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, so under my waterporoofs I was wearing the Spiderman suit I had been given by a companion in Bolivia. Spiderman won of course, and wondered off to stare reflectively at Bahia Lapataia, where the road south ends on the American continent.

I am at the end of this journey. I’ve finished. I’m done with this bike ride…..whichever way I say it it sounds strange. I have thought for many many hours about these final moments, arriving in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego (given the name due to the cooking fires seen burning on the beaches by Magellan and his crew). I thought about filming different conclusions, about jumping with joy, perhaps finding a local policeman or granny to ride with me for a few minutes. As it was, Alonso and I arrived tired, very wet and half numb with cold after one hundred and ten kilometres of heavy snow and wind, whipping the crystals painfully into my eyes as I tried to pick a line with the hardest snowpack free of heavy goods vehicles. But now we’ve arrived, the weather no longer matters, and much to my companion’s relief, slave driver Dom’s alarm no longer sounds in the frigid dawn to take advantage of what little daylight exists in these latitudes.

But that is now, A little over a week ago I was in Chile, waiting for a gap in the snow storms to cross the stormy Magellan Straits and enter Tierra del Fuego, a land of pampas, of uninterrupted wind and Gauchos (cowboys) that treat you like family, because there ain’t nobody else! Without Gauchos like Ivan, my tired body and failing mind would not have weathered the storms we have ridden through…….

* * *

Ivan’s horse skeetered sideways, still thirty feet away in the pampas but nervous of Achilles and his cargo. There was no estancia for miles, Ivan said, and the large homestead in the distance we could see had an unfriendly owner who, apparently wouldn’t show us hospitality. But, Ivan, smiling, invited us to follow him to his small house over a rise behind near the icy track, from where we could hear his dogs, who had sniffed us on the sharp Patagonian breeze.

We fought our way against the building headwind back the way we had come, following his horse to a small gate and over frozen ground to a tiny, sturdy hut. Our new home.

Three steaming plates of stew were placed infront of us, cramped around his table and all but filling his one room house. No sooner had I cleaned my plate than a rack of patagonian sheep was produced and Ivan began cutting and sawing the shell of meat into managable chunks. We would eat well tonight…

Ivan was telling white lies. He admitted it himself a few hours later. There were two estancias only kilometres away, but the truth was he wanted the company. It was thanks to those white lies, that I had one of the nicest meals I have ever tasted while learning little snippets of the life that Ivan leads, his deeply lined, kind, weathered face smiling shyly at us as the cold wrapped its crusty hand over his metal hut, crystalline fingers of ice spreading across the tiny window panes. Once our sleeping bags were prepared, there was no floor space left. Ivan tripped over me during the night when stepping out for a piss, and Alonso kicked me in the head by accident. It didn´t matter though, we were all happy to be there!

In fact, thanks to people like Ivan, since entering the Land of Fire I have not had to get my tent out once, and hardly my stove. Border Police, Gauchos and firemen have been our Guardian Angels and ensured that I didn’t lose a single gram of what little fat I have left to protect me from the humid cold winter here.

* * *

It was my penultimate day on the road. Alonso was struggling, not accustomed to lugging his hundred kilo frame around on a bicycle, and it was raining, a cold, sleety rain that seemed to burn a hole in your skin and freeze you from the inside out. So it was with weary hope that we entered the village of Tolhuin, heading directly for the fire station over the rutted ice. None of us expected what was to come.

Hugo, the Fire Chief slowly rolled open the huge heavy metal door and beckoned us in out of the snow. Achilles and Joselyns borrowed bike that had come to be known as Barbie joined thirteen other vehicles in the huge station. Five minutes later we were sipping Mate and watching the Simpsons with a handful of volunteers that treated the station like a second home. Very shortly after we had thawed out, smells began to eminate from the far side of the large living area. Hugo was preparing dinner, three huge pots of ´Puchero´, Patagonian lamb and steaming vegetables which we devoured, sitting at a huge table with the firefighters and their families, Alonso and I sharing a satisfied glance after seconds and thirds of this delicious food.

That was before one of the friendly, giggling firemen mentioned something about a “fireman’s baptism”……thoughts of rugby team initiation ceremonies galloped worryingly through my mind as I was told to don an old firemans jacket and boots, the bunch of men seemingly licking their lips with glee. “Do you want to go voluntarily or do we have to force you….I suggest voluntarily” the biggerst of them said, smiling down at me. I marched outside obediently while the firemen sniggered and some of their familys trailed closely behind, the children whooping with excitement. A particularly deep patch of snow was found to dump me in, my jacket, face, boots and mouth filled quickly with wet snow by a scrum of bomberos. And so I was babtised, Bombero style. Alonso was caught hiding in the warehouse and given the same treatment, as was Joselyn. Everyone is equal in this world.

Dry again shortly afterwards, we were congratulated by all members of the station and presented with a key to a lovely apartment in which to sleep. My last night on this journey was also one of the most comfortable, ending far too soon as we trudged out in the dawn light again, snow and rain specking our clothes before we had even started.

The painful memories of the last day cycling are now fading fast, as the software in my brain files those sensations, or sends the most painful of them to the shredder. In this way, the discomfort, misery and anger is skillfully forgotten, allowing me to start dreaming of other adventures that will doubtless be equally painful….

I´ve finished. Theres no more land left.

Did I succeed? I suppose so, geographically speaking, but the importance of that has slowly receded as I have been cycling south. I began this journey, hungry to prove that I could do it, that I was strong enough to survive, full of machismo usually connected to extreme sports. Slowly, ever so slowly though, my priorities changed and I learnt the real worth of this journey. Company. Sharing. Faith in those around you wherever you are, despite the largely negative scare stories that plague the world. Thanks to the spare seat on Achilles, I was able to learn a little more than I might have done otherwise. I could really physically share my journey with people, many people that would never in a million years have dreamed of travelling on a bicycle. Without knowing it at the time, setting out on the 16th June 2006 on Achilles the tandem bicycle, I was presenting myself with the opportunity to inspire, surely the best gift one can recieve. Did I make use of it? Did I make someone laugh or even smile? Did I plant a dream in the mind of a child or old man? I sincerely hope so.

The journey doesn’t stop here, it just changes. It will never stop. Thank you for accompanying me on this part of my trajectory. Without you, it wouldn’t have been half as special.

Dominic Gill, Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina

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 earth
While the weather Gods look on and fall about in mirth

When all but glimmers of my hope is lost
The sun`s steely wands shine fierce, to rid the earth of cold
Water girgles in hidden passages of frost
And birdsong grows with color bright and bold

Achilles shakes off his frigid coat of winter
The ice on which we ride begins to squelch not splinter
But as quickly as he changes clothes, shaking off the brittle crud
He`s entombed a new, but this time it is mud…

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 of intensive forestry in central southern Chile, an era that is ongoing, but now dominated by ugly tractors, chainsaws and the unnerving logging trucks with their “now you see me, now you don’t” second trailers.

Taking advantage of a brief weather window in perhaps the wettest Autumn on record (concerned about the new stomach I seemed to be growing on account of an extended period of incredible hospitality), Fernando (my new companion and the first peace loving rata to ride Achilles) and I made tracks into the depths of the dense plantations, and camped that night in a rare patch of beautiful native woodland, our tarpaulin strung between the fly wheels of a slowly rotting traction engine, our carpet a mosaic of brown and yellow leaves. I woke the next morning to the drone of logging trucks and the annoying wine of chainsaws cutting down the mature (at only fifteen years old) pine plantations around us. However, soon the trees swallowed the noise and left us in relative silence as we traveled into the heart of the Mapuche region, the only recognized indigenous region left in Chile. As Achilles rolled on, my tattered and faded Union Jack now fluttered weakly beneath the colorful Mapuche flag which flew for a few short days as I traveled through the remains of their land.

I had chosen once again, not to take the panamerican highway south, and hence ended up on the coast, stormy skies sending bands of well ordered frothing waves spilling onto the dark sand. In the small depressed fishing village of Tirua, the asphalt disappeared into puddles, giving way to dirt “ripio” tracks that took me up and down short steep hills, sometimes hedged in by immature plantations and other times following a tranquil lakeshore, occasionally passing a Ruca, the beautiful traditional thatch dwellings of the Mapuche people.

I was welcomed into this region not by a quaint touristy sign notifying me that this was the home of the “Indians”, but by some careless graffiti sprayed on the side of a small bus shelter (some of which provided me with draughty sleeping quarters!). “Indians, f*ck off and die” it read in badly spelt Spanish with a swastika scrawled underneath. Indeed, there seem to be a lot of misguided youth in Chile that use this sign as a license to hate whatever they want, and in this case fairly ironically at least a fraction of the blood of their ancestors.

My heart sank over the next few days as I began to realize I was simply looking at the same old story repeated all over this continent, “How the Indians lost their will to live” it might be called in a book of fairy tails. And while, even today, kids can be heard laughing at Mapuche names read out in their class register, well meaning white folk urge me to take care in these parts, for there are “Mapuuuuche” here (try and imagine that word being uttered in a fear struck voice such as that in Monty Python’s Killer Rabbit episode).

