border] The border crossing was pretty easy since both the Argentine and the Chilean border officials were in the same building. We dropped down to Los Andes and found an (expensive) room for the night. There was a rodeo in town so everything was booked and besides, Chile is just expensive.
We made the final 100km to Santiago and located the mechanic that I had read about on HorizonsUnlimited.com.
[the human rights museum in Santiago] We dropped of the bikes at this Chilean born, german motorcycle enthusiast and hoped for the best (for both our bikes and our pocket books). My steering head bearing went out again and megan's are starting to go. Because we need parking for the bikes for the next week, we also had him change the oil.
We enjoyed 2 days in Santiago, a very clean and modern city with US like prices on everything. I went for runs in the morning and then we walked around seeing the sites.\
Then, on Sunday afternoon, we took a taxi to the airport and boarded a plane for Chicago.

Some pictures of Argentina and Chile

2011-03-15T10:14:00.000-07:00

I don't know where to fit these in. I could write a big story, but I'll let the photos tell the story.

High up on the Altiplano. If you look carefully you can see Flamingos in the lake.

The border between Bolivia and Chile. Apparently, the place to check the bikes out of the country was 20km back on a sandy road. However... the guy accepted a couple of dollars to run the paperwork back for us later in the day. Money well spent.

Ice cream is so good down here.

Salt Mines in Valle de Luna. In places the walls were clear.

Out for a tour in Valle de Luna, Chile.

Watching the sunset with all the tourists. There must have been 500 people up here enjoying the sunset. Pretty fun.

18000 foot Volcanos everywhere

Looking for a campsite somewhere south of Susques. This spot didn't work out too well.

I love our stove, but without the high altitude jet, it was very difficult to get started at 14000 feet

I couldn't quite climb it, but at least I had my helmet on in case I fell. There were amazing, solid boulders all through this valley.

Argentine wine from Salta. Happiness for Megan.

The group of BMW riders from Cordova that we ran into. We stayed at this place with all of them. A great group of people with strong Argentine accents.

Even the cats get good food here

The wine aisle. Heaven for Megan, again.

Lush Valleys outside of Salta. The rivers were flooded which for interesting riding, but it was beautiful.

Parrots everywhere

Here we are in a front loader crossing one of the many rivers of Argentina's route 40

It is Megan's dream to throw a cute dog on the back of her motorcycle and ride the rest of the trip with it. This little guy almost made the cut.

Megan's front fender broke when she had the accident in Colombia. We had it repaired in Columbia, but when I dropped the bike the previous day it started to break again. I figured out a way to keep it together for a while using a compression strap.

Our camping picnic dinner with one of the many delicious wines from down here

Washing ourselves and our moto clothing in this perfect little stream. It was very hot here so it felt nice to have wet clothes.

This woman died of thirst on the side of the road but her son survived by drinking her breast milk. Now she is a saint in Argentina and everyone goes to visit here. The Difunta Correa is good luck and if you leave her something you will get what you want.

A proper BBQ with my high school friend Kevin Coryell.

More happiness

Marshall's happiness

That's right, I played the pan flutes.

Wine Cellars. Wow.

Wine grapes. Yummy.

Argentina Hates Bridges and I need to eat more often

2011-03-15T07:59:00.000-07:00

Not sure what it is all about. Peru is a pretty poor country and their roads have bridges. Bolivia seemed to build rather nice spans over running water. But Argentina... I guess all their bridge engineers decided to leave for Europe.

View Route in northern Argentina in a larger map

Since entering Argentina we have had to drive through so many rivers that I have completely lost count. We came in over the Paso Jamo from Chile and decided we were going to make a right turn at Susques and head down the famed Route 40. This road travels the entire North/ South distance of Argentina, about half on dirt.
February and March are the wet season and 2011 is a particularly wet one. People we have talked to say this reminds them of the ol' 1986 wet season which apparently was quite wet.

It seems like with every river we encounter just gets a little deeper and swifter. The video shows us driving down a road that just turned into a river. It wasn't so deep and was actually better driving than the road had been, but I am always nervous for the hidden hole or boulder.

Our bikes do pretty well in the water. The air intake for the engine is about 3 feet off the ground so one would have to be in really deep water (or lay the bike down in shallow water) to get water in the engine and so we have always plugged along when crossing rivers that even trucks couldn't cross.

Until we came to the one near Hualfin. This one was deep... and fast. No one except the real yahoos in their 4x4's were getting across. There was a highway crew there with giant front loaders and graders but they were just sort of driving in circles not quite sure what to do about the situation.

I contemplated just punching it across, but thought twice when the "Jefe" told us that we couldn't cross because he said so.
A local told us there might be a better crossing a little further upriver. Just then, a motorcyclists from France (Charles- his blog is here- in French) showed up and we all took off to look for a way to access the river upstream.

A few failed attempts on rocky roads that led to nowhere left us scratching our heads on how to proceed. Charles swore he saw a road that would take him to the river via a sandy wash. I was just getting hungry and grumpy and started to become convinced that too much messing around like this was going to ruin our bikes. I just wanted to go back to Haulfin, drink some beer and deal with this in the morning (it was getting late). Megan got the binoculars out and looked around. We decided to split up. Charles would go down the sandy wash, we would follow a hunch on one more road, and hopefully it would all somehow work out in the end. At this point, I was code red on my blood sugar level but refused to eat anything.

As we were attempting to turn the bikes around on a very rocky road, I dropped Megan's bike on a hill and went tumbling down it. I threw a bit of a fit, discovered I indeed hadn't broken my arm but had broken the clutch lever on her bike. Megan force fed me some dry bread. This picture was taken right in midst of it all. See how happy I am... and how happy Megan is with me?
After some food and some bickering in the heat, we heard Charles' cries from down in the sandy wash. He was very very stuck in the mud and needed us to help him get his bike back to us. Welcoming a distraction from the clusterf*** we were in, we walked down to him and with a little effort we got his bike rolling again.
Not able to drive Megan's bike (because of a lack of clutch lever) we weighed the options. I could attempt to JB Weld the lever back together. We could attach our vise grips to the cable and just pull when we needed a clutch... Or we could use a spare clutch lever if we had one. We didn't. But Charles had a Honda one. And guess what? It fit perfectly.

Back on the road and with some smiles we decided to go back to the main crossing and see if we could somehow get our bikes across. It would be dark in an hour, the next town was about 50km away (of what we thought would be washboard sandy/ dirt road) but we should try to cross anyway.
When we got back to the crossing, there was more heavy machinery but the situation seemed about the same. If only we could load our bikes into the front of a big front loader.

Megan set off to see what she could do. First she smooth talked the Jefe. He said that we would need to find a private vehicle to put our bikes in because his company (which I think was hired to make the road passable) couldn't except the liability. Then she started talking to the drivers. After what must have been some serious diplomatic discussions (Charles and I just stood back and watched) they agreed to take us across in a front loader.

In we went, one at a time and across the river, amassing on the other bank sometime around dark. I've always wanted to ride in the scoop of a big front loader and now I have. It is pretty much as cool as you might imagine it to be. I felt like a real prince up there.
We tipped the driver, loaded up our bikes, grabbed a backpacker from Montreal named Natalie and headed off for Belen. As luck would have it, the road turned to perfect pavement and we made quick time to the next town where I could finally get that beer I had been wanting.

Riding not blogging

2011-03-12T05:37:00.000-08:00

A perfect storm of

lots of dirt road riding
bad internet connections
realizing that the Montessori conference in Chicago is right around the corner and we have important deadlines (catalog, materials, cards, ...) to meet
not wanting to be on my computer any more than possible

has resulted in a lack of blogging of any kind.
We have made it Mendoza and will spend the next week here with a childhood friend (Kevin Coryell), his wife Belen and their 2 1/2 year old Chloe. I plan to get caught up on the blog, create a video of us riding through southern Bolivia, and get my clothes washed (it has been 3 weeks) while here.
In the meantime, Lenny - who we rode with for a week- has actually put some stories up on his blog. Take a look and it will give you a good idea of what riding through Southern Bolivia is like. Then when I finish the video, you can see it in motion picture magic.

So... more to come. I promise.

Lenny Blog: From Deadhorse Down.

Looking for adventure in all the dark places

2011-02-26T06:17:00.000-08:00

We have a very slow connection so no photos on this one, but I will put them up when I can.

I'm not so sure that coming to Bolivia during the height of the rainy season was such a good idea. Not that we had much of a choice but it adds an element of excitement everyday. The roads in bolivia are famous for having stunning views but they are also famous for being very bad. Add a nice layer of rain on top of the dirt and you get a lot of questions as to whether we can drive on the roads at all. There are of course paved options but these go way far east over to the jungle and we sort of want to stick to the desert for a while. And then as the icing on top, our map seems to be totally wrong when it comes to roads so we are just sort of stabbing in the dark when it comes to our route.
To start things out we left la Paz after getting new expensive Pirelli tires, drove up the autopista out of the valley, and Megan promptly got a flat tire. My first thought was that the tires had been mounted wrong and they pinched her tube but upon closer inspection she had managed to pick up a wicked piece of metal that sliced through the tire and tore apart the innertube. We changed the tire with the help of police force that was manning the checkpoint. After some debate we decided it might be best to go back into town and buy another innertube since we had used up our spare and we probably couldn't find another one for a long time. To sum it up we didn't leave la Paz until 4 and the next town was 170 miles away. Large thunderstorms hung over our route but somehow we managed to mostly dodge them all. Minutes after arriving in Oruro the rain came in full force but we were tucked safely in and headed off to find a Hari Chrishna vegetarian restaurant. Yummy
We met another rider named Lenny from new York and rode the amazing 180 miles to Potosi through terrain that reminded me of a mixtures of Montana, Nevada, and southern Utah. Except at 14000 feet. One of the best days of riding in a while as we managed to dodge most of the very large thunderstorm cells. We stopped to watch the lighting shows and then ran away as fast as we could arriving in potosi just after a big dump.
I recommend looking up Potosi on the web so I don't have to write about it but it is a very cool colonial city with a rich history of silver mining. Enough silver was extracted from the mountain above town to make a bridge from here to Madrid (whatever that means) but at the cost of 8 million lives of miners.
The mines are still being worked today by small cooperatives of miners but at any given time there are 10,000 people inside the mountain extracting silver, tin, lead, and zinc by hand. The conditions these guys work in are dank, dusty, and dangerous. Asbestos dust flows freely through the shafts and most of these guys are pounding holes for dynamite by hand. They make about 100 dollars per month doing this (if they find a vein) and die young from bad stuff in their lungs.
I, of course, had to check this out and signed up for a mine tour along with Lenny. Megan opted out.
Ever since I was young I have loved exploring mines and I couldn't miss this opportunity. We even got to explode dynamite.
With mixed feelings we exited the mines feeling elated because it was super cool, but just as nuclear bombs are super cool, I would rather they not exist. However I still want to learn about it and what better way than to experience it myself. The dynamite was a full on guilty pleasure but when else am I going to get that opportunity?
I will think twice before using silver but since almost everything in this world uses some silver what are we to do except raise awareness of where it comes from and think about the usage. This mine was bad but I am sure there are even worse.
It is pouring rain in potosi as we prepare to drive the 140 miles down to uyuni and the great salt flats. My map shows the road as dirt but I have that there is a lot of payment on it. We'll see. I hate packing up the bikes in the rain but at some point we have to keep moving south and I doubt tomorrow will be better than today. So here we go.
Sorry for no photos on this. We will get Megan's awesome photos up soon.

