I had a fight today. It wasn’t a bad one, one or two small bruises nothing more. Strange that it should happen just as I arrived at the end, but it was then that Alonso my companion decided to change into “Chancho man”, roughly translating as Pig man. I had a feeling this might happen, [...]

Six wands of steely sullen sun
With the chilly fog and grassy spines of ice they fight
To free my frozen chain, and let my wheels run
And release Achilles from his frosty carapace, take flight
Though ‘flight’is not perhaps a word to loan to me
Suggesting freedom, soaring, gliding fancy free
Instead we crunch and grate on shards of shattered [...]

The world south of Conception is a traction engine museum. Every self respecting village has at least one of these iron work horses rusting somewhere near the deserted plaza. These once mighty hulks - now slowly sinking into the winter mud under the weight of their iron boilers - mark the beginning of an era [...]

“The atmospheric conditions have been very unfavourable lately……….It has been raining,” explained Owl.
“Yes,” said Christopher Robin. “It has.”
“The flood-level has reached an unprecedented height.”
“The who?”
“There’s a lot of water about” explained Owl……”however, the prospects are rapidly becoming more favourable. At any moment….” At that exact moment, a logging truck barrelled into the tree in which [...]

I could make out the road ahead, dimly lit by the occasional lamp post and the spreading smudge of dark blue on the horizon. Dawn was heavy in the air, the salty moisture damping the sound of the lazy breakers chastising the rocks below me. The white line ahead disappeared over small bluffs, and no [...]

White, brown, yellow, red, brown, blue. There, I’ve done it, I’ve summed up the entirity of the last month. I hope you enjoyed my account.
I’ll explain. The white? The Salar de Uyuni, the biggest salt flat in the world in which I was lucky enough to have the company of my good friend and long [...]

In the time it had taken me to dine on some rehydrated black potatoes and a generously boiled piece of mutton, what had seemed to be a pleasant gathering in the community’s tiny plaza had transformed, swollen across the highway into an animated road block of weathered faces nodding or shouting in time with a [...]

Along the wide open Pampas of southern Peru, the horizon is a distant line, sometimes snow capped, sometimes green, but always fresh, with at least a slight cool wind reminding you that you’re not all that much lower than the summit of Mont Blanc, or Mount Rainier. The spikey grass provides a jagged comouflage for [...]

I have cycled myself slowly into a different place. No less worldly, no less wise, but different.
When I say different, I don´t mean the skies or the texture of sand in the desert, these physical things change every single metre. I mean the way the people think, and the way that people question me about [...]

I left Cuenca in a comfortable and purile bubble of English humour and practical jokes, protecting me from the scarring feeling of leaving good friends and a place that had become my home for nearly two months. I rolled out of this beautiful city part of an amusing flotilla: a tandem, with of course me [...]