Needless to say, only a day after hearing these words of warning (Achilles having destroyed the knees of Fernando who subsequently returned to Conception), I found my self in freezing weather lodged in the cosy kitchen of a beautiful Mapuche family gobbling Cochayuyu (a soup of seeweed and native condiments) and sipping on a bottle of moonshine filled with “chupones”, sugary flowers that had been left to flavor this spirit for the last year. The family talked in their native tongue,mapudungun, of which the majority of Chileans have never heard.

I can’t help but shed a sad smile when I think about how we (Europeans) have managed, in what now seem to be the America’s most developed countries, to ostracize the culture, heritage and true historical founders of these regions. Try it one day, ask a Mapuche if he or she feels Chilean, or an Apache if they feel American …..I’m betting that they will think for a while before replying.

While most tourists will know the region surrounding Osorno for its beautiful volcanoes and lakes, for me it was the start of what I have coined “the Pastor’s Passage”, and before you ask, it has absolutely nothing to do with religious proctology. Thanks to a kindly acquaintance back in Blighty, I had a slowly growing string of Methodist Pastors with which I was invited to stay at intervals along my journey into southern Chile (I am in fact writing this on a lap top resting in Coyhaique at the family home of Pastor number four, Esmenar, who with a name like that surely starred in Harry Potter!). The first of these families was arguably headed up by the authoritative two year old Lucas who controlled his grandfather, Pastor Miguel, and the rest of the family with his winning smile and requests to play pittotepotte….to you and me, football.

Here, like the majority of the houses in the south, life revolves around their cosy wood stoves, from where, to my delight, fresh bread is regularly produced. While customs change edging under the feet of the Mount Fuji-like Volcan Osorno, south onto the legendary island of Chiloe, the fresh bread keeps on coming!

It was, in fact in Chiloe, where I discovered the waterproof properties of technical rain gear after two years of constant use is left wanting. While riding through a squall on this picturesque little island, I found that when rain was blown horizontally at more than twenty-seven kmph, the material acts as an ingenious kind of one-way colander, and hence, incredibly, water enters but doesn’t ever leave (until you empty it from your sleeves). Scientists interested in selectively permeable membranes take note; I am willing to loan my waterproofs for research purposes. It was because of my failing equipm that I was especially grateful for the hospitality of Pastor Ruben and Pastor Jaime, rescuing me from various moist days, sheltering in fisherman’s shacks or damp cows fields.

All the while for the last nearly two months, the volcano Futaleufú has been smoldering threateningly and spilling ash onto the surrounding villages. Subsuquently, the area has been sealed off and hence, the caraterra Austral effectively all beit temporarily severed. So, with little choice I embarked only a few days ago on a thirty five hour ferry journey through the channels and islands south of Chaiten, to arrive at Puerto Aisen in a different chilly world of snow, ice and stunning mountains. The journey by sea was fascinating and planted yet more plans for adventures in my already overloaded brain.

As the bags of bivalves stacked on the deck next to Achilles gurgled, hissed and bubbled (giving any decent foley artist a run for their money), I was left with time to think. Time to think about two years and two days on the road. About the people I have met and then cycled away from, and the knowledge I have gained and that I hope I will retain for the rest of my life. I feel full of experiences but not thoroughly fulfilled….but does one ever? I enter what will be roughly the last month of this cold journey keen to finish, but still frightened and unsure of whats next…..I don´t think real life is this easy!!

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” Robert Lewis Stevenson

“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 Christopher Robin and Owl were conversing and turned the hundred acre wood into the scene of a terrible accident, the first to involve a Chilean truck driver, a small English story time hero and a talking Owl.

This is perhaps what A.A. Milne might have written if he had been travelling in and around Conception while writing “The House at Pooh Corner”.

Inundation. I love that word, or hate it, I`m not sure which. I’ve seen it on the news a lot recently here in Chile. We don’t use it a lot in english, I’m not sure why, it sounds great, almost like something you should be proud of. For greater clarity, I thought I might include the definition:

inundación (esp.) / Inundation (eng.); the rising of a body of water and its overflowing onto normally dry land

Now water hasn’t proved a problem in my journey up until now, it simply means I get wet and have to dry stuff when my skin becomes white and wrinkled. But here, in Conception, I have ground to a halt due to a potent mixture of wind, rain, lack of hard shoulder and a vehicle I have learned to respect and avoid…..the logging truck, with its playful and unpredictable second trailer.

On the lovely dry “route of the Conquistadors” from Santiago to Conception, a number of these vehicles wooshed past, the pines flanking the road bowing lightly in their turbulence. First one feels the barage of air shunted ahead by the flat fronted cab, then the seemingly airless void as both trailers blurr past your left cheek. And then, sucking at the large surface area of Achilles and his two pasengers, the magnetic force of the trailers pull you into the road for an instant, and then they’re gone, the second trailer fish tailing well over the white line in a happy go lucky salute.

The road south has lost its hard shoulder and appears to have been specially engineered to collect huge volumes of rainwater, 60kph winds ensuring that the driver can never be sure where the air ends and the water begins. Thanks, but I think I’ll wait until tomorrow to tackle this section…..I’ve been saying that for a week, and been on the verge of leaving twice, but for the first time, all weather forecasts don’t have anything negative to say about tomorrow!

However staying in one place has almost never been so comfortable. I left Santiago with Horacio, who’d decided to give making beautiful ceramic masks and sculptures a rest for a week and sample a life on the road. We quickly tired of Ruta 5, the main north south highway here in Chile, and hung a left into the rolling hills and forests near San Javier, one of the principle forestry areas in chile. Memories of Oregon and Northern California came flooding back as we cycled happily through the fresh still air of autumn, pines, Eucalypts and native oaks colouring the folded hills with greens, yellows and rusty browns.

One day we cycled through the vineyards, all possible camping spots blocked by tall expensive gates hiding car ports and swimming pools. At the bottom of a nearby hill covered with pines, we found a track winding away into the trees. It looked promising but after 300 yards a house emerged, a large old house. Horacio and I parked the bike and stood some distance away shouting “Hooolllaaa, is anybody there??” while trying to smile politely at the small band of dogs eyeing us suspiciously.

Half an hour later, after Claudia had appeared tentatively in her slippers, and after being told on absolutely no account could we camp here, we were sitting in the classical high ceilinged kitchen warmed by a large wood burning stove, drinking tea and eating bread and avocado. The Astaburuaga family had ushered us into their incredible home, awash with gleaming wooden floors and antiques that would make the average royal residence seem bland and ordinary. Never on this journey had I slept in such classical luxury, yet another small wood stove at the foot of my bed, crackling soothingly in the otherwise silent house, generations of books sitting dormant in the library, and polished leather horse saddles hanging like figureheads on the walls in the darkness.

The next night Horacio and I were camped outside a quiet petrol station, back to normal again, the palacial quarters of the night before becoming a distant dream the physical remains of which was a bottle of the family’s fine wine, which we sipped out of plastic mugs while cooking pasta in the damp air.

Only twelve hours later we were being treated like royalty once more, but this time in the confines of the Busto family home, two sons and their elderly father building an extension to their squat adobe house, set apart from any other in a large stand of pine trees. The dry smooth mud walls radiated heat from the stove top crammed with simmering stews and boiling potatoes, while we chatted and drank generous servings of pipeno (home made wine) with the men, as interested in our journey as we were in their simple but very complete lives. Rather than expensive antiques, the Bustos had three beautiful strings of red chillies hanging to dry above the cooker.

I have been in Conception for about two weeks, and have not passed a second of that period alone or wanting in any way. From the minute Horacio and I arrived, we were escorted into town by the students of DUOC, the technical college here in Conception that have taken it upon themselves to give me hospitality I will never be likely to forget. Cordon bleu cuisine in the gastronomy department, state of the art edit suites to play with my videos, lecture theatres, plentiful audiences and press calls to publicise my voyage, and most importantly, near family and friends with which to spend my time with.

I leave Conception with a heavy heart, my motivation to continue dwindling and my powerful roots gathering strength. Weather prospects are not good, and most normal cyclists have stopped for the season, waiting until patagonian summer raises its pretty head. If I wait until then however, like a stubborn wisdom tooth, I will be nearly impossible to remove from my comfortable home here.

From Conception I travel south past the poorest city in Chile, Lota, where a disused cavernous coal mine sits surrounded by the depression of sooty poverty, the last blackened barrier before the true south of Chile, where the now modest population of Mapuche people can still be found.

The wind and rain I can hear battering the window has about eight hours to do what it wants, then I will politely ask it to bugger off, before I roll on down with a Chilean Rastafarian who won’t so much as touch my much loved staple foodstuff, tuna.

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 doubt down into a series of bays and up the other side, only interrupted by splodges of white, hazard areas demarcated by the sea birds sitting on the lamp posts directly above them. I steered a drunken line avoiding these strong smelling drop zones, knowing only too well that my unusual machine would provide welcome early morning relief for the sleepy guillemots.