Bolivia and a bribe

2011-02-22T18:16:00.000-08:00

[Lake Titicaca] Seems so cliche to have to pay a bribe at the Bolivian border. Megan had a plan to get out of it, but since they asked for 75 cents, I just went ahead and paid it. Especially since we had just paid 270 dollars for visas to get into the country.

[puno] The day started with us in line at the Bolivian consulate in Puno, Peru- about 1.5 hours from the border. We read that if you got your visa at the consulate it was only $100 per person but when the Consulate finally decided it was time to open the office, he told us that we "can" get the visas at the border and that we should get them there. Then he walked past everyone in line (all Peruvians and Bolivians), out the door and straight to the coffee shop to get breakfast.
So we packed up the bikes, drove them through the front door of the Hotel Monterey and out onto the pedestrian only street. We drove a couple of hours along the shores of Lake Titicaca, past ancient Quinoa and Potato fields. For some reason, they were growing Lupin as well which I didn't really know was edible.
After a few turns we arrive at the Peru/ Bolivian border. Getting out of Peru took 5 minutes with lots of smiles and us telling the border people that Peru was our favorite country so far (seems like the right thing to say at borders). We drove over the hill to sleepy Bolivia. After waking up the immigration people, they handed us the paperwork for our visas (Americans need $135 visas to visit Bolivia since we charge Bolivians $135 to get into the US). The agent closely scrutinized all of our $20 bills and rejected a couple of them. One had a series number that he didn't like (starting with B), another had a fray at the edge. Not having a surplus of $20 bills, this started to become a problem. I had to go outside and change the Bolivianos that I had just bought using Peruvian Soles into dollars which as you can imagine was quite profitable for the money changers. Like I say, I always like to do my part to help out the local economy.
[bolivian visa] After some more hemming and hawing we finally got the visas in our passports and the 90 day stamp into the country. The immigration guy joked that he normally charges $5 for the stamp but since we were out of money he would just let us through. It was actually funny at the time.
The paperwork for the bikes was easy and quick and we just had one last needed stamp from the police before we were on our way into a country we both have been very excited to visit since the beginning of the trip.
Leave it to the police to be the rude ones. They stamped our paperwork, told us to make sure we got it stamped at every police check point (yeah, right), talked quietly amongst themselves and then told us it would cost 5 Bolivianos (75 cents) per bike for their time. Megan said we didn't have any money and was ready to go to war with these guys, but then I did the math in my head and realized how little they were asking and promptly gave in. I should have let Megan fight for justice but I caved in quickly.
We spent a night in Copacabana (a La Paz tourist destination on the shores of Titicaca) and then drove over a 14000 foot pass into severe thunderstorms and dropped down 6000 feet of muddy road to the town of Sorata.
[notice the llama in the background] Sorata is an old colonial town perched on the edge of one of those classic Andean river valleys. In theory, there are 6000+ meter (20000 foot) peaks just outside of town but we never saw them. We saw lots of mud and rain. We stayed at the wonderful Altai Oasis just outside of town run by the worlds most hospitable Bolivian family. We waited for a day for the rain to clear, but it never did.
We did, however meet a wonderful street dog we named coalcita and some quirky female doctors (megan's giardia started to come back) who advised Megan to eat vegetarian food- like white chicken. I went for a nice hike in the rain along a raging river and decided Sorata might be a nice place to come back to in the dry season.
We are now in La Paz in a very nice hotel with a wonderful view of the city.
[La Paz] This post is long enough, so I won't say too much about La Paz except picture an outdoor market where a million people participate all the time. This is La Paz. It is pretty cool.
And very last, we found a motorcycle shop here that has tires for our bikes (nosigliasport.com) and what I hope will be a really good chain. I am getting very tired of maintaining my chain and I want one that won't stretch out so much (and fall off). Hopefully this new chain does the trick.

The next leg of the trip will be an adventurous bit. Bolivia doesn't have a lot of paved roads (or bridges) and is famous for road blocks from protestors. We have a route in mind, but we have no idea if it is passable this time of year. I'll let you know.

How we became bird watchers

2011-02-14T07:45:00.000-08:00

Machu Picchu is on almost every travelers list of places to go. Rediscoverd in 1911 by an American looking for Inkan Ruins, Machu Picchu was never found by the ransacking Spanish so it is still in amazing shape.
Just a teeny bit of history here. The Inkans existed in these parts of the world for about 300 years from 1200 AD to 1500 or so before they were crushed by Small Pox and egotistical Spanish conquistadors. If you notice, it wasn't that long ago. The Inkans created a sort of Socialistic system (although they had slaves too) where communities grew food together and shared it. They were masters of agriculture as well as masters of stonework.

The ruins are everywhere in these parts. Since they chose to build with granite blocks perfectly (and I mean perfectly) fitted together, many of their buildings and terraces still exist throughout the area.
Machu Picchu is just one ruin, albeit a particularly aesthetic and intact one. To get a sense of Incan ruins and life, one does not need to visit Machu Picchu but visiting seemed like an important thing to do to share in some sort of Global Psyche. When Machu Picchu is referenced, I now know what it means and that feels important.
Because Machu Picchu is such a desirable place to visit, it is a bit of a goat rodeo getting to it. The Peruvian government has done a good job of minimizing impact but there are a lot of hoops to jump through to get there.
Here is what we had to do:
Drive 50 miles from Cuzco to Ollantaytambo and park the bikes at Los Portadas Hostal.
Buy a train ticket from Ollantaytambo to Aquas Calientes for 60 dollars per person (ouch). There is no road to Aquas Calientes (which is the closest town to Machu Picchu).
Buy tickets in Aquas Calientes for Machu Picchu (45 dollars per person)
[Megan can't focus on the camera because she is looking at something fuzzy in front of us] Wake up at 4:30 am and catch a 5:15 bus from Aquas Calientes up the mountain to Machu Picchu (8 dollars per person) arriving at 5:45 am.

[and that fuzzy thing is a lama] Wait in line with 1000 other people doing the same thing as us.
Hope to get a stamp that allows us to climb up Wayna Picchu (the mountain overlooking MP). We got the last stamp.
Walk around MP for the entire day marveling at how much work it must have taken to make this place.
Too cheap to pay for the ride down, we walked back to Aquas Calientes straining our knees on the endless granite steps.

Machu Picchu was amazing. I recommend everyone go and see it. It was worth all of the effort to get there and I will never forger the site of misty granite mountains with terraces, grain storage, and houses perched along the cliffs with stonework that is truly unbelievable. Despite the thousands of people who visit everyday, the place had a magical charm that sticks with you.
One thing I was particularly impressed by was the "drawbridge" on the side of the cliffs. This must of have been for defensive purposes. In this picture in the background lower right you can see how they built the path along the cliff and then left a gap in it. Pretty cool.
But how did we become birdwatchers?
A Seattle climber named Jim Sykes up and moved to Peru about 6 or 7 years ago. He stationed himself in Huaraz, opened a Cinema, met a fantastic woman named Gladys and is now a Peruvian resident.
A few months ago, they decided to bail on Huaraz and start a birdwatching business near Machu Picchu called Lost City Bird Guides. There are year round tourists in MP, and beside the ruins, there really isn't much else "to do" in the immediate area.

They took us out for a day of birding in the high jungle/ cloud forest of the area. They handed us each a pair of binoculars and out we went looking for feathered creatures. And there were a lot. Birding is an interesting past time. You look up in the trees for moving things, then try to find said moving things in your binoculars. After you see it, you identify it before it flies off. Jim and Gladys are really good at it. Their enthusiasm for finding all sorts of species spilled over to us and we found ourselves looking every which was for yellow, brown, blue, red, spotted, striped creatures. They could identify the birds in seconds and tell us all about the critters, if they were rare, what they eat, where they live and so on.
In these parts, the bird everyone wants to see if the Cock of the Rock (this is the actual English name). You can't always see them, but on this day we saw both Males and Females. In fact Megan spotted one independently and was pretty proud.
The whole package of going birding and visiting Machu Picchu made for a great vacation from riding. If you are reading this and at all plan to go to Machu Picchu, plan to spend an extra day in Aguas Calientes (actually a nice little town with no cars) and go birding. It is so much richer than just popping in for a quick visit to the ruins.

Misery loves company

2011-02-14T06:37:00.000-08:00

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.

Finding Penguins

2011-02-06T08:05:00.000-08:00

My sister loves Penguins. Therefore by proxy, I love them too. Megan loves all critters so she loves Penguins.

[Pink Flamingos in Paracas National Park] Oddly, there are Humbolt Penguins in Peru. We learned this when we went Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo with my sister in late December and looked at the Peruvian Penguins.

After studying the map and doing a little research we discovered that the Paracas National Park in Peru is home to Peruvian Penguins. We made a long day of riding from about 100 miles North of Lima, through Lima and its crazy traffic, and then another 150 miles south to Paracas and stayed the night. I ate some more Ceviche (this time it didn't make me sick), Megan drank some Peruvian wine (not bad) and then the next morning we saddled up her motorcycle and went into the park to look for Penguins.

Paracas is a long stretch of protected coast line with giant cliffs that tumble into the ocean. If I had to guess, I would say that it gets less than 1" of rain a year and is therefore a big dry salty desert.

Without a lot of information other than "don't take the boats out to see the Penguins, they disturb them" and "you can see some Penguins from a cliff somewhere in the park" we paid our 2 dollar entry fee to the park and went to a place on the map called La Mina (why not?). 10 km of good dirt road and we didn't find any Penguins. A lot of sunbathers and swimmers.

Ok... how about going up over this hill on a random single track to see if there are any Penguins. This went on for a while. We hadn't packed a lunch so after a few hours of driving across the desert looking for views of the ocean we were about to give up.

We saw lots of seals on the cliffs below, we saw lots birds (boobys?) but no Penguins.

[looking for Penguins in all the wrong places]

[Are there penguins here?]

On a last whim, we decided to follow one more track to look check it out. I was hungry, Megan was hot and hungry but we needed to find these swimming birds.

And there they were. Penguins. And they were pretty cute.

[If you look closely you can see some lines in the background] After a nice meal back in Paracas, we were back on the road to Nasca to see the famous Nasca lines. this tower lets you see a couple of them. If you really want to see them, one needs to go in an airplane but since this costs $100 per person I think we will have to make do with the viewing tower.

One a last note about meeting people on the road, as I was sitting on the side of the road trying to figure out why my chain fell off, this guy and his wife pull up in a really nice truck and start asking us about our trip. Well it turns out he is Emilio Scotto who is somewhat legendary in the Motorcycle world for riding a Honda Goldwing Motorcycle around and around the world for 10 years. Now he is out promoting a rally in Argentina by driving this truck around. That's something I could do...

Like a backcountry ski hut, but for climbers

2011-02-06T07:42:00.000-08:00

[Leaving Jo's place in Huaraz- a very comfortable place to stay for both us and our motorcycles] This trip was meant to be a climbing trip. I know, it looks like a motorcycle trip, but a significant portion of our precious luggage space is taken up by rock climbing gear. However, not a day goes by where we don't seriously consider jettisoning our ropes and draws and lightening our load. Sure we are climbers at the core, but maybe we should just focus on motorcycling and do the rock scaling back in the states.

This changed for us after driving the spectacular 85 km stretch of road south out of Huaraz and then the challenging 6 km of road up to the climbers hut at Hatun Machay, one of the most impressive sport climbing and bouldering areas I have visited.

I will start with the drawbacks of this area and then reap praise upon it.

Drawbacks:

14,000 feet elevation. It is just darn hard to breathe up there. But you get used to it.

Short climbing days. This time of year the fog rolls in around 11 or 12 which effectively shuts down the climbing day forcing us to drink tea and read books back at the hut. Apparently this doesn't happen from May to September which we would be nice to be able to climb more than 5 hours a day.

Praise: Anrdres at Andean Kingdom has put together a climbing area so impressive that it just yearns for climbers to come and visit. In 2005 he built a fantastic Refugio (a refugio is a stone house out in the middle of nowhere that people can stay at) to house climbers.

This thing is super comfortable with running spring water and a gas stove to cook on and at this moment is staffed by an ultra friendly host, Coco, who greets one with a cup of hot tea and a big smile.

[Coca sending his project] Then there is the climbing. The stone forest of Hatun Machay goes on and on and on. So far, there are about 120(?) developed sport routes (routes with bolts) but if I had to guess I would say there is potential for... hmmm... 6000 quality routes. The area just goes on and on and on. I've never really seen anything like it.

[A 25 meter mega classic 11b on dead vertical volcanic tuff] One of the issues we have had with climbing on this trip is that the climbing areas can be mis-managed with sketchy bolts and even worse anchors. This is not the case at Hatun Machay. Bolts are all supplied by Andean Kingdom as long as people bolt within the standards of safe routes with no runouts and solid anchors. It is so refreshing to see this high standard of safety and quality upheld in a remote climbing area. Hospitals are far away.

I'm not too much of a boulderer (climbing short problems without the use of ropes but utilizing a big pad to fall on). It requires a lot of instantaneous power which is something I haven't developed in my climbing. It also can be scary because every fall is a ground fall and sometimes the ground is less than desirable (even with pads). As a two very wise climbers, Damien Potts and Andy Seaver, once said when developing a perfect bouldering area: "First you look for flat landings and then you start looking for boulders." Finding one of those two criteria is easy. Finding both is hard.

View Larger Map
[This map is about 1.5 miles across and this is just a section of the climbing.]

If Hatun Machay has potential for 6000 climbing routes, it also has potential for 100 times more bouldering routes that fit these criteria. Unbelievable. As you walk through the stone forest there are countless rock formations that come up out of the soft grass, most of which would make for an interesting problem or two. Some have been developed, but the area is simply too large to develop it all.

We planned on staying one day, but stuck for around for two and I could easily envision being there for a month if the road wasn't calling our name.

[One of the other hosts at the refugio]

Simply Amazing

2011-01-30T20:49:00.000-08:00

On our quest to head from the coast to Huaraz we had to choose one of many roads to take us there. Only one was paved and this was way out of our way. The others range from powdery dirt to under construction and going over a 4200 meter (13000 foot) pass. We chose to follow the Rio Santo from sea level up to Huaraz. In it's voyage to the sea, the river has cut an impressive canyon not too dissimilar to the Grand Canyon. Just look at the google map and see how cool it is.

View Route up the Rio Santo in a larger map
Then watch the video that we made. If this doesn't inspire you to get on a motorcycle and drive to Peru, then I don't know what will.

Cuenca in pictures

2011-01-24T06:12:00.000-08:00

We spent in a week in lovely Cuenca. My mission while there was to do all the needed maintenance on the bikes, do my taxes for the city, state, and feds, get set up for the Montessori conference in March, and get over my stomach bug. I was able to accomplish all three.

Megan's goals were to hang out with her good friends Kathleen, Fran, and Samuel, create a strong relationship with the montessori school in Cuenca and work on her bike. By the time we left, Megan was satisfied as well.

Big thanks to Kathleen and Fran for making us feel so comfortable in Cuenca and for looking out for us.

At the park with the family.

Getting motorcycle boots repaired

Rabbits are cute

Observing the Montessori School

Showing off the bike to the kids at the Montessori School

Megan wants to raise $1000 for a scholarship for 1 year's tuition at the Montessori School. To do this she is putting together Ecuador baskets to sell at the montessori conference in Chicago in March. She went about Cuenca collecting 50 sets of small things that represent Ecuadorian culture. These are being put together and then mailed to Chicago for us to sell for $40 each. All proceeds from these will go to the scholarship fund.

Getting Beta at the local climbing shop on where to climb around Cuenca.

Very lost and looking for the climbing area near Paute.

Is the climbing here?

We found it and spent an afternoon climbing.

Scary caterpillar on the way to the crag.

Megan and Sam.

Marshall and Sam

6 Cubans arguing politics around a dinner table. As you can imagine, this got very loud.

Megan, Kathleen and Super Sam

Megan took this as we were leaving Cuenca. I had to stop at an ATM and get some more cash (they use US dollars in Ecuador)

A restaurant at 10,000 feet made to look like a western restaurant. Complete with Willie Nelson for music. Two motorcyclists from Cuenca passed us on the road South out of Cuenca and then waited for us here. Javier and Nick waited outside in the rain and flagged us down as we drove by. This place is popular with local motorcycle riders as many more streamed in.

Nick and Javier (father and son) with BMW 1200GS and KTM 990. Nick (the father) rode from Alaska to Chile two years ago. It took him 4 months. Both these guys work for the big newspaper in Ecuador. Nick is a director. They bought us lunch and we really enjoyed chatting with them for an hour over some fantastic food and coffee. Motorcyclists all over the world are a big happy family. There is something about being out on two wheels and a motor that brings people together. It doesn't happen with 4 wheels and a motor, you need only two.

The Mosquito in the room

2011-01-24T05:31:00.000-08:00

As anyone who knows me well knows, Mosquitos love me and I go bezerk with them. I have had episodes of lying in the middle of a trail somewhere in the north cascades, lying in the fetal position and giggling because Mosquitos have gotten the better of me.

This graphic from a brilliant graphic designer, Christoph Niemann (who does some work with the NY times- please go look at his work sleeping, legos, and airplane travel) pretty much describes many nights that I have had with Mosquitos. Substitute the New Yorker with a) and electric tennis racket that I had in thailand or b) finally getting our mosquito net out and setting it up.

We have this little portable mosquito net from Sea to Summit that we have been traveling with. It packs down to the size of a rolled up t-shirt and is cleverly designed to be able to hang in almost every hotel room, either from off of an overhead light or from a picture from behind the bed.
There is something I don't understand at all in places that have mosquitos. Hotel rooms don't give you mosquito nets. In fact the presence of a mosquito net often reminds me of the presence of free wi-fi in hotels in the US. The more you pay for a room, the less likely they will have free wi-fi (or mosquito nets). There is some presumption that the rooms are mosquito proof (they never are) or that mosquitos just don't bother one while sleeping (they always do).
[mosquito net rigged up in Vilcabamba, notice the shoe tied to the edge to keep it down] Well, we have taken care of that by traveling with this pyramid mosquito net thing and I can't recommend enough getting yourself one of these if you are like me and just can't sleep with a mosquito in the room. Megan loves it too because I don't get up in the middle of the night, turn on the lights, and just stare at the ceiling looking for the little trouble maker(s).
Now if only we can always remember to bring this into the room and not leave it out on the bikes.

A perfect day of riding

2011-01-16T20:14:00.000-08:00

As per a recommendation from Rudy and Marcelina (the owners of Hakuna Matata) we decided to take a pass over the mountains that pretty much dropped us directly into Cuenca. It's not a big pass on the map, but it looked interesting. We rode south from Hakuna Matata (and megan rode across the suspension bridge for which she was previously scared to ride) on brand new tarmac through twisty roads with no traffic until we reached the town of Mendez. Mendez, although still technically in the Amazon, is right on the edge of the mountains. It is a very quite town with no tourists perched along a river in deep valley.

We left the next morning and heard that due to construction on the road, it was open at some place from only 12:30 until 1. We didn't know where this place was so we sort of had to skidadle.
Up we went. Through incredible terrain with absolutely no traffic. The road was paved in places, broken pavement in others, and completely dirt in other (mostly where it had washed out at some point).
Eventually it turned to all dirt as it clung to the edge of a steep valley dropping several thousand feet to the floor. We hit the construction, but being on motorcycles, they waived us right through and on we went winding up moderately difficult dirt/ mud roads.
The roads had just enough challenge to keep us engaged, but nothing was so technical that we felt like we couldn't do it. Just the kind of stuff we came down here for. Yippee for motorcycle riding in Ecuador.

My stomach, unfortunately, picked up a little friend somewhere in the Amazon and we are currently battling it out in Cuenca. Jorge, as he is known, is defending himself by blowing up a big balloon somewhere in my gut. I, however, have Cipro and I hope that together we can exploit Jorge's weaknesses and force him out of me. It is a battle for which my role generally is that of staying in bed and watching movies.
Never fear, as I have been laid up in bed Megan has entertained herself quite well by hanging out with her college friend Kathleen. Kathleen and her husband, Fran, have a 1 year old who is beyond cute. Just look at the little bugger.