I had reached the coast, and now, all that remained was to cycle south along it, enjoying the rolling breakers, fresh sea breeze and cool water, in complete contrast with what I had just arrived from. Green became common, sand became a good thing, and the sun was now a much loved companion, fighting with the wet, frigid sea mist, which by eight in the morning executed an orderly, silent retreat into the depths of small valleys and hollows until it disappeared altogether, allowing my stiff fingers and cheeks to defrost in the suns warm rays.

The road still occasional shot straight as an arrow inland before I was in any danger of becoming accustomed to life on the sea, and I would find myself camped in an arid brown wilderness once again. The gaps between the beach became shorter however, until I was permanently within sight of the sparkling water, usually some way beneath me.

Nearing La Serena – a popular place in the summer and the point on the coast that marked the start of the wealthy second home paradise of those that lived in the city – after a long and tiring day of short, steep rollers I pulled off the road in the late afternoon high above the coast on a beautiful scrubby headland dotted with giant boulders, the occasional horse or donkey grazing at their bases. I cycled down a sandy track excited at the prospect of camping in the middle of this rock garden, a climbers playground, and soon found the largest most sheltering stone and parked Achilles at its foot.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve felt disappointment or anger on this journey, but it is the most recent. Around me, in every direction, were the remains of picnics, bathroom fittings, children’s toys, even floral arrangements presumably from funerals or cemeteries……..garbage, broken, ripped and ugly in every fissure and bush. Its something I became more accustomed to in Bolivia and Peru, countries that have not yet solidified an infrastructure for collection and processing of waste. But Chile is very much a first world country in so many respects, making my fading memories of England seem old fashioned and outdated. But this is different. Chile has garbage trucks, its got recycling, I can sometimes see wind turbines on the horizon, or houses with entirely solar roofs. So why do a seemingly large number of people feel the need to travel some distance from their home to a beautiful comparatively untouched area and dump their rubbish? Is it that they failed to notice the garbage bins and the large yellow trucks curb crawling and accepting even the smallest offering of waste in their home towns??

Instead of climbing, I built a fire in one of the existing fire scars and set about burning about 20kgs of rubbish. It was like trying to sweep the nearby beaches clean of sand armed with a toothbrush, but by the time the sun and dipped below a line of advancing sea clag, I had at least created a space in which to live and cook, free of bleached bottles rocking in the breeze, or used paper plates. I slept that night in the dank air wondering whether we can, as a species, evolve out of behaviour like this. I came to the conclusion in bouts of semi consciousness, that if we follow capitalism through to its logical conclusion, we won’t have to worry too much about dropping our chocolate wrappers in the street, because we’ll all be dead!

The long straight roads of northern Chile had allowed me to progress quickly as planned, and with the quality and availability of bread, butter and chocolate milk stepping up as soon as I crossed the Chilean border, I even managed to gain a little weight. Even as I write this, my body is processing another litre of chocolate milk and I’m tipping the scales at nearly eighty kilos. But the Atacama starved me of one vital ingredient…..company. So, it was with some excitement that I rolled into La Serena, knowing that Phillipa, an Achilles veteran (having rode with me twice already in Peru), was waiting to lap up another painful journey on my bicycle. As she waved me down and crossed the street to greet me, I registered a fleeting look of happiness mixed with a desperate confusion, the pain of her last bike ride with me resurfacing in her cerebellum doubtless causing involuntary spasms in her seat bones…..

Despite this, we journeyed nearly 160 kilometres together before, in the shelter of a small and deserted fishing harbour one morning as the sun shed its first light ont he water, she announced that she had been broken by Achilles once more. An hour later, I said goodbye to Pippa for the last time on my journey, as she tried in vein to get comfortable in her window seat ont he local bus. She had, however, provided me with much need company during the two days she rode with me and rid me of my loneliness. I had no idea until the first night sleeping on the beach with Phillipa how unaccustomed I was to company, but at 2am in the morning, waking rom a deep sleep, I found out.

I stirred, lulled into semi consciousness by the breaking waves on the dark shining sand. There was however, another noise, closer than the waves. I lifted my head and looked out of the open vestibule. There, a black dog was licking the dirty sides of my new pot, a much valued addition to my cooking set due to the fact it could easily accommodate enough pasta for two hungry cyclists.

Once I registered that my prized pot was in some kind of danger, I let out a flustered bellow followed by a small flurry of swearing, as the dog, pot minus lid gripped firmly in its jaws, disappeared, swallowed up by the darkness as it made its escape. A second or two later, still trying to wake up and orientate myself, something stirred next to me in my tent. SH¡T!! I thought, Theres another thieving k9, but this ones robbing my body heat!! Completely disoriented and confused now, I swiped at the moving object and let out a much less coherent and slightly scared “blaaaaugh!” noise. This hole episode flashed past in seconds. It took my brain another moment to register the face that had appeared at one end of what was in fact not a mutt, but a sleeping bag. Phillipa asked why I’d hit here. Perhaps misguidedly, I tried to explain while my heart raced that it was because I thought she was a dog……

The pot was recovered a kilometre further down the beach the following morning, found next to a pile of broken beer bottles. Phillipa sustained no lasting damage from my beating and has chosen not to press charges. She will however, not be riding Achilles again.

Well before I reached Santiago, in fact in the beautiful, wealthy but unfriendly Zapallar, I was embraced by what was to be weeks of friendship, extending its warm hand from Chiles capital city. As I was picking bits of my cheese and avocado sandwich out of the sandy grass next to a tent full of the type of surfers I love to hate, Omar, Mauricio, Christian and Pamela arrived on shiny bicycles and whisked me away to a bike shop – Silva Bikes that was to be my salvation – and a rented house with abed ready and waiting for me! It was with this happy bunch that I journeyed to Santiago, Mauricio (also slightly worryingly known as Kamikaze) riding with me up the last two hills and respective tunnels before the city.

From that moment up until now, I have not been short of company, while resting up, surrounded by cycling enthusiasts that paid regular visits to my home, in the Rodriguez house behind the local Methodist church, inviting me to bbqs or shepherding me around interviews with the local news. This happy group of unpretentious peddlers resembled an adult version of the Goonies, each with a humorous idiosyncrasy that sets them apart from the others, as they roll around promoting cycling as a mode of transport. I on the other hand, have chosen to ride on the metro, resting my legs and Achilles for the last stretch of my journey south, and wondering the streets on foot watching, listening, learning…. Leaving this place with be difficult after two weeks of fun and what seemed like family life. But I will leave tomorrow, I will head south into the heart of a Patagonian winter……….what an idiot! I can’t stop now though, I’m getting close….

“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning….”
Winston Churchill

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 time companion Adam, sporting two very fine pairs of big, one dollar sunglasses to protect him from the harsh rays reflected off the sharp salt crystals of the salar. I had dreamed of arriving at this place since the beginning of my journey nearly two years ago, a harsh white expanse where cyclists were rumoured to have been blinded by the glare and found by the Bolivian army cycling in three kilometre circles, blind and helpless, with the salt literally absorbing the water from their bodies. So it was with some anxiety that we set forth, wading across the shallows on the edge of the salar, cuboid crystals of halite digging into our softening feet, causing us to walk like cartoon charcters attempting to creep up on their enemies. All the while, landcruisers packed with tourists drove by through the mirror like water, snapping photos of these strange people manhandling a large bicycle and trailer, saving Achilles from a salty, corrosive death.

We passed masked men living a life on the salt, mining this edible mineral and piling it in small pyramids to dry in the high altitude sun, and as we ventured further from “land” in this dry lake, the salt got firmer, the tire tracks of the landcruisers slowly dissappearing into nothing as the crystalline polygons took over, catching the sun as it sunk lower in the sky. When it eventually dipped below the horizon, and a opressive heat was replaced by a void of cold, the mountains on one side and the islands on the others were distant, and only visible in the flashes of silent and picturesque lightning that surrounded us. It was as if we had been placed , with our tent and a bicycle, in a snow dome that had been left unshaken for a while, to view the storms outside, silent and distant from our eerily quiet salty home. The following day we reached the island, one of many, that is occupied by troops of cacti, silently but aggressively guarding this haven of tourists. Already, after only twenty four hours in this landscape our bodies were feeling cracked and dry, and beaching our craft on the island provided some relief from the suns rays, now sinking into the dark rock beneath our feet. Once Adam and I had made the return journey, back the way we had come and we had rehydrated our tired bodies, I was again left on my own to venture into the deserts of Southern Bolivia. I was alone by choice, there being no shortage of tourists in the little town of Uyuni that were keen to hop on the back, however I feared for the rear wheel of Achilles, for if the roads were as bad as rumoured, the wheel would be taking perhaps too much of a battering with two riders.

The Yellows, Browns and Reds?