On to Motorcycle maintenance.
Part of the fun of a trip like this is getting in touch with your bike. As I ride along, I am constantly feeling for any changes. Anything that seems out of the usual. Then when I do feel something, I hope that either a) I'm wrong and just never noticed it before or b) it magically fixes itself. But sometimes you have to go to option c) actually diagnose and then fix the thing.
Front Brake: The brake issue from a few days back took route b. I did open up my brakes and give them a good cleaning, but I think what really made them work fine again is that they just broke into the ever-so-slightly new alignment of my front end after the firefighters looked at my steering head bearings.
Water Pump: This is something that I really was hoping was option a from above. This is the fact that sometimes when I ride, I smell a little bit of antifreeze. I sort of had convinced myself that this is normal and that the engine was just hot and therefor gave off a little smell. However, I am now ready to accept that this isn't normal and in fact is most likely an indication of bad water pump seals. It could also be a cracked head, but for now I'm going with the simplest solution which is bad seals. (Thanks to Gary and Jodie at RPM cycles in Ventura for helping me to diagnose this- what a kick ass shop).
I got online to f650.com and spent a little time researching what it takes to replace the water pump and whether I really should. After a lot of reading (f650.com is an amazing resource for anyone owning an F650GS single), I now know how simple the water pump on this bike is and that I really should have brought the part down with me. So tomorrow I'm off to try to source the part from Quito and have it flown down to Cuenca.
Fork Seals: Along with that part, I need to get fork seals since my left fork seems to be leaking a little bit. Again, I hope I can find them in Quito as well. [If all else fails, we could go by horse- check us out as cowboys]
Steering Head Bearings: An yes, I finally give up and will replace my steering head bearings as well. Option B from above is just not going to happen. Fortunately, I brought that part down with me.
Valve Shims: As long as I am at it, I am going to check the Valve Shim clearances on both mine and Megan's bikes. For me, this is about a 2-3 hour job per bike, but very gratifying because you have dive deep into the bike to get these puppies. It makes me feel like a real mechanic. I get to play with timing chains and cool things that go click click click. I even have digital calipers to measure the shims.
Spark Plugs: I've been carrying them, I might as well put them in.
Oil and Antifreeze: Although we have only ridden maybe 1000 miles since I last changed the oil, it has been 8 months and it seems worth doing. Especially on my bike which may (and probably does) have antifreeze in the oil.
[our horse back riding guide Fausto teaching us about local plants]

The end of the rainbow

2011-01-12T09:10:00.000-08:00

We found it.
[The obligatory GPS shot at the equator. I couldn't quite get it to zero.]

After leaving Cayembe and stopping at the Equator for a quick visit and some obligatory snap shots, we headed up over the mountains towards a 13,500 foot pass. At around 12,000 feet the rain kicked in.

We crested the pass in style and then descended towards the Amazon. As one might expect for an 11,000 foot descent into the jungle, the rain kicked in in full force and the fog started to get thick. Fortunately, there was no traffic and the roads were in excellent shape. As we plugged away at 25 mph hugging the white line on the side of the road, I started to seriously doubt our decision to take a detour from the relatively dry mountains of Central Ecuador over to the Oriente (or Jungle) side.

We hit Baeza and the rain started to lift. 10 minutes later, the roads were dry and we road impeccable twisties for a good 100 km through the jungle going over small passes and noticing how the vegetation and landscape changed from area to area.
Deciding at around 3 pm it was time to start looking for a place to stay, we took a gamble and turned off the main road on a small dirt track towards what we hoped would be a cute little place out in the jungle. The signs looked a little old, and it being low season, we didn't know if the place would be open or not. The road was cobbly and in places steep and at this time I would like to make a few comments about riding with your spouse:
I had spotted this little place in the guidebook and decided, without consulting Megan, that this was the place to go. I had a hunch that it would be like Cave Lodge in Thailand (one of my favorite places to visit) and wanted very badly to go check it out. I misunderstood the guidebook in that I thought it was 3.6 km from the last town but still just off the main road. When we got to the turn off, it became apparent that we would have to ride some sort of dirt/ rock track for 3.6 km to get to the place.
It was hot, we were tired, and when we got to the turn off I kind of just went down the road expecting Megan to follow. About a 1 km into the road, I stopped to adjust my suspension, and when Megan pulled up next to me, I just reached over and started adjusting her suspension without asking her. At this point she was pretty upset with me, but really wanting to push on, and being way too hot to stop and talk about things, I just sort of pushed on. BAD IDEA.
After 2 km, we arrive at a sketchy looking suspension bridge which Megan was going to have no part of crossing on her motorcycle. We started to talk about whether it was a good idea to have come down this in the first place, and although it would have been fine under normal circumstances, we had spiraled into a place where communicating wasn't effectively happening and where we both were digging in our heels.
This is usually the crescendo of any argument. At this point, we could a) start listening to each other and understand the other's point of view or b) do the opposite and think that other is unreasonable and just plain wrong. Usually what happens is that option b goes on for a little while longer until one or both of us gets tired of being mad and then we realize what is going on (often by putting food in our mouths) and someone takes the first step towards option a.
We stayed at b for a while longer.

I rode her bike across the bridge. Walked back. Got mine. Road it across the bridge. I figured we were at the point of no return where it would be harder to turn back then to push forward to the unknown lodge. We could just keep going and sort out the emotional stuff later. Another bad idea.
The road was technical and with us upset with each other, it was hard to stay focussed to ride.
After a while we finally pulled up to Hakuna Matata, and as Megan later called it: the end of the rainbow.
There is a third option for what to do when in an argument that I didn't mention above. This is c) arrive at fantasy island aka paradise and be greeted by a soft spoken Belgian who makes everything ok.

We are now the only guests at a perfect resort, with a spring fed palm tree shaped swimming pool, luxurious accommodations, all meals covered, horses to ride, and views out to the rainforest that belong on the Nature Channel. There is a light rain coming down outside as I sit under a thatched roof with light Ecuadorian music playing in the background.
Of course we decided to stay for another night so that we could have a full day here. It is just way too nice.
Back to the couple thing for just another little bit. How could we have handled the situation differently to avoid the grumpiness? I think stopping before we turned off the main road to come up with a plan would have helped. I think making sure that we were both equally invested in coming out here would have put the responsibility of arriving on both of us, rather than just on me. Any advice out there is greatly appreciated.

It's the people, stupid

2011-01-12T08:02:00.000-08:00

For us, traveling is more about the people we meet rather than the sites we see. We like to visit places but the true experiences come from interacting with the folks we run into.
The last two days have had some good opportunities for that.

Raul from Venezuela. Imagine our surprise when after returning from dinner in Ipiales, we go out to look at the bikes and there is another F650GS parked right next to ours. The owner quickly found us and it turns out he is from Venezuela and is riding down to Argentina but is riding with the support of his truck with his wife driving the truck. In this fashion he gets to ride a motorcycle that isn't all weighted down and can really indulge in the twists and turns of the roads.
We exchanged emails, and he even may have located a buyer for one of our bikes down in Chile. Hopefully we will run into him again someplace on the road, but he is traveling quickly down to the Southern Tip of the continent in order to beat the cold weather. Maybe we'll see him on his way back up.

Deigo (or Alex) from freakin' New York. Another big surprise in Cayembe. Exhausted from a day of riding we stop at a little coffee shop to get some local baked treats and as we are getting our gear back on we hear: "Washington? No fucking way! I can't believe it." We turn around to see an eager New York City peace corp hick sitting in a truck with an Ecuadorian in the passenger seat. We chat briefly and he invites us out to the dairy farm where he works just north of town. Not ones to turn down an opportunity we find a place to stay (an awesome ranch down a dirt road run by an italian family) unpack our stuff and drive over the farm.
Turns out that Diego is a true Brooklyner who has a bunch of family in Ecuador. His family owns a ton of land in the area including a dairy farm with 130 lovely cows, 3 (or more) dogs, and kittens galore. Diego owns a moving company in Brooklyn and when he gets tired of it, he comes down to Ecuador to work on the farm for a while. This kid has a lust for life that you don't see too often and it was fun hanging out with him for a while.

Sneaking out of Colombia

2011-01-12T07:34:00.000-08:00

Drug runners do it. Poor ecuadorians do it on their way up to the US, and we did it on our way out of Colombia.
As I have written about before, owing to their expired papers, our bikes were technically owned by the Colombian government. Although I'm sure they would put the ladies to good use tracking down drug runners and FARC, we weren't quite ready to make such a donation to the newly elected conservative government.
Therefore, we became outlaws...

Problem 1: Every police checkpoint became a source of anxiety. Would they stop us and ask for our papers?
Solution: Look like you are rich, and have no motivation to run drugs or guns and no one will ask for you papers.
Execution: Done with pride.
Problem 2: We needed to exit Colombia and not have the government office (DIAN) see that we were leaving with two motorcycles.
Solution: At the border, park the bikes in a place where the DIAN officials couldn't see the bikes. Change into non-motorycle riding clothes and carry some fake luggage. Go inside to get our passports stamped as leaving the country. Jump back on the bikes and high tail it across the border as fast as we can.
Execution: Flawless (although with a few nerves-a-rattling at the border).

We didn't take any pictures, so enjoy these photos of delicious food in Ecuador. The first one is Bizcochos and a mozzarella like cheese. The second one is at the little Italian owned horse ranch/ guest house/ restaurant in Cayembe, and the third, well that is at the end of the rainbow.

And off we go

2011-01-09T20:16:00.000-08:00

[loaded up with the Muñoz-Gomez family] We loaded up the bikes this morning and gunned south for the border. We had a 200+ mile day (a lot for us) in some stunning terrain. We went from 6000 feet to 2000 feet to 10000 feet to 4000 feet and finished at 8000 feet. We drove past the spot where Megan had crashed the year before, drove through and around 3000 foot deep canyons, and dodged boulders rolling off road cuts.

After having not driven the big bikes for 7 months, and after Megan crashing, we weren't sure how we were going to feel getting back on them. Would we drive 10 mph and overly cautious? Would we consider riding the bikes through South America not worth the risk? How would it feel compared to last year when it was all so fresh and new? How would the girls be after sitting in the rain for 7 months?

[chickens hanging out at the bottom of this xmas tree. Click on the image to see them they are cute.] Obviously, I can't answer all those questions just yet, but something strange did happen when we got back onto them. We felt relaxed. Sitting on the bike with unknown road ahead fell incredibly familiar and within five minutes of being on the road felt like we had never set the ladies down.

[Megan snapped this when I was working on the brakes. She's enjoying the view- the chicken- not megan] Now for technical part. Skip over this if you don't care about motorcycle maintenance. One problem did start to present itself about halfway through the day. My front brake started to feel a bit too "reactive." It was either off or full-on without a middle. Upon further inspection, I realized that it was actually grabbing slightly without being pressed which is sort of a bad thing. Driving with the brakes slightly binding for long periods of time could heat up the rotor, causing it warp which will certainly cause problems down the line. I bled some fluid out of the lines just to make sure there wasn't a back up anywhere, but this didn't help the problem. I pushed the pistons back and had megan pump the brakes. I went through this a few times to see if the pistons were stuck. This seemed to help a little but not completely. I went ahead and drove on them the rest of the day, but will need to take another look tomorrow. I think I will try to clean the pistons. There could be some road grime or corrosion in there that is preventing the pistons from recoiling. Another thought is that last may I had a mechanic take a look at the steering head bearing and perhaps the whole front end didn't get put back together exactly the same as before which could cause the brake to be grabbing the rotor ever so slightly askew. This could work itself out after a few days. However, it is strange that I didn't notice it in the morning but I could certainly attribute that to my excitement of getting on the bikes.

So here we are in Ipiales getting ready to cross the border tomorrow. Technically, our bikes are illegal in Colombia (their paper expired in June) so we are going to have to do some fancy footwork at the border to get us but not our bikes checked out of the country. It is all part of the fun.

Life in Popayan

2011-01-09T19:51:00.000-08:00

We arrived safely in Popayan after a classic adventurous bus ride with cowboy-like drivers who stop everytime they see a person hoping to pick said person up. Needless to say it took a while to get to Popayan, but we weren't in a hurry.

[Mariana squirting the shaving cream stuff] We called Henry (the guy whose house our bikes were at) and he met us at the bus station. Our initial plan was to stay a couple of days and then get on the road heading south, but we quickly found out that this wasn't going to happen owning to a festival that goes on for days in the region. There must be some significance in the festival, but as far as we could tell, the reason for this thing is for everyone to

Throw water on each other if water is handy.
Throw flour (like the kind used to make bread) all over this wet or dry person.
Spray high powered shaving cream like stuff on person
Cover this person with colored facial cream
Drink

[megan getting into the groove] It seemed like a bad idea to ride for 200 miles through small villages with countless people throwing water balloons and 1 kilo bags of flour at you.
So rather than ride our bikes, we went out with the Muñoz-Gomez family to indulge in some good old fashioned fun.

[dancing the night away in Henry's house] I will say that it takes quite some time to wash the flour/ water combo out of your hair and clothes but it was well worth it. We drank, played, and danced to salsa.
During this time, we managed to get the bikes in working order: replaced Megan's rear brake, replaced her rear tube which has had a slow leak since Costa Rica, reshaped her boxes after her crash and did some general lube stuff.

We also went out to a waterfall with Henry and the family (Mariana and Enilce) and rappelled off of it, and then went to some hot springs and soaked for a few hours.

[changing the tire by the nativity scene- the only shade we could find] One thing that kept surprising us during our time in Popayan was the absolute generosity of this amazing family. They bent over backwards to make us feel welcome and part of their family. They insisted we sleep in their room while the three of them slept together in Mariana's room. Enilce would cook delicious Colombian meals for us whenever possible. Mariana spent a lot of time talking very slow spanish with us and keeping us entertained. Henry managed to create time between his busy schedule at the Fire Station to get us the tools we needed to work on the bikes and to give us a proper Colombian experience. We now have another family in Colombia and absolutely expect to come back and be part of this amazing culture.

[using the fire fighter's hydraulic press to reform megan's boxes] For anyone afraid to travel to Colombia, I can not stress enough how warm the people in Colombia are. I am sure that anyone who has travelled here will back me up in saying that Colombian culture takes the deed of looking after travelers to the extreme. The people have a mix of curiosity and generosity that makes being here an absolute delight.

You can't fix a bathroom in Jamaica, apparently

2011-01-04T08:23:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post saying we made it safely to Colombia last night. We are staying at a super cute colonial hotel in the old part of Cali. It is around 75 degrees and overcast here.

But the real story has to do with bathrooms.

We get on our flight from Miami to Cali, Colombia at 5:30 pm and take off without incident. The movie comes on, I pop in my headphones and watch the thing in a sleepy daze. About 1 hour into the flight, the flight crew comes on and says "You may have noticed, but all of the bathrooms on this plane appear to not be working. We are trying to fix them, but we may have to divert."
About 15 minutes later: "Looks like we can't fix them so we are going to land in Jamaica and see what can be done."
5 Minutes later: " Jamaica doesn't have the crew to work on these bathroom so we are turning around and heading back to Miami."
Megan instantly pointed out that we were about 1.5 hours into a 3.5 hour flight and that turning around really made no sense because we were pretty much at the half way point.
But turn around we did and back to Miami we went.

After unloading from the plane, finding a new plane, getting back on, and reflying to Cali, we arrived in Cali about 5 hours late- at around 2am.

The good news: I accidentally left my ipod touch on our original Miami/Cali plane. Once I realized my error, the captain actually went over to the old plane, looked around and brought me back my ipod. What a nice Captain.

What did we leave behind?

2011-01-03T13:29:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in the sand on South Miami Beach. After having slept 4 fit-full hours in my airplane sleep on a redeye from Seattle, I feel a little dazed and somewhat confused when I look up and see an entourage (pun to be explained later) of photographesr running down the beach and squatting in front of us. "Oh, look," I think. "They came to take my picture. After all, we have put in about 2 months worth of work of the past 3 weeks getting ready to head south and I guess that is newsworthy." Of course, I didn't really believe this. It is only in my half conscious mind that this thought passed through.

Getting ready for the Motorcycle trip this year has been both more difficult and much easier than last year. We have a lot more going on in our lives this year and wrapping up all of that up has been a logistical challenge.

1. We took a 10 day intensive Wilderness First Responder course in mid-December.

2. We had to get 25,000 small cards and associated figurines together and boxed up to send to Chicago in March.

3. I hope to wrap up the work I did with Gore and get prepped for next year.

4. We had to do our 2010 taxes.

5. We had to pack up our house and get it ready for our renter(s).

6. And somewhere in there we had to pack for our motorcycle trip.

I won't write too much about items 1-5 except to say that it was a lot to do in a month.

Item 6 therefore fell to the back burner and we only started thinking about it 3 days before our departure. Knowing that we left a lot of gear in Colombia (Megan was smart enough to make a list of what we left behind), we didn't actually have that much to pack up for our return. For clothing we only get 2 pairs of pants, 3 t-shirts, some socks, underwear, and a few warmer clothes.

I had to think hard about what we would need as far as parts for the motorcycles. I grabbed a couple of oil filters, found the 2 parts that broke when Megan crashed, got a new front chain sprocket because megan's will probably wear out somewhere in Argentina (I replaced mine in Mexico), bought a tool that fits perfectly over the very soft metal of the oil pan bolt (so that I don't strip it again), bought two replacement oil pan bolts (just in case I do), and bought replacement steering head bearings for my bike. The steering head bearing came with a crash course on how to change them from Mister Colin at Ride West BMW. I'm not so sure I can do the job on my own, but as he pointed out and as I know from last year, you can always find a gaggle of people who will help you out once you go and mess everything up. Worst case scenario: put the bike on a bus and go to the nearest town with a motorcycle mechanic.

We picked up maps for each country that we will be going through, and replaced Megan GORE-TEX® Outerwear which were full of small holes after her crash.

We took all these things, along with gifts for our friends in Colombia, threw them all in two large duffles, and hoped for the best.

We'll see what super crucial thing we left in Seattle. Actually… as I am sitting here writing about it, I had a terrible feeling that perhaps we forgot our motorcycle keys. i know we travelled back with a set and we certainly don't have that in our luggage. On the other hand, I know we left a set with Henry (the guy who is watching our bikes), so we have a set, but I don't think we have a backup set. Gulp!

Oh well.

So back to the photographers on the beach. Turns out they weren't taking photos of us. They were snapping photos of Adrian from Entourage (a TV show on HBO). We certainly wouldn't have recognized him (having never seen the show) but Megan asked the Paparazzi and they told us.

That was our 12 hours in Miami. We board a plane to Colombia in an hour and then catch a bus to Popayan tomorrow (a 3 hour ride) to meet up with "The Girls." Hopefully they start right up and give us no problems.

My god, what have we done?

2010-12-07T10:12:00.001-08:00

It has now been a few weeks since taking over an online Montessori Materials business (Montessori123.com) and as we have become more familiar with what we have purchased, the amount of potential work that we could do becomes absolutely mind boggling. And with less than a month before we depart for Colombia (where they are having record rainfall) we have a lot to do.

Just yesterday as we decided to try to inventory all the preprinted and precut inventory that we inherited in the purchase I pulled the classic "walk around in circles, unable to get anything done under the weight of so much to do" for which the only cure for me is to go for a run. This helped to calm me, but after returning to our cluttered condo, with stacks of materials and replicas strewn all about the place, I fell back into the craziness again.
Fortunately, while I was away Megan came up with a plan on how to deal with craziness. This involves putting most of what we have back into boxes and dealing with it later. I like this plan.

Allow me to explain a bit of what we got ourselves into.

When we purchased Montessori 123, we mostly purchased a) an existing website with a good strong history b) a bunch of satisfied customers that we can (and will) begin to communicate with and create a relationship and c) (most importantly) over 350 digital files of Montessori materials.
Sounds simple enough, but the complexity begins to come when you realize that these materials are from the brain of a very creative person but that only that brain actually knows what they all are. She did a good job of organizing them to the best she could, but there still is 5 years of a messy hard drive (think about your own hard drive) with different iterations of various projects. On top of this, these projects are on the website for people to buy but various naming and pricing schemes, all of which I'm sure make sense to the original creator. However, as of yet, they don't make a lot of sense to us.
Then there are the bonus materials. Some 25 boxes of preprinted, laminated, and/or cut materials. Many of these are unlabeled.
So yesterday we started going through these boxes and attempted to inventory what we have. When you have over 300 materials of which you aren't too familiar with, all boxed up in various stages of being finished and you are supposed to catalog and inventory them all, the most tempting thing in the world is just to take them to the dump and start all over again.
"What is this material with the top card being a picture of a fox and some matching cards that start with kite?" How are we supposed to inventory something like that? However, this "thing" is worth around 30 dollars at retail so it sort of worth figuring out what it is and then figuring out how to connect it with a consumer. This leaves me walking in circles around the room... and then going for a run.