And so it was that I ventured forth into the region of Lipez, down into the very bottom corner of Bolivia, hardly populated and certainly not paved with anything other than sand. Over that week, the sand clawed at my tires, leaving me regularly ground to a halt in a sand trap and struggling to push my charge out the other side. I sound ungrateful, I suppose I should be thankful that there was a road at all. In fact, there was nearly always a choice of surfaces, washboards or deep sand. I usually tried to ride a delicate line between the two, and hoped that if I hit more deep sand I would be travelling sufficiently fast to barrel through to the otherside, skidding through the powdery trenches without steerage. But, you know what? It didn’t matter. I may occassionally have cursed the wind or the cold or the sand, but usually I rode transfixed on my surroundings. Mountains of sand and rocks, a myriad of different colours rose up on either side. Tiny streams were fringed with such intense greens they looked fake against a backdrop of tangerine skies and rust coloured rocks. A nearly blood red lake was home to the deep pinks of flamingos dipping gracefully away from me as I edged quietly closer to the edge of Laguna Colorada to look at these strange creatures.

At the end of one long day, gales having tried to beat me back the way I had come, snow was beginning to come down in flecks, stinging my face in the cold wind as I reached a hieght of five thousand two hundred metres. I topped out on my last draining hill, confused by a number of options in the sandy earth in front of me. Ruts led off in every direction and I desperately needed to shelter from the encroaching weather, made all the harsher by the altitude. I decided on one way and cycled off as quickly as dubious traction would allow over the lip of the hill. Half a minute later, I was looking over a valley seemingly left behind from the cretaceous, only lacking a few triceratops rooting for truffles. I camped that night at over five thousand metres, with steaming sulpherous geysers surrounding me. But, while bubbling ominously and seemingly creeping toward my tent, they did not stave off a temperature of minus twenty degrees celcius in the chilly dusty moonscape outside the two thin nylon walls of my trusty tent. I was happy to be experiencing these incredible places, but my body was wearing down, losing weight little by little with every day I survived off the rations in my bag. It had been a week now since buying fresh food, and I was craving something juicy. I knew however, that at a push I could survive for at least another week, since I had over half a bottle of what I now call “life blood”, or in your language, mayonnaise, which mixed with curry powder has kept me content for quite some time.

The next day was a day of many different worlds. A day of mountains and sunsets, of freezing cold and desert heat. a day of poverty and isolation coupled with monied tranquility. It was this day that took me one hundred and eighteen kilometres down a mostly bad gravel track into the penultimate country in my journey, Chile. I passed through an area known as Dali’s desert, and it really seemed that way. Melting clocks and elephants with huge obelisks on their backs had been cleared off the set and replaced by a strange double bicycle and sweaty white man. Huge jet black boulders in a sea of yellow sand with mountains etched from dust, but dust of a million different colours, like a glass rolling pin I once saw in my childhood with all the different sands of the Isle of Wyte layered on top of each other. And then came the border, of sorts….

This grand frontier consisted of one small hut, two cold policemen, a broken sign welcoming me to Chile, and sand, lots of it. But how the world quickly changed around me five hundred metres inside Chile. On the last mountain pass before the desert plains, with my first Chilean sunset warming my face and making the land around me glow, I touched down on tarmac. I say I touched down, it felt more like floating, so long had it been since I’d rolled on this smooth surface. For nearly forty kilometres in the gathering darkness I descended, not being able to see much but not really caring either, fixing my eyes on the luscious twinkling lights of San Pedro de Atacama 1500m below me. The grew closer in the darkeness as I floated down to them, fainter, hungrier and sweatier as the temperature increased during the descent. What greeted me there was a world of swept adobe lined streets, of ambling tourists and ludicrously expensive shops and cafes. I slept that night in a campsite, dreading the coming of the next day when I felt that I may have to engineer some kind of aid agency to lift me out of this small pit of wealth.

As it was, I was saved by one Christian Tarantola, a biker and traveller himself and owner of a nice new cafe. I, within minutes of sunrise, became his assistant making juices and pizzas for those that had the cash. I lived with Christian, and I ate for nearly free, sating my desire for fresh fruit and vegetables. For nearly ten days I lounged in this desert Oasis, went to bonfire parties and became known as the man with the longest bike in town. But, it was a rest, and only a rest. Unlike Christian who had arrived like me to relax for a few days and ended up a few years later running a cafe, I rolled away sadly and against my will, into the driest place on earth, the Atacama, creeping out of the shadow of the majestic volcano Licancabur, and into the full strength of the desert sun.

The Browns, and perhaps more yellows, dotten with white once again?

This desert is a harsh, cowboys desert. Broken wooden crosses half buried in sand creak in the wind. Plastic bags and shreds of toilet paper replace tumbleweed. If you look hard into the seering opaque haze, you can see it…a white bag rolling, as if caught in the spokes of an egg-shaped wheel, or a generous length of toilet roll, skittering snake-like a few feet before a stone or lonely twig snags its forward progress.
One could search for miles and not find one little dry shrub or delicate stick. But, like the aboriginal peoples all over the world, one has to adapt to ones surroundings, become one with it, embrace its subtleties and use its vast nothingness to your advantage.
So, you learn quickly in this case, not to look for sticks or shrubs, but to look for plastic bags or toilet paper, for the few small plants that exist here in the driest place oni earth are the desert’s effective filter feeders. Not only do they suck tiny droplets of water from the air, they also catch what little rubbish exisits in this void with their small, brittle fingers. If plastic bags could sustain them, these shrubs would be giants trunks of biomas in the sand. Equally, if dry shrubs were useful to me, this snippet of hard earned ‘black top’ knowledge (gained after hours of staring with burning eyes into the middle distance) would serve me well. But they’re not. Its too windy and too hot to want fire.
And so, it is filed, this knowledge, in the “Not so useful meanderings of a scorched brain” cbinet, already full to bursting, as I pedal my way along the hot sticky black top, trying not to look at the mirror like haze ahead, only at the weat dripping frmo my nose, slowly rusting a hole in ym bicycle frame.

But like all things, this desert had an end, and I reached it….it was the deep blue sea, foaming with feeding pelicans and quiet fishermen who fed me my first fresh fish since Lima, Peru. I am passed perhaps the hardest that this journey will throw at me, short of perhaps the humid cold of Southern Chile. This encourages me to keep moving, but with every weary pedal stroke, I feel my roots, more tenacious than ever, bursting through the soles of my worn shoes, trying to stay me in my tracks. I will do my best to keep pruning those roots for another five thousand kilometres……

Thoughts from the desert…..

I cycle along, in a mental, sweaty trough. I wait for the truck behind me to overtake, hugging the white line so as to be close to the vehicles brief but refreshing draft.
I look up as it passes. Its a bus, whos back I see speeding into the distance. Once the half second refreshment has washed over me, I have a moment of mental clarity and I realise what I’m looking at. On the back of this luxury coach is a picture of the driver, looking relaxed and smiling. In the space behind him are the words “semi-coma”.
SHIT! Are these the drivers I’m sharing this highway with? Questions poured sloppily into my brain…..Was this a requirement for drivers in this tour company? Could this coma be induced when accepted for the job or did you have to be a so-called natural “semi-coma” sufferer? Either way, I thought, best stay a foot or so the other side of the white line next time, to be on the safe side. Surely, not even a semi coma sufferer would stray outside the white line…..
An hour or so after this episode, another bus of the same company passed with the same smiling driver pictured on the back, though this time – and it was nearer and the words were clearer – in the space behind the driver it read “semi-cama”, indicating that this bus was equipped with fold down, near bed-like seats. I wondered idly, my brain operating like a clockwork mechanism covered in mollasses, if the driver had one too, one of these bed seats. Presumably, being in an only semi-cncious state, it didn’t matter either way…..
The bus soon dissappeared into a shimmering mirror-like door four hundred yards ahead. The door shut before I reached it, and the black top continued.

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 solid little woman wielding a megaphone. Others busily carried rocks or tires into the road, to stop any forward progress of traffic.

I said goodbye to Olly, the landlord of Olivers Travels Pub in La Paz and my latest companion, and gingerly approached the backs of the campesinos focused on this tiny cannon ball of a woman. One or two grinned, and others ushered me passed while the rest of the traffic had been stopped. I began to feel I was in the clear as I cycled slowly through the mud next to the makeshift podium, when from behind me I heard an angry voice…”why are you flying the Bolivian flag?? You’re not Bolivian!?”

Mmmm, it seemed my act of diplomacy was backfiring. The woman’s megaphone fell silent for a moment and all eyes turned on me. The moment of reckoning before these tough little people ripped me to shreds and burned me like the tires that at that moment were being dowsed in petrol.
I thought quickly, but more out of instinct shouted back equally agressively “Because I love your country!”

questioning brows softened and cheeks creased into smiles and a smattering of applause chased me onto the highway, south of this little manifestion, just one of many, seemingly every week in Bolivia.

This little drama, along with the entirity of the last two days with Olly had been conducted wearing a spiderman outfit. Strangely though, I have had more questioning looks when wearing normal cycling garb, so one has to assume that either spiderman passes through this part of the altiplano frequently to help web llamas, or that the locals regard the get-up as a very practical (if a little snug) weather repelling suit.