In 4 days we begin a 10 day intensive First Aid course (WFR) which means we won't be able to work at all, that brings us to Dec 20. Then there is the xmas craziness, which leaves a week before we leave on Jan 2. Whoooaaa. The good news is that we have to get it all done... and we will.
Oh yeah, and did I mention that we have to have around 600 sets of materials printed, laminated, cut, and boxed in order to send to Chicago for the March montessori conference?

One month until action

2010-11-23T11:06:00.000-08:00

Warning: this might be kind of a boring blog. Sort of a house keeping piece to catch up so I can do more interesting blogs in the future. Hopefully the pictures are pretty.

[mountain biking in Lyons, Colorado] You know, it feels like I have been blogging for the past year, but then when I look at the blog, I realize that I haven't done a darn thing since returning to Seattle in June. Whooooa. I'm not going to try to catch up on the last six months, but I feel like I should at least give a little information on what are plans are and how we prepared for it.
After returning from Colombia, I promptly forgot all of the spanish that I had spent so much time trying to learn. It must be in there, but I don't know where.

I fell right back into my business (luxurious productions) by creating a series of training events for GORE-TEX® Products around the country. The contract this year was for a similar amount of work as last year, but I wanted to execute with a much higher quality. We made the decision to have her not take another job and help out with Luxurious Productions. We needed her considerable expertise in experiential curriculum development.

[teaching about motorcycle safety] Megan taught several classes to 3-6 year olds about motorcycling to South America and some of the cultures we visited. It was fun to see her in her element. I still have no idea how she can manage a room of 30 preschoolers all by herself for hours on end.

We took a trip back east to visit Gore and to visit Megan's family and friends. While there, we took the mandatory trip to Shelbourne Farms in Vermont and held Henrietta the chicken. We also visited one of Megan's best friend, Erika who is a very talented artist and has two adorable kids and a fantastic husband. Her blog is here.

We climbed a little bit in Utah while by going to the Uintas for 2 days with our friends Kasi, Andreas, Jenna, and Dylan. We also went to Maple for a few days with the same crew but added Roger, Merridy, Maya, and our good friend Dan Morris who lives in Salt Lake. As usual, I am never in the physical shape that I would like to be in when arriving at Maple, but it was fun and Dan shot some good photos (psswd: maple).

We planned and developed curriculum in August and then in September we began executing our events starting with Anchorage, then REI Corporate in Kent, WA, then Minneapolis, Denver, Salt Lake, Las Vegas. Southern California, San Francisco Bay area, Bend, and Seattle. The events went fantastically well with the new curriculum this year and we received amazing feedback.

[mailing our first order] Upon arriving in Seattle, we went and bought a business. Over the past couple of years, Megan has become disconnected from the Montessori world and has been playing with ideas to get back into it. However, given our lifestyle (of not being in one place for very long), teaching is out of the question.

[we found this little fellow on the beach in Southern California- turned out he is very invasive] An opportunity presented itself in the name of montessori123.com. This is an online retailer that sells montessori materials for teachers, parents, and home schoolers. We have hundreds and hundreds of nicely crafted nomenclature, or 3 part, cards. When someone wants some, we print them up, laminate them, and mail them out. It sounds simple and mostly is, but the magic comes come from the fact that the cards we have are very nice, that Megan will be able to make lots of new cards from our travels, and that the business has been around for quite a while and has a good reputation. The prior owner hasn't leveraged her past customers in a while, so with a little bit of marketing (which is what we essentially do now) we will be able to create a community around the brand and grow it... right?
We'll see, but in the meantime we are trying to figure out how to
a) actually buy a business. It is more technical than we thought and there is a lot to learn
b) run the day to day of the business
c) develop a system to have it keep going while we are back in South America
d) prepare for a conference in Chicago in March (we will probably fly back from Chile for it)
e) not kill each other from working together so intensely over the past 6 months.

[teaching our nephew Lucas about Gore] So there we are. With a return ticket to Colombia on January 2, we have just over a month to start planning and thinking about being on motorcycles again. Vroom Vroom.

Election Day in Colombia

2010-06-03T09:26:00.000-07:00

[Almuerzo with the family] We didn't end up climbing Purace as planned but I bet you can't guess the reason why. I wasn't because we didn't have time. We did. It wasn't because the weather was bad. It was fine. It wasn't because there was snow on top. There wasn't. It was because Sunday was the colombian presidential elections.
This was pretty much the equivalent of McCain vs Obama. There was a liberal candidate offering hope for a new Colombia versus a conservative candidate offering to keep Colombia on the same track that it has been on for years. But this isn't exactly why we didn't climb the mountain.
[Sofia, the Gonzales' niece and part time daughter] As it turns out, elections are a bit precarious in the countryside of Colombia. I asked if the FARC had a candidate running in this election and they sort of did, but the revolutionaries would really rather not have anyone vote in the election at all. And to accomplish this they send people out on the small roads (the main roads are completely safe) to try to intimidate locals and keep them from going to polling places.
[Mariana- one amazing 11 year old] On Saturday, Enilce (the woman who we were staying with) went out to a pueblita for one of her student's first communion. When she came back she told us that she was stopped by a FARC guerilla. Nothing at all happened to her but when I asked her what would have happened If we had been there she told us that it wouldn't have been as easy for us.
This doesn't mean that Colombia is dangerous. It just means, that like anywhere in the world (United States included), you just have to be careful at times. There is no way we would have even been allowed to go on that road. We would have been flagged down many times and told not to go there by the 99.9% of the population that are the most amiable people we have ever met.
It just means that on election weekend we needed to keep to the populated places and more relevantly that we couldn't go climbing.
Never fear, we had a great weekend hanging out with possibly the world's most gracious family. They gave us their beds to sleep in (we tried to sleep on the floor), they made us food, they took us out to lunch (which is the big meal of the day), they are allowing our bikes to take up most of their back porch, and they even drove us the two hours into Cali to get our paperwork done for the bikes and to drop us off at a hotel.

[backyard BBQ- the ladies are covered up behind us] As an aside about the bikes. The paperwork for our bikes is currently set to expire on June 16. This means the bikes technically become the property of Colombia after that date if they are still in the country after this date (which they will be). Henry went and had a police report made and got all the paperwork together to show that Megan had an accident and that it would be impossible for her to take her bike out of the country. He called the customs office (DIAN) in Cali and asked if they were able to extend the paperwork until January 2011 and they said they could. So we all drove to Cali (Henry insisted on taking us there and talking with the customs people... like I said: the world's nicest family) and went to the DIAN office. We found the right bureaucrat to talk to and after a long conversation, we were flat out denied any form of extension on the bikes. Henry asked for solutions and we were pretty much told that there weren't any beyond Megan and I leaving the country with the bikes and returning to extend the paperwork (impossible).

[at DIAN] What does this mean? It means that in January we will need to drive the bikes relatively quickly to the Ecuador border (It is about 400 km) without getting stopped by any police (impossible) or at least without being asked for our paperwork (not impossible). If we are stopped, we will have to ask if there are any "solutions" that can be created "right here and now."
At the border, we will have to hide our bikes, go to customs office pretending that we don't actually have motorcycles, get our passports stamped, then drive across the bridge into Ecuador. It all sounds rather exciting to me. Of course, I'd rather do it by the book and we certainly did try, but this should add an air of thrill to the ride.

[cats in Cali] So that's it. We are now back in Seattle and ready to take a vacation from our trip. It feels a bit naughty really. Like we are doing this trip down south which feels exciting and adventurous but that we are in the US for 6 months taking a break from it. We can buy any and all motorcycle parts that we need. We can communicate with strangers without being misunderstood. We can drink tap water. We can have friends for longer that a few days. All great things. I think I would be bummed if I knew we were in the States for good, but since it is only a short time, it actually feels kind nice.

[a picture of Rhonda from two years ago] My next adventure is to fix up Megan's 1974 Honda CB 200 "Rhonda" and use that to get around. I am looking forward to diving into Rhonda and learning how to work on her. I just have to figure out how to rebuild a carburetor. Any advice?

Out of Cuenca- into Colombia

2010-05-27T19:59:00.000-07:00

The last couple of days in Cuenca included going fishing at a trout farm up in Cajas. They have this rather large pond completely stocked to the brim with fish. The rule is such that you can't throw anything back so that meant that we caught a lot of very small trout.

[Fran with his massive catch] It goes like this:

you put your stick with a fishing line, hook, and some sort of dough into the water.

you watch as fish swarm around the hook.

after about 15 seconds from lowering the hook into the water, you tug a bit and you have a fish.

then you have to take the hook out of the fish's mouth and put fishy in the blue basket (at first, I didn't like this part).

Repeat 13 times

Pay 7 dollars for your fish

Clean said fish (in our case, Fran cleaned all the fish)

We also went to an amazing little BBQ place. They only serve one thing. In fact, we didn't even order. We waited for a bit for a free table and once we were seated they just brought out some BBQ chicken skewers sitting on top of french fries. Yummm.

[heating up the coals with a blow dryer] Restaurants that only make one thing often do it very well. It seems to me that if I were to open a restaurant, I would only want to serve one thing per night. Why not?

[check out the graphics on this sign for fruit shakes] So we arrived in Colombia this afternoon after taking a plane to Quito and then a 5.5 hour long bus ride up to the border. We are in the small town of Ipiales staying in a nice little hotel. It feels good to be back in the land of good coffee and friendly people. However, I don't think there is a vegetable to found anywhere in Colombia.

Tomorrow we take a 7 hour bus ride up to Popayan but if the bus is anything like the bus we took last time in Colombia, it will be a nice bus. The plan is to call Henry and then we will stay at his place. If weather permits this weekend, we will probably climb Purace, a 15 000 foot active volcano just outside of Popayan. I am excited to get out and see how I do at elevation. I have been running quite a bit at 8000 feet so hopefully my oxygen carrying capacity is somewhat up there.

They are having big presidential elections this Sunday which should be interesting. There is potential for a left/ center candidate from the green party to win out over the conservative pro-military guy. It feels like being in the states right before the Obama election. You can sense the excitement. This NY times article explains it. Personally, I can see the merits of both candidates. Colombia has made major progress towards security in the last 8 years thanks in major part to the current conservative guy. However, there has been a major ass whooping which, for sure, has violated many human rights of villagers. The Green party guy has also done a lot for security in Bogota as the mayor but in a much kindler, gentler way. I can't begin to understand the complicated politics in this country nor am I allowed to have an opinion but I suppose if I had to vote, I would choose the Green party guy. One can't vote based on fear. You have to look at what the candidate stands for and make a decision on who best represents your values.

But don't worry, we will steer very clear of any political demonstrations or events and just go fishing instead.

Fun stuff in Cuenca

2010-05-23T16:29:00.000-07:00

This past week we have been up to some fun stuff:

About 20 minutes out of town is a national park called Cajas. It is up around 12 000 feet elevation which makes hiking/ running a bit difficult but we managed to walk around up there for about 6 hours.

It actually looks like there might be some decent alpine climbing up there as the rock is solid granitic gneiss that does form some cracks. However, without climbing gear we had to chase Alpacas around. Not too bad.

We went to an Argentinian dance show. There was ballet, folk dancing, and tango. I thought the dancers were around 18-25 years old, but Megan thought they were much younger. It wasn't super professional but it was fun to see. These guys worked their asses off to put this show together.

On Saturday we adopted a kid. Look at this little Tiger. What a great one. Oh wait. We just borrowed him for a few minutes from Megan's super good friend from college, Kathleen. This is Sam and for me it has been very interesting hanging out with a 5 month old on an almost daily basis. This is maybe the third time in my life that I have held a kid and it isn't quite as hard as I thought it would be. They squirm a bit and sometimes poo, but when they aren't hungry they can be pretty fun.

As many know, I am terrified of kids but since there may be one in our future (not anytime real soon) I have to get used to the idea. Being around a kid has been both good and bad for me. Good: I am now more familiar with what it takes to rear a baby which makes it easier to accept. Bad: It is a full on commitment. 24 hours a day. Yikes! When will there be time for motorcycle riding?
Then, after a walk around the city with Kathleen and Sam, we went out to a delicious meal and then not quite wanting to go home we walked around the city a bit more. As we passed by the football (soccer) stadium we noticed that there was a game going on. We bought 6 dollar general admission tickets and watched Cuenca play Manta.

We arrived at the end of the first half and this being Cuenca, there was no score board to figure out what was going on. Not knowing the word for "score," and after the first five minutes feeling too shy to ask what the score was (shouldn't we have just known?) we had to use sociological techniques to realize what was going on. We figured out that Cuenca wasn't winning, but they had control of the ball almost the entire time, so they probably weren't losing either. The game ended with no goals witnessed by us so we figured it had to be a draw. Sure enough, after we got home, we learned it was 0-0. I probably shouldn't have been such a chicken and just asked someone, but I was feeling shy of the yellow zone and didn't go there. Bad tourist.

We only have a few days left here until we are reunited with the bikes for the weekend. The plan is to climb a Volcano with Henry, the guy who will be looking after our bikes. I'm pretty excited about that. I have been running every day here so hopefully I won't be sucking too much wind up at 13 000 feet on the mountain.

Water goes down the toilet the other way

2010-05-19T06:57:00.000-07:00

The plan was such: Go to Cuenca, Hang out with Megan's friend Kathleen, Find an apartment, Take spanish classes, Let megan heal. And that is pretty much how it has gone.

Cuenca is a city of 300,000 people situated amongst rushing rivers at 8000 feet elevation. There are lovely churches, cobbled roads, aggressive taxi drivers, and lots of green spaces. We wake from our 6th floor apartment every morning to either the sounds of church bells (they start at 7 am) playing lovely rhythms or to rockets (they also start at 7 am) with very loud firecrackers attached. I'm still not sure why people fire off rockets at 6 am and why they are always in pairs but apparently monday at 7 am is good time for fireworks. Why not?

So we are learning Spanish at a good clip in order to forget it again when we go back to the States on June 2nd. Hopefully we can find a place to speak a little Spanish this summer. We do, however, have return tickets to Colombia on January 3rd which is apparently in the middle of a big holiday for them. Lots of water splashing and rejoicing.

Life in Cuenca

[view from out apartment] So what is life like in Cuenca? Well… generally speaking, We get up around 7:00, make some coffee, read a little news on the internet and do our Spanish homework. Then we go to class at 10:30. For the sake of our marriange, we have separate classes in the morning. For two hours, we are crammed full of grammar rules and new words that we would quickly forget if it weren't for the two hours of conversation class that we take together in the afternoon. During the lunch break, we head out to the market and I eat from the entire roasted pig that is so mouth wateringly displayed. Yumm. (Megan doesn't enjoy the pig so much).

After the afternoon classes, I might put on my running shoes and head out for a nice run along the river. At first, going for a run at 8000 feet proved difficult, but my heart is warming up a bit and I can run 10k in a little under an hour. Maybe my lack of any upper body muscle mass helps me to run, but I doubt it since beer is so cheap here and I have countered the muscles with a little panzita. Never fear, one of the things I really look forward to when we return to Seattle is hitting the Vertical World climbing gym with ferocity in order to get back into shape for the summer climbing season.

I digress… For dinner we cook up a lovely meal in our 1980's Miami Beach decorated apartment and then maybe go out for a stroll through the town to let the food settle in. The markets here have amazing produce, meats, and the pastas are locally made and quite yummy.

View Untitled in a larger map

This past weekend, we took a 3 hour bus ride south to Ñamarin, a little Indigenous community that our fried Kathleen has connections to. We stayed in a very small guest house, had meals cooked for us by the family that runs it, went for a long hike through the countryside, were treated to a little dance performance by the local kids, and ate Cuy.

Cuy is a very nutritious, delicious tasting, and easy to grow meat. We, of course, know it as our beloved Guinea Pig, but here they are merely livestock. It tasted a lot like rabbit but maybe a bit smoother. My first impression was that it was very oily, but when I ask around about Cuy, they say it is very low in Cholesterol and has only the good kind of fat... whatever that is. Anyway. It was good.

Incidentally, I usually feel very uncomfortable doing ethnic things like watching dance performances that are put on for us because we are tourists. It goes into the category of "culture as a zoo" where one watches cultures as if one were at a zoo rather than just participate in culture. The latter takes a bit more time and can put one deep into the yellow zone. However, when half the town came by the little guest house/ community center to watch the performance I felt a bit better. These kids were doing this because they have been practicing and wanted to show off what they knew rather than dancing for the tourists because it is what the we requested (we didn't request it). It was even requested by Jose, the proprietor of the guest house (it is owned by the community) and the first University trained indigenous doctor in the region, that we could make a donation to the dancers so that they could buy more uniforms and necessities for dancing.

It was refreshing to see an indigenous community that is thriving in modern times but not at the sacrifice of their culture and family. They live in a fantastic area in small family units, grow their own food and share responsibilities as a community. And... the men all wear Man-pris which if anyone knows me, knows I like to wear capris.
This coming weekend, we plan to go up to Cajas which is a national park up at 12,000 feet. I will try to do a long trail run up there, but the elevation may get the best of me.

About the Bikes

[Megan with her good friend Kathleen and her new baby: Samuel] Since this is a motorcycle blog and not a travel blog I should probably write a bit about the bikes. I MISS THEM A LOT. Every time I walk by a tire store or a bike parts store I feel like part of me is missing. I used to always register the last parts store that I saw just in case we would have to go back and visit. Now it doesn't matter.
I miss the freedom that having the bikes gives us. It is hard to get out of town without them.
I miss the celebrity status that bikes sometimes bestow upon us. The bikes are always a great conversation starter with random people and I enjoy that.
I miss riding. It is just so stinking fun. I still feel a rush of excitement every time I sit on Irmtraube and start her up.
This doesn't mean that I'm not grateful for what we do have, which is a healthy Megan and a great experience in Cuenca. Things could be a lot worse. It feels so very un-zenful of me to have attachments to things like the bikes and I try to reposition my thoughts towards what I do have rather than what I don't have, but sometimes...
In 10 days or so, we will be temporarily reunited with the ladies. Megan still can't ride, but perhaps I can go out for a little tour of the area. I will need to find someone to ride with because I don't feel comfortable riding the back roads of Colombia without a Colombian nearby. No need to end the trip with a kidnapping (Mom, that one is for you).

About Megan's Health

This post certainly wouldn't be complete without a little update about Megan's condition. Her hip and knee bruises have all but healed up.
She can now write with her right hand without pain and besides the bruise that is slowly making its way down her chest it might be hard to tell that she even had an accident. We will keep her in the figure eight brace for a full 6 weeks (it has been 3) and keep the movement down to a minimum but when we went and got xrays and chatted with a doctor (for 50 dollars) about it all, he said that it's doing fine.

This x-ray shows where her bones are now.
Thank you everyone for your concern and your comments after the accident. It really means a lot to us to hear from you all and know that you are concerned.

Toilets

This video shows why I titled this post as such. Go look at your toilet and see the difference. Pretty cool, huh?

Walking home with Pero the Plant which we bought off a little guy on the street for 50 cents.

Megan in the garden of the Modern Art Museum.

I got up early one Sunday and walked around the town before the fireworks and taxis got crazy.

Getting some meat from the meat guy.

Our favorite grain- Quinoa- grows like crazy here.

Lambs are incredibly cute.

The day the moto trip ended

2010-05-03T09:39:00.000-07:00

It always starts the same way: "The day was like any other." We woke up in Cali knowing that we would have to drive through some rain, but still wanting to put on 300-400 km towards the Ecuadorian border. We took the usual snapshots of the hostel we were staying in (the Iguana Hostel in Cali is very motorcycle friendly), battled traffic getting out of town and were soon on the Pan American heading south. The trucks and traffic thinned as we approached the end of the mega Cauca river valley and the start of 300 km if windy mountain roads. But with the mountains came rain so we stopped to put on our GORE-TEX gear, made our luggage waterproof and drove into the rain.

An hour or so later, we passed the city of Popayan. Megan asked if we should stop and check out the town and I said that we shouldn't. We needed to put on some miles and although Popayan has a reputation as a nice colonial town, I just wasn't interested in a quick drive by of a city. We pushed south and in Timbio we stopped for a quick snack at a bakery.

Why am I boring you with all the details of the morning? Well it seems appropriate because this would be the last time this year that we would go through this "routine" of motorcycle travel. About 10 minutes out of Timbio everything changed.

It was starting to rain a little harder so we slowed down a bit on the twisties but none-the-less we had to pass trucks so we would accelerate around them. I was out in front feeling a bit like the road was slippery and megan was hanging behind driving cautiously.