For nearly two weeks I had been stationary, with a lovely bed to sleep in thanks to the hospitality of Matt and the crew at Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking (who had me cycling UP one of the most impressive downhills in the area before I left!). I even had a job, almost fair to say I had something resembling a normal life in La Paz. While I didn’t have much desire to go to any of the city’s museums, every day was more than occupied. Repairing Achilles in Gravity’s workshops – where a fleet of gelaming mountain bikes sat winking at me, begging to be thrashed around the surrounding hills – occupied at least a slice of the morning. And then followed the best part, wondering through the streets to the English Pub, Olivers Travels, where I worked alongside a handful of lovely Bolivians who are dearly missed.

The walk took me first past Plaza Espana, where I would stop, do chin-ups on the climbing frame and watch small children battle it out on the wonky table football tables that live every night under the slide until an elderly man arrives and readies them for action. Down the steep cobbled streets, past the same policeman toting his shotgun everyday on the street corner where there doesn’t appear to be anything worth protecting, onto the main street which becomes a throng of interesting faces, from large indigenous women (Cholitas) toting huge amounts of booty or a child or perhaps both on their backs wrapped in a colourful shawl, to sophisticated businessmen talking on their cell phones, or fashionable students loitering with their friends before heading into a pizza palour for a snack.

Every day, by the time I reached the Pub, I had seen shoe lace salesmen, old ladies selling spoons, a million pirated DVD stands, policemen wearing huge white gloves pretending to direct traffic, a chinese restaurant called Jackie Chan and a small stall selling my favourate biscuits, which I would inevitably make a stop at before entering the quiet confines of Oliver’s. If one were to stray the other side of the bar, you would encounter the tourist enclave of La Paz, a street fondly named the witches market, selling among other things, dried llama foetuses for good luck and the usual assortment of alpaca clothing. Go a little further, and one reaches the culinary heart of the great city not far from the cathedral, where the good Lord can look over you as you consume at least four sausage sandwiches, and a litre of freshly blended fruit juice.

And then there was work. Always entertaining and incredibly worthwhile, if not for the meagre salary, for the delicious food and the impecable company. After 10pm, there was rarely a dull moment, whether there was a small latin squabble over a fella dancing with someone elses girlfriend, or three aimable irishmen begging to stay after closing and offering to buy everyone as many drinks as it took. And then there were the regulars. Those Englishmen that had grown roots in Bolivia but apparently had very little good to say about it, perhaps hunting listlessly for a Bolivian beautiy half their age……

And so, I escaped from La Paz unwillingly, grinding my way uphill for 12km to El Alto, the ugly urban sprawl that hides the altiplano under a mess of pot holes and concrete, where the majority of the working class communte from, to work in the expensive centre of La Paz. It is only south of La Paz, when the squat concrete and brick give way to altipano and small dishevelled villages that the real Bolivia seems to materialise. Down to Oruro, and past it onto dirt roads, almost desert for hundreds of beautiful kilometres, kept company by youngsters, perhaps sitting by a stream while their llamas graze the short spikey grass roundabout, many miles form the nearest little community. These roads, the washboard surfaces interspersed with perhaps five hundred yards of sand tested me at times, but the landscapes kept me moving forward, through sometimes moonscapes with deserted adobe settlements, and occassionally much less…..
However, it was before I hit the dirt that I happened upon the small village of Pazna ten minutes before a two hour thunder storm.

Who was my saviour this time? you may ask…..well, it was Marcelina, the lovely lady that owned a small shop on the corner of the silent plaza. She took me in, fed me bread and mate while I watched the local youth playing table football for the princely sum of one boliviano a game. It was Marcelina that allowed me to leave my bike in her front room, while I headed by car (with five blood soaked goat skins heading to market) into the hills and to Potosi……..

With the value of minerals extracted from the “rich mountain” since the spaniards began exploiting it, it has been said that one could build a bridge from Bolivia to Spain. It is also said that the same bridge could be built with the corpses of the dead miners retrieved from one of the 438 entrances. Donning my hard hat, headlamp and wellingtons I entered the mine, Jose my guide and ex-miner reassuring me that less than ten people had died here this year……it was only February…..

* * *

ODE TO EARLY CAPITALISM……

“Build a bridge from here to Spain!” I heard the foreman cry
“But save the silver and use the bones of those that here did die”
And so it was that carts came out with dead, not precious ore
Three million corpses rose up again, from within the mountain’s core
‘Cerro Rico’ gave up this day, from deep within its mines
Six hundred years of hearts and souls, of slavery and crimes
A mountain grew of bleached white bones, and a bridge they did construct
While in royal halls the silver stayed, with the wealthy and corrupt
The bridge reached Spain, but bodies more there were in cart and sack
So many men left bones to use, they had to build one back
And still the pile of men and boys continues to increase
And still “el Tio” looks out from hell, where minerals he’ll release
Until no more a bridge we’ll need, for humans they’ll be nought
Eaten up in greed and selfishness, their deathly ticket bought…..

* * *

Being the foolish person that I am, and always interested in good video footage, I sweet talked Jose (and laced his palm with silver) into taking me to those levels that were not usually frequented by the likes of gringos. “What Fun!” I thought as we entered the main tunnel, where almost immediately you could hear the ominous hollow clanking sound of a wagon full of mineral being pushed by two teenagers in or out of the mine somewhere on the two or three kilometres of narrow gauge rails that existed only on this level. As they passed us, and we squeezed our body’s agaist the damp rock wall to allow passage, they stopped to show me their sparkling load, zinc, silver and some lead glinting dimly in the light of out headlamps. I looked at the boys. Forteen, maybe sixteen at a push, manhandling two ton carts four or five times a day shuttling between the cool dry outside and the warm damp mine. These boys will most likely have arthritis by the time they reach forty.

Jose led me up a series of eight ladders up a small loose rocky shaft. With each rung, the sound and vibration of a pneumatic drill begame stronger, and small stones and dust rained down as the wooden ladders flexed under our load and threatened to pull loose from the fuse wire connecting them to their wooden stays. The dust filled the air, there being no water piped to these restricted levels to dampen the drilling waste, and by the time we’d arrived at the upper most level and climbed through some toppled eucalyptus support joists, our head lamps were useless, only lighting the thick wall of dust that filled our mouths and nostrils. Squeezing through a narrow expoited vein with plastic bags in our ears to dampen the noise we practically bumped into the two drillmen, rasping through their simple dust masks as they prepared to lay charges to enlarge this new gallery. Two minutes was enough for us both and we wished them good luck as we coughed our way back to the dim hole we had to feel for, before escaping back down the series of ladders to the dust free main level. As I write this, twenty four hours later, though my coughing has stopped, fairly impressive chunks of clay-like mucous enthusiastically force their way out of my nose to make a break for the mine from which they came.

Before we left the mine some hours later, I had heard the crack and then dull report of twelve explosions, shaking the rock and pummelling the air at our level, the force travelling through perhaps thirty metres of solid rock. The winchmen I was talking with fell silent, as the streamers left over from carnival celebrations, swayed rhythmically too and fro with each report. While we stood there, 400 metres away in a small dead end tunnel, El Tio (The Uncle), an idol resembling the devil sat adhorned in streamers and coca leaves, a cigarette smoldering in his clay mouth and a huge erect penis symbolising fertility of the earth. He is the God of this underworld to which the miners pay their respects, offering alcohol, cigarettes and coca leaves the first friday of every month. In this way, the miners are permitted to extract mineral from the mine without angering the Devil, though it doesn’t seem to stop him from claiming about fifty miners a year in tunnel collapses, dynamite accidents and suffocation.

Dynamite is legal for anyone in the city of Potosi, and every so often in one of the many protests that take place every year, it is used freely to attract attention, and occassionbally you may hear about a family dispute or squabble that was taken care of by one stick of nitro-glycerine, a mercury detonator and a small bag of ammonium nitrate, all for the princely sum of just over two dollars.

Its seems like I’ve been in this country for a long time, but it was less than a month ago that I crossed the quiet border from Peru to arrive in the touristy but pictureque haven of Copacobana, where Phoebe’s journey on my bicycle ended and Ganninia’s began, propelling me from the hidden seaside like town on the shores of Lake Titicaca, where the water despite the altitude is warm and the beaches tranquil, across the lake, along the altiplano in the shadow of the beautiful snow capped Wayna Potosi to La Paz.

And now, I am in Uyuni, about to embark on perhaps the most difficult part of this journey so far, across the harsh, white Salar de Uyuni, and through the mountain deserts of Lipez, where water is scarce and temperatures plummet to well below freezing over night.

Harsh describes the landscapes here. Beautiful but harsh, from the rusted hulks of a hundred old steam engines listing heavily on their sides in the desert, to the bright partially waterfilled salt plains where the horizon gets muddled between the flat reflective surface and the sky. The desert then takes over, rising to over 5000 metres and exposing the visitor to the reality of dehydrated, sand filled desolation. I don’t know how I will fare, but I am certainly about to find out.

“Light may earth’s crumbling sand be laid on thee, that dogs may dig the bones up easily” Marcus Aurelius

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 the Vicuna, Alpacas or Llamas that graze here, looking up with their camel like faces to see what that strange slow whirring noise is that they’re not accustomed to. The mornings are, in the uplands, usually enshrouded in mist that enveloped me and my bike the day before in a wave, whose fingers creep up the slopes to strangle the visibility of the cold air, sometimes extinguishing it with a blanket of heavy moisture. In these conditions, one loses all perspective, only the speed of ones rotating legs indicating velocity or gradient, the sounds of grumbling freight vehicles reaching you before the dim glow of headlights. It took me four days of climbing from Nazca to reach the upland pampas where these conditions reside in the wet season, and those four days represent perhaps some of the hardest and certainly some of the wettest in my journey so far.

The rain and icy wind left me craving hostals or at least a roof to keep half the elements at bay. Every so often, I was lucky enough to find it, once in the form of the old delapidated vicuna monitoring station – where I played a game of volleyball at 4300m with the guard, his diminutive wife and their three year old daughter next to the bleak highway – and again, in a one room hostal in the refreshingly green valley of Pampa Marca nestled deep between to highland plains.

Something or someone was smiling down on me that night as the heavens opened and at least the mother-in-law of all storms rolled down the valley, rain and hail in a potent and bruising mixture bouncing a metre off the road as I watched from the comfort of a little porch. Pointing my camera out at the road, filming the spectacular rain, I was temporarily blinded and deafened (and had to check my underwear for damage) as a fizzing lightning bolt lit my LCD screen and struck the roof of the little school a hundred yards ahead of me. The school was empty.

I woke the following morning to a calm sky, but with hills dusted with snow. A line of idling trucks outside meant one of two things, either the cook at the only restaurant in this isolated village had pulled off a special recipe, or there was a problem on the road ahead. The standard rice and eggs breakfast was good but not that good, and it didn’t take me long to find out there had been a large landslide not far up the road, blocking all traffic. The words “you’ll have to wait, no-one can pass” were like a red rag to a bull, and I pedalled off, snaking between the huge line of trucks, up the hill, past tens of people walking back to the viallage for warmth, like refugees. At the front of the queue, past a throng of people and the odd spade being prodded in the dirt, was 150 metres of 4 foot mud, and a gap in the hillside above where that mud had once sat happily. Forty five minutes it took me to dismantle my bike, and in three heavy loads, climb up the mountainside, around the slide and deposit my goods next to the waiting crowd 150 metres further up the road. By load number three, locals and tourists alike started to take an interest and a smattering of applause greeted me when my bike was one unit once again on the uphill side of the mudslide. In the time I had taken to sweat my gear around the problem, only a fraction of heavy mud had been cleared from the road with the only spades available. I cycled on a quiet and windswept road for two hours before the first tour buses roared by, hooting enthusiastically. This same road led me without further mishap up another two mountain passes and down again, into a valley where nestled in its bottom, is the ancient and beautiful city of Cusco, dripping to the rafters with dreadlocked and stripey trousered tourists. This impressive once Inca stronghold, provided me with a cosy base from which to explore the riches of Peru’s Inca empire, or at least part of it.

To avoid the thirty one dollar charge for a short train journey from the earthy coloured village of Ollentaytambo to Agus Clientes, below Michu Picchu, I stopped and chatted to the station master for a while trying to sway him into letting me onto the ‘local’ train. My hopes dashed politely but with a well practiced tongue, I set off with half a litre of water and a couple of bananas down the 45km railway track, stepping awkwardly between uneven sleepers to avoid twisting my ankles on the irritating ballast. Sometimes there was a track winding its way loosely alongside the railway line, joining tiny villages together in an increasingly steep sided valley, stepped with agricultural terraces right up to the lofty ridgeline. Rain came and went, as I tramped along, regretting a little more every minute the fact that I bought a fairly tight fitting pair of shoes. Locals stared at me from small adobe doorways, only accustomed to seeing tourists framed by the aluminium surround of a train window like portraits as they passed swiftly and without benefit through their little world, only kilometers from Peru’s most popular tourist attraction.

Where the track ended and the rails continued uninterrupted in their gradual descent to Aguas Calientes, I stopped for a breather in a tiny shop, where a handful of locals shot the breeze in Quechua. Speaking in a mixture of Quechua and Spanish, they questioned me as to my purpose here, and what would possibly inspire me to spend nearly two years travelling on my own, without a huge family and a house. Within five minutes, an older man plonked himself on the bench next to me, while two indigenous women and a baby stared wide eyed at this strange blond man in their village.
“Why don’t you find a woman in this village?” he asked, assuming that I was single. “I could help you if you like tommorrow” he said willingly.
“Thats very kind of you, but I must continue on this little journey of mine” I replied grinning
“what do you do for work?” the man asked, obviously formulting an ensnaring plan.
“Well, I do various things, but I love mountain guiding” I said, looking for possible man traps. But it was too late, the man’s eyes lit up and his cheeks creased into a triumphant smile revealing his one gold framed tooth.
“There you see? you could herd cattle over there on the mountain tops with your woman, that way you would have it all!”. The women across the way giggled at his insistence and cunning, and
I left them with a hollow promise that I would return soon, knowing that a thousand things would overtake me once done with this journey, and my thoughts may perhaps never return to the little village where I had an enthusiastic life coach and marriage consultant.

I arrived in Aguas Clientes at midnight, feeling broken, having lost touch with a number of toe nails and narroly avoided being run over by a freight train, whose bulging carriage sides forced me to jump blindly in the darkness into a rocky ditch in the undergrowth. I managed to find a small shop open in this sleepy little tourist base camp, and purchased some rubbery cheese and bread before settling down in my sleeping bag at the foot of a little petrol pump under a corrugated iron roof on the edge of the village next to the thundering, angry river.

The following day I dragged my tired, blistered and broken body (not used to the rigours of walking!!) up to the lost (until recently) city of Machu Picchu, still cloaked in dappled cloud, allowing brief glimpses of the grey walls and vegetated cliffs that make up its surroundings. Once on top of Waynapicchu, the towering rock that overlooks the city, the Gods drew the curtain back, revealing the green terraces, with ant like people – the early birds – making their way along the labyrinth-like paths and terraces. More impressive perhaps, were the still cloud bedded valleys below, steep folded lush green mountains, small but ferocious rivers hidden in the trees, invisibly shaping this striking landscape as they have been since the ice removed its heavy grip on the land.

There is no doubt that Machu Picchu is one of the wonders of the world as we know it, but I couldn’t help feeling pressured into enjoying the experience, which of course has the opposite effect. In a journey dominated by a wide open countryside, and people that happily welcome a strangers face, the tourist saturated experience of this amazing place saddened me slightly, on seeing the change in the locals.
Not all, but more than a handful of the Peruvians providing for us gringos lose their smile, lose their natural warmth, and look at you as a green dollar bill to be snatched up, or a mischevous school child in an understaffed classroom. Its true the world over in my experience. Needless to say, after a shepherd has given you three of his four sheep skins to sleep on, on the dirt of his one roomed hut only days before, being told to piss off after closing time by a bored looking guard is a little overwhelming.

Thanks to Adam’s – still with me on his own comedy bike – sweet talking in a bar, gap year student Phoebe Walker decided to take the Tandem plunge and leave her more ordinary back packer friends in favour of the back seat of Achilles, and the company of two purile Brits on the pampas heading for Bolivia. It has been a smooth and enjoyable ride up until here on the shores of Lake Titicaca, where another family has not only taken us in but wrapped us up in the carnaval and festive customs of this time of year.

Not 12 hours after arriving, we were bouncing happily along in an old dodge truck on a muddy track to a tiny homestead in the hills above the worlds highest navigable lake. From here, we witnessed and took part in the marriage of two, umm, Alpacas. Now, while this might sound a little fishy to you lot, once a year here it is customary to give thanks to Pachamama, or Mother Nature, for the crops and livestock she has provided you with, and to bless the current stock in order to ensure abundance for the coming year. A sensible custom in a world where a few dead cows could mean something a lot more serious than another trip to the supermarket or mortgage advisor.

In this desolate yet stunningly beautiful landscape, alpacas, cows and sheep were herded together, and sprinkled with mixtures of maize and other grains in water, symbolising a myriad of things. At the heart of these ceremonies was the coca leaf, chewed, shared, and rubbed on the backs of the animals as a blessing, as has been done for hundreds of generations. The Shepherds and family took part with an enthusiasm I admired and respected, and one that left me wondering how and why we have left these customs behind in our society. While many of us are religious, we pay little attention to what has been provided to us, and for the most part wouldn’t take the time to even kneel down and thank the earth we walk on, let alone prepare an expensive tincture to show our appreciation for the marvel of the food chain. We settle for leaving a couple of cans of pork’n'beans at the local harvest festival…..