When we ride together and I am out front, I periodically scan my mirrors to see where Megan is. Especially when it comes time to pass a truck. This time I looked back, but didn't see Megan anywhere. No big deal, this happens a lot because she might stop to take a photo or perhaps got stuck behind some traffic or whatever. I slowed down to wait for her to catch up. No Megan. I pulled off to wait for her. After about 30 seconds, no Megan. What I did notice was the lack of traffic coming from where I had just been. This wasn't good.

With quite a bit of fear, I turned around and headed back. I thought to myself, "If she is taking a picture, I am going to be so mad." Still no traffic coming. Oh shit! I started to drive a bit faster and started yelling "Fuck, Fuck, Fuck" quite loud and even wailing some. Finally I saw a truck coming my way and the driver stuck his hand out the window to indicate that I was needed behind him. "Shit!" My mind started heading towards worst case scenarios but it also wanted to believe that she was just taking a picture.

I rounded a corner, scanning as best I could for her green jacket when I spotted her sitting in a chair in front of a little farmhouse with people all around her. The bike was on its kickstand, but there were a few parts sitting on the ground next to it. I pulled up, got off the bike with some relief because she was merely sitting in a chair rather than splayed out on the concrete. Her helmet was off and she was fully conscious and alert although a bit frazzled. She was holding her right shoulder but otherwise looked ok. I don't really remember much about what happened then, but she did ask if she had any internal bleeding and if that was going to be a problem. I didn't know, but the fact that she was awake was a good thing and that we really just needed to get her to a hospital as soon as possible. There was a car sitting there and the family stated that there was a hospital back in Popayan, about 30 minutes back. I envisioned putting Megan on the back of my bike, but that seemed out of the question and besides she was already being led to the family's car to be taken to town.

The quick plan that we put together was this. I would put away her bike in the house. I would get some clothes out of her boxes and catch up with the car. I wheeled the bike into the living room, went though her stuff trying to figure out what she might need, got all my stuff together, and with a deep breath I took off.

Then about 2km down the road I realized that I had forgotten the passports. I turned back around to head back to the house. After arriving, I rummaged through our stuff, didn't find them, tore apart my bike, didn't find them and then stopped and thought. Oh yeah! I had given them to Megan to take with her.

It is funny how in these moments, one goes on auto pilot. You just react instead of acting and this can cause problems. I become efficient at some things and inefficient at others (like memory). I suppose this is why training is so important, because you have to trust your instincts and just go with what happens. Don't try to think it through too much. I suppose I was a bit relaxed because after seeing Megan, I knew she was ok (more or less), that she wasn't going to die, and that it somehow would all work out.

So now I was way behind the car and needed to catch up. However, it was raining and from my first aid training, I remembered that the first rule of first aid is to not create another victim. I slowed down, but then became worried that I would never really be able to find Megan. I didn't really know what the car looked like, I hoped that there was only one hospital in town. I started coming up with different plans to get in touch with her. As I was nearing Popayan, I even pulled over to talk with a car that seemed to be flagging me down. I think he just wanted money for gas, but imagine his surprise when this wide eyed white guy pulls up on a motorcycle asking in broken spanish if he had seen my wife and what had happened to her. After figuring out that he knew nothing about my wife, and that he wanted nothing to do with the crazy American, I took off again towards town.

Eventually, I spotted an ambulance and a car parked next it. The people were waving me down so this must be where I needed to be. I stopped, looked into the car and saw Megan lying in the ambulance. I even took this picture because after seeing her I relaxed quite a bit. We still didn't know what was wrong, but her entire right side was in a lot of pain including her hip.

So I followed the Bomberos ambulance (Bomberos is the fire department) to the hospital. I parked my bike in a parking lot, tipped the attendant quite a bit of money to look after it and went into the hospital.

The Hospital

[waiting for xrays] This is where the exciting part of the story ends, and the boring part starts. Although she was in a lot of pain, Megan was for the most part ok. After an initial examination by who we dubbed "the masochist" she was placed in a wheel chair and we waited. And we waited. After 2 hours, we got into another ambulance with a bunch of other people to go get some x-rays. This was a bit frustrating because people didn't really understand how much pain Megan was in and kept trying to lift her into the ambulance. That wasn't going to happen. Finally there was an understanding that perhaps she should be laying down on the stretcher rather than sitting up. Anyway, we made it to the xray room, waited around some more and finally got pictures taken. It was at this point that we realized that she had never been immobilized for her spine or checked out to see if it was damaged. I did my spinal checks from my training as a Wilderness First Responder 10 years ago and she seemed to pass, but we requested x rays of her cervical area just in case.

At this point in the story, things got cool. As we were wheeling Megan back to the ambulance on the stretcher, a white guy and a Colombian guy speaking perfect English asked if Megan was Karen. We said "no" but then the white guy asked if we were from Seattle. This stopped me dead in my tracks (while Megan continued to be wheeled out the door). After a short conversation, it became known that these two were from the Fire Department, that Bill was in Popayan doing a training and that he had heard that there was a woman from Seattle who the Bomberos had worked with. I got a card and a "if there is anything I can do to help, you let me know." I then ran out to the ambulance to find a very scared Megan wondering where the hell I had been.

We returned to the hospital where we had first been admitted, moved Megan into a wheel chair and waited some more. At this point, it was around 7:30 (we had been in the hospital since 2 or 3) and we were told that we were waiting for a specialist to read the xrays and to figure out what to do. There was a shift change at 9, and at 9:30 we were told the specialist wasn't going to be able to see us (or so we thought- everything was in Spanish). Then at 9 when we were hemming and hawing about what to do the specialist saw us. He looked at the x-rays, determined that there was nothing wrong with her hip, but that her clavicle was fractured. There wasn't much he could do about it except prescribe one of those figure 8 things but that we wouldn't be able to get one that night. And that was it.

I wheeled Megan out, with the plan of getting a taxi to take her to a hostel and I would follow the taxi on my bike.

The Bomberos

As we left the ward and went to the place where we pay, there was a posse of Bomberos waiting for us. They said something magical to the desk because we didn't pay a penny. They put Megan into their ambulance and told me to follow them to the fire station where we would work everything out.

After arriving at the station, they said that we would go out that night to get Megan's motorcycle because it wasn't parked in the safest of places (apparently there is still some action in these parts). So at 11:30 we piled into a firetruck (not megan… she was taken to a nearby hotel), woke up the family and I drove the bike back with a firetruck, lights on, right behind me. We left the bikes at the station, I walked to the hotel and after a really long day we laid down and went to sleep.

What really happened

As far as we can piece together from the accident, Megan was riding in the rain. In Colombia, they paint these enormous yellow and white stripes on the road to mark a school zone. Megan hit one of these painted sections, slid a bit, and when she hit the pavement on the other side, her bike high sided. This is when the bike flips back after regaining traction. She wasn't going that fast, but things just came together to cause this to happen. She hit the pavement (still holding on to the bike- the worst thing is to go free of the bike) and her and Gigi (the name of her bike) tumbled once before sliding off the road onto the front door of a family. Fortunately, the woman of this family is a nurse and immediately helped Megan out. This is the same family that then drove Megan to Popayan and called the Bomberos along the way. This is also the same family that I came back and woke up at midnight to get the bike.

I think what really saved megan was the fact the boxes on the back (the right one crushed a bit) kept the bike off of Megan. There is remarkabley little damage to the bike. The front fender broke off (it is only plastic) and the mirror snapped off, but beyond some grinding down for the road, the bike seems fine. Her Arai helmet worked incredibly well. You can see where it hit the pavement, but her head is perfectly fine. The GORE-TEX gear ground up a bit on the pavement, but not actually that much. The materials that Arcteryx uses are incredibly strong given the bashing and sliding that occurred. The riding gear and gloves seemed to do what they are supposed to do. She has no skin abrasions, and the fact that her hip isn't broken probably has a lot to do with the shock absorption of the pants.

I don't really know what to say as far as lessons learned, but the main one is: be really fucking careful in the rain. Anything can cause a slip and consequently a high side. Perhaps the secondary lesson is to befriend the fire department. Fire fighters the world over are an amazing group of people.

The New Plan

The next morning, we finally went out and ate some food (the first time in 24 hours), then walked over to the fire station to look into a new plan. We were greeted like heros. Every person in the station (there are 35 employees and 105 volunteers) came up and asked how we were. The second in command (Henry) had already thought out a plan for us and was getting ready to initiate it. Henry and I would drive the bikes up to his house where they would be safe. In 20 days time, he was going north to Bogota and would take Megan's bike (Gigi) up to Manizales, about 400 km north. We would follow on Irmtraube. The goal was to get the bikes to our friends house, Jairo and Diana (see previous post), where we could leave them for 6 months before returning to Colombia next January to continue the trip. During that 20 day window, we would go down to Cuenca, Ecuador to visit Megan's super good college friend.

Henry is this amazing individual. He works what seems to be all hours at the fire department and at the hospital. He has a wife and an extremely adorable 11 year old girl who now are our extended family in Popayan. A term he uses a lot, and which we have heard many times in Colombia is, our house is your house. We have since gone out for meals with them, hung out at their house and made to feel very much at home. During one such visit, the idea came up to just leave our bikes in the little space behind his house where they would be safe and sound for the next 6 months. This way we wouldn't have transport them back and when we come back in January we would already be near the Ecuadorian border rather than way back up north by Medellin.

So that is the new plan. We are going to Ecuador for 2-3 weeks. The bikes will live at his house (or at the mechanics since Henry is taking them to the mechanic for a little work). We will come back near the end of May, hang out in Popayan for a while longer and then fly home early June to start working a little early.

Henry even has a cousin who works at DIAN (the office for importing vehicles and such) who will extend Gigi and Irmtraube's papers until January.

How lucky are we.

I just want to reiterate again how amazing the Popayan Bomberos have been. We have hung out there quite a bit and every time made to feel extremely comfortable. We chit chat for hours with the various people there, they go out of their way to make us feel good, and then they are off on a call. Pretty amazing.

So that is it. Although this is a tragedy for us, Megan is pretty stinking lucky that she has only broken her right collarbone. But because of this, we have met amazing people and improved our spanish leaps and bounds.

[on the way to Ecuador] As a wise friend once told me, when stuff like this happens, you just have to take the new path and go after it with gusto. Sure it sucks that we can't ride the ladies anymore, but now we will have new adventures. Besides, the ladies will be there next year when we get back.

a little video of following the ambulance

2010-05-03T07:38:00.000-07:00

I found this little video I made of me following the ambulance to the hospital. Nothing much, but it give an idea.