I am now, primed, ready to cross another border and arrive in the poorest country in my journey, Bolivia. What will I remember from Peru? The harsh desert with unforgiving headwinds? The stunning mountain scenery of the Corillera Blanca? The floating Islands and the colourful clothes of the local people here on the lake? Or perhaps the acquired taste of the much loved sheeps head soup with cherished eyeball included? Rest assured all of these experiences will be lodged firmly in my memory banks, as well as a few others, one of which I would like to share with you……

There is a lot of money and planning that goes into music videos, one of the most lucrative parts of the television industry. One of Michael Jacksons music video’s for instance, necessitated corresponding with the gang leaders of Rio’s famous favellas (patrolled by armed private police) for months and a large downpayment in order to be able to shoot a pop song in their neighbourhood. Fat Boy Slim comandeered the expensive services of Christopher Walken to dance in his, and the list of extravegant music shoots goes on and on. Not, however, in Peru.

I wouldn’t bother mention Peru’s selection of music videos unless it was impossible to escape the viewing of them tens of times on a daily basis. They’re in every doorway, every little DVD shack, every economical restaurant, hunting you down as effectively as the locals that insist you must buy their range of wooly hats or Inca crosses in Cusco.

And so, you maybe asking, what makes these music videos worth such a comprehensive mention? Well, the sheer quality of them. Bad Quality. So bad its incredibly hypnotic! To try and paint a verbal picture of these visual feasts, I will list a number of things you’re likely to see in such spectacles, and thus a menu for a successful Peruvian hit;
- Trafalgar Square (shakily)
- A man getting knocked over by a protesating sheep (or goat depending on the genre of music)
- A boy band dancing in a moist field, perhaps only once losing step to avoid a cow pat
- Curious locals standing in a moist field, watching a boy band dancing, perhaps only once losing step to avoid a cow pat
- Beautifully dressed indigenous ladies dancing in field, while scruffy fellas in shell suits provide dancing partners
- one happy drunk
- An assortment of farmyard animals
- A small range of low quality clips lifted off “You’ve been framed” or similar blooper home video program.

….I could go on, but I won’t. Its Brilliant, and almost free! Whats more, the locals within fifty metres of a television airing this material sit transfixed, motionless, sometimes forgetting about the half chicken thats been plonked in front of them. I can only think of two reasons why this should be so. Either, they’re looking for a family relative, that may make a cameo appearance in the video at any second, or there is a subliminal nationalistic message, broadcast at a frequency that causes a high level of hypnosis. The latter is certainly the reason for my addiction, and since my first Peruvian music video, I have started pointing with my chin as the locals do, suggesting that Peru owns the Titty, and Bolivia the Kaka part of the famous lake Titicaca, and other such nationalist traits. Incredible.

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 my journey. Its as if, in isolated pockets of this land, the United States and the rest of the “western world” has loosened its grip on these people, or perhaps never had one at all. Where 1000km further north, questions inevitably turned to economy, standard of living and the cost of my equipment, here it is as likely to turn to what kind of potatoes we have in our soil, and whether I know what donkeys look like. I was even asked yesterday if, where I come from, we have water. In reflection, this part of Peru sees so little water, that if it weren´t for the hundreds of Inca irrigation channels still successfully transporting the crystal clear liquid from the mountains to the desert, I would question whether they new what water was.

There are two languages widely spoken here, Castellano (spanish) and Quechua, yet some of the farmers I have encountered are mildly amused to hear that some of us speak yet another language. “What does it sound like?” they ask, stealing themselves for the inevitable giggle that issues from their mouth as soon as I speak in English. Yet, perhaps only 20km away, savvy Peruvians entertain and rub shoulders with tourists from all over the world.

I have found myself, rather than saying I have come from Alaska, saying that I have traveled from a long way the other side of Ecuador. I am not dumbing down my conversation as I have heard a handful of patronising gringos do since I left North America, I am just trying to change it according to what people will understand given their altered knowledge base. If I say Alaska, they think they heard Nasca, only 20km away, but stare equally wide eyed as if I had said I crawled from the moon. Similarly, once or twice when I mentioned the figure 22,000 kilometres, someone heard twenty two kilometres and asked me how many months it had taken. They don´t work in distances here you see, they work in time on a bus. So, for instance, if it took two hours to travel twenty kilometres to the next town in an old school bus running on only one cylinder, two hours becomes the new bench mark for the time needed to travel to the next town, simple as that. So, as is the latin way, you will never get the same answer twice, irritating until you learn to take the mean of ten answers, work off that, and be grateful if that estimate is accurate to within an hour.

I admire the curiosity of these people, in fact I alsmost envy it. If every single one of us had the same child like thirst for knowledge as the majority of people that live in the more isolated areas around here, we would be rich indeed, few things going unnoticed or unknown, and therefore many more things perhaps going well. Where people´s curiosity and will to survive here may drive them to fix a small chinese video game designed to be thrown away, or fashion a trailer out of some disguarded rusted rebar, our – and by “our” I mean those of us that live lacking nothing – comfortable apathy seems to result in a thousand missed opportunities to improvise, re-use, re-think or improve. This is a reoccuring theme that I am sure you´ve heard before, and one that circulates round and round the cramped walls of my craium regularly as I crawl my way often painstakingly slowly through this land.

But dare to think for a second, what if something catastrophic happened? what we do? Would we make do or would queues of people stand outside the empty shell of a department store waiting for a refund, or would inoperative telephones be wielded to summon our valuable home insurance pay-out?

In Auguast of last year, a powerful earthquake destroyed large areas of cities and towns in the area of coastal Peru I have been travelling through. Piles of adobe (mud and straw bricks) rubble lies sometimes where it fell, and more usually in large piles on the edge of the towns. Lines of aid organisation tents front onto the road, with the remains of housing still in use behind them. I have been told that those areas still restricted to the public containing huge amounts of debris and unstable structures still, after nearly six months, carries the sickly stench of tens if not hundreds of missing corpses, left buried with insufficient aid to extract them. Those that make their living out of opportunistic litter picking still come across body parts in the rubbish dumps.

Yet, despite the warning I received from well meaning Peruvians to take great care of my posessions in these areas of extreme hardship, I seemed to be entering a new level of generosity, where those that were still trying to rebuild their lives one wall at a time would enthusiastically aid me in the advancing of mine, buying me lunch or giving me a coke from their antique delivery truck.

Since Christmas, spent in the lovely company of Pedro, Alicia and various family members in Lima, I have probably seen some of the richest and poorest neighbourhoods on my journey. While some of the poorest are represented by the more unfortunate earthquake victims in Pisco (the capital of Peru´s not particularly pleasant Pisco sour coctail), the richest and yet more of the poorest Pervians reside in the gigantic sprawl of Lima, where only one block from the Presedential Palace, poverty and disrepair comes out of hiding and spreads itself in a patchwork blanket of corrugated iron and plastic sheeting, out into the limbs of the city, meeting the dusty mountains in finger-like shanties.

South of the city, where I was lucky enough to spend new year with Lena and Augusto and friends, lie eighty kilometres of Lima´s beaches, where the city dwellers flocked to to see in 2008. Street vendors doubled their efforts to sell their wares to huge numbers of weekenders, and firework vendors and litter pickers collecting valuable aluminium cans did a roaring trade as yet another year passed, washed away for the second time on my voyage by the Pacific Ocean.

The sparse and unforgiving desert has again sapped my body of fluids on this leg of the journey, but reaching the tranquil beach paradise of Paracas (whos Ballestas Islands form a haven for the Hombolt Penguin and a huge colony of roaring sea lions) and latterly Nasca, home to perhaps the most concentratd patch of archeology in the world, has provided me with breathing space and a brief pause before climbing, following ancient lines etched into the desert sand, out of the desert and into the rain swept mountains towards Cusco. Achilles is about to embark on just under 4000 meters of climbing in one hundred kilometres. He won´t complain, but I´m sure I will…..

I leave you yet again, but this time with a greeting used, people say, by the Incas, a civilisation, that judging by their respect for mother earth and incredible engineering skills, we have yet to match in intelligence……

“!Ama Sua, Ama Kjella, Ama Lllulla! – Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t be lazy”.
Quechua

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 on the front and no-one else; a man with an overgrown afro and beard and a wild look in his eye cycling a less than touring bike adhorned in twice its value of childrens stickers and two school backpacks strapped dubiously to the side, and lastly; Barney on an only slightly more suitable machine cycling dreamily along next to us, his head moving side to side loosely on his neck like a thunderbird puppet.

The last leg of Ecuador held surprises and treats well outstripping the negligable distance to the border. Particularly vivid memories include Adam launching himself into the plunge pool of an enormous and frigid waterfall sporting a snorkel (out of which strange shrieks were emitted on contact with the icy mountain water), and camping in the hills with company that made every evening an adventure in its self. Armed with a tent that would be a more suitable Wendy house were it a little more weather proof, and a bottle of paint thinners, there was nothing they could not do, and together we added colour, laughter and a considerable volume of unwanted flames to the Ecuadorian countryside.

However, before leaving Ecuador I had one goal involving a small detour from the route south, and so it was that the three of us journeyed deeper into the arid southern hills to explore a once thriving centre of capitalism, a village that represented success and hope for Americans and Ecuadorians alike. Now, the last reserves of hope are dribbling out of the mining culture there, along with pitiful amounts of gold, the majority long since extracted by American mining companies in the twenties.

Porto Velo. Set amongst steep dusty hillsides and a mirky cyanide polluted river maintains a dignity and warmth I wouldn’t expect in a village where gold mining chronic health related issues, were they treated, would probably cost more than the value of gold extracted daily from a handful of small privately operated mines, worked by a few brave or desperate men that wear a look of long suffering, and descend every day into antique mine shafts with equipment that has not changed for fifty years.

Having registered an interest in the history of this place to a local, having checked in with the boys at the only creeky wooden hostal, my first hour in the village saw me being whisked off invitingly to the house of the most senior ex-miner still alive. At 93 years old, he remembers when the Americans came, when they formed a brass band and when fourth of July celebrations were forced upon them. He holds no grudge, indeed times were good back then with subsidised food and perhaps the best medical services in Ecuador. He remembers mining with one six hour candle for an eight hour shift, finding his way out of the cramped shafts by feel. He remembers the mules used to haul the rocks out of the mines being brought to the surface every six months to be shot and replaced. They had gone blind from half a year of eternal darkness, as had many miners.

Times have changed. Where there were mules,there are now combustion engines, and where there were candles, they now have sodium or battery operated headlamps. There are still many fatal accidents, but less than there were. But other things have changed too. When the superpower had extracted all that was cost effective, they retreated to the trading halls of New York, taking with them health benefits and lawn tennis clubs, leaving the industry with pollution, inadequate equipment and a mountain of gold diggers. One or two of the lucky ones are rich now, the others continue to tap away, rolling mercury in their gold pans picking up the dregs and loosing friends daily to these historical, holes in the hillside.

My journey to this little dusty pocket of all but forgotten industry lasted only two days, and I was touched by the friendship and welcoming culture of the people in this island near the worlds banana export capital. I fell asleep on my last night there in a room next door to local construction workers who – we had asertained by peering through a fortuitously positioned knot hole – grinned and giggled at images of a blond woman doing unspeakable things on the little LCD display of one of their cell phones. In the middle distance, the dull grinding of stone wheels crushing conglomerate continued into the night.

After the winding and varying roads of Ecuador, the Peruvian desert highways hit me like a red hot paint stripper, blowing wind and sand into our faces as we travelled, occassioanlly seemingly dissolving into the heat haze, hundreds of straight, black top kilometres. The desert road sometimes kissed the ocean, and it was in Mancora, the popular surfing town that I struck lucky with more willing stokers to power me through the sizeable Sechura desert, but not before relaxing on the beach and enjoying the delights of the food vendors that sold tasty morsels out of beautiful wicker baskets. One such delicacy was the aptly named beach penis, an oblong donut type pastry filled with hot toffee like condensed milk, that kept us salivating and craving more. It was in fact our ranting to each other about the qualities of this calory rich treat that attracted the dissaproving attention of Erin and Phillipa, both of whom were destined to do their bit on the back of Achilles, inching south into the hot headwinds, and camping amongst the thorny desert brush and parched mud flats.

The desert challenged us with a war of attrition, attacking us slowly with building headwinds and mild stomach disorders that had the three of us comparing notes on fecal offerings, occassioanly thrilling each other with accounts of a solid deposit lurking some distance from our sand filled tents, perhaps near a goat track or a crescent shape ever creeping sand dune. In desperation, doing our best to escape the deadly highway, we opted to try and follow a tiny road marked on the map that appeared to follow the coast. After one and a half days of alternately riding on a beach threatened by rising tides, and pushing two steeds – the third had suffered mechincal failure – through deep sand inbetween near deserted settlements, we arrived at a pueblito where the tide met the mountains, blocking further progress on the road, which was in fact the beach. Though this adventure proved draining, it did break the manotony of the pan american highway and allowed Barney and I to make the night time aquaintance of two crab fishermen on an isolated stretch of coastline, where we shared our tea with these hardy men, spending hours at a time in the chilling water for only a dollar or two of crabs.

It was in the beautiful colonial town of Trujillo that I was to experience the comfort and warmth of Lucho’s “Casa de Ciclistas” a house open to bicycle travellers, fast or slow, local or tourist. From the cosy base of his workshop, we explored the vibrant markets and incredible archaeology in and around the city. The Moche people, pre-dating the Incas had made this place their home, building huge cities and temples out of the same type of mud bricks they use today. When the Incas came, these civilisations slowly fell into ruin as the Incas took the most skilled and able people to work in their new cities, and little by little, the desert breached the protecting walls, reclaiming the city in a sea of drifting sand.

Lucho, a powerful cyclist himself helped propel me along the last day of desert highway to Chao, where we (I was still revelling in the company of my two companions) ventured onto the dirt heading into the Cordillera Blanca, possibly one of the most beautiful mountain ranges in the world.

Slowly at first, then dramatically, the scenery changed from harsh desert to low scrubby hills and a river, yes A RIVER!! We followed it past lush rice paddies and tiny irrigated pastures in the midst of increasingly large rocky peaks. We bathed in its fast moving torrent before the water sank below us, untouchable in a deep gorge as the rocky road subtly climbed up into the foothills of the Andes. Again, on this tretch of dirt, my thoughts turned to holes in the ground once more as the odd work vehicle, from the hydro electric project further up the tight valley, may have seen an unguarded tandem bicycle outside a disused sand mine or old coal shaft. On stopping in a tiny down trodden village, where, strangely, fruit stalls almost outnumbered dwellings, I watched a man staring at us, black from head to tow except for his blue miners hard hat. I invited him to take part in Adam, Barney and my biscuit sampling session that entertained and sustained us at various points throughout an average cycling day.

The miner worked all night, and lived a semi concious life during the day, not bothering to wash the coal off his leathery skin. His gravelly voice promted me to ask about his health. All the miners have lung problems, he said, but they have no choice, for in this beautiful but fairly isolated valley, it is what they do, and it is what their fathers and fathers fathers have always done. All the while he stared up into the nearby hillside, where a tiny black hole could be seen and an equally modest coal conveyor. We left this muddy little community having ascertained that the miner’s favourate biscuit flavor was mint, though I would hazard a guess that there is only one flavour his taste buds recognise now. Coal.

The Canyon del Pato, one of the most spectacular roads I have ever seen, led us ever upward through more than forty tunnels of rough hewn rock with the river having cut its path well below us to the mountains. Achilles the tandem skittered and lost traction often on the loose rocky road, but any feeling of effort or pain was spirited away by the soaring rocky hieghts, and the sheer exposure of this road, seemingly leading us deep within the Misty Mountains. But, as quickly as the first gaping tunnel swallowed up my tattered british flag flying war torn from my trailer, the holes ceased and the horizons expanded to reveal fields, greenery and farming people of the Peruvian sierra, where school children blocked my progress until they had been rewarded with a ride, and an old man grinned with delight as he was given a circuit on the back, around his little farmhouse shop.

I am now in Huaraz, where the rainy season has begun, sadly obscuring the view of the Cordillera every afternoon. But I wouldn’t leave this place without at least attempting to sasiate my appetite for alpinism despite the adverse conditions emptying this climbing Mecca of climbers.

As I write this I recover from a hard 24 hours of crawling out of my tent at midnight and dragging my two companions, breathing hard at 5000m to attempt an easy mountain…so easy in fact, a local guide assured me I wouldn’t need a map. Needless to say, mountains obscured by cloud and snow the afternoon of arrival in this impressive valley, I approached them blind with clear night skies.

Every so slowly, as first light made the snow glow a gentle blue, I began to make out the situation I had feared. I had, with necassary precaution of course, guided Adam into the middle of a sizeable ice fall, cracking and groaning with the weight of new snow on the glacier above. Two mountains, both magnificent towered above us while that easy mountain remained tucked away, much more easily accessed from the neighbouring valley. I made a hasty retreat, leading Adam – his first time in crampons – out of the danger zone, increasinlgy unstable as the morning light began to warm the glacier ice, and the drip dripping of meltwater increased in intesity. We may not of climbed Vallunaraju, but we had basked in the glory of a rare sunbathed morning in December, with two of Peru’s most impressive peaks soaring regally above us, a tiny whisp of wind blown snow trailing of the summits.

Tucked behind the peaks, a band of heavy clouds slowly rolled in to occupy this territory that becomes theirs every afternoon this time of year, to please the farmers and anger cyclists all over the uplands of this enormous country.

And so to Lima for the festive season, where Saint Nicholaus may spy a heavily laden tandem and trailer, and envy the load carrying capacity of the sturdy machine. Beware Rodolph, you may be made redundant.

Have a lovely holiday, Christmas or no.