From Anchorage to Ushuaia by Bike

After horseback riding in the mountains around Vilcabamba valley, called the valley of longevity since its inhabitants can live to be 120 years old, we got back on the bikes for the final push through Ecuador. Slightly smaller mountains than we had come through, but just as hard. We loved Ecuador and so stayed an extra day in Catacocha. Then, just a few hills to get over in the heat and one night camping in the brush beside a river in the middle of a tropical forest, and we arrived at the border town of Macara.

Good-bye Ecuador…

The country where:

• Everyone eats rice morning, noon, and night (Peru does too, actually)
• You choose your cut of meat at the grocery store by testing each one with your fingers
• There are two prices: one for the locals and one for the tourists – entirely legal for the hotels
• You can find chicken feet in your soup – all the better to dip with!
• There are no manhole covers, only gaping holes in the roads and sidewalks

As we were leaving Ecuador, we had to stop for a medical exam and a strict reminder of how to prevent swine flu. It took almost an hour, and while we waited we watched the locals (mostly Ecuadorians) cross the border between the countries carrying goods on their bikes or in their trucks. They didn’t have to stop for a medical check-up, or even show a single piece of ID!

Hello Peru!

At the Peruvian border there was no police check, but the customs officer was not very friendly. And then, not 50 m from the border, we heard the familiar calls of “gringo, gringa” – yikes! If it’s going to be like this the whole way, we thought, we’re not going to like Peru very much. Sara got whistled at again, and really the only defence is to keep her head down and totally ignore the attention.

5 km from the border we ran into the police blockade –while we were coasting downhill! Stuck in the middle of nowhere, we were most unimpressed when the first question that the three police officers asked was whether we had a camera. We both wondered if they were after a bribe, but we really didn’t know what to make of it. We had been warned a lot about robberies in Peru, and so we were pretty nervous. So at first we pretended like we didn’t understand the question, but then after we answered other questions about where we were from and where we were going, the police officers explained that they just wanted to have their pictures taken with all the bikers that passed by! So we took a bunch of pictures with them, with the help of passing motorists who helpfully stopped by the side of the road to get out and take photos of us all. In the end, the police officers were really nice. They told us to watch out for Peruvian muggers, offered us some pastries, and warned us seriously against going through Sullana (where we were planning to spend the next night). A number of other people also said that staying in Sullana was a bad idea, including the owner of the hotel where we stayed that night, and who we had a long talk with about Peru. As soon as we told him that we were French, he wanted to talk about the nude Carla Bruni pictures that were recently put up for auction and the Air France plane that crashed into the Pacific. Actually, since Alaska, every time we tell anyone that we’re from France, they mention Carla Bruni or Zinédine Zidane…

The next day,  thanks to our training in the Andes and our high red blood cell count, we made it all the way across 114 km of flat, polluted desert in the Northern part of the country, and avoided stopping in Sullana. We averaged 19 km/h, our fastest since Central America. It’s tough to be much faster than 10km/h when you’re biking through the Andes!

Lima

And now we are in Lima – that was quick, wasn’t it? There will be those who say that we cheated, and others that say we made the right call. After much hemming and hawing, and considering that we are a little behind schedule, we decided to bus the 1000 km between Piura and Lima. It was 1000km of flat desert, not very clean and definitely monotonous. Two days in that environment was enough for us.

So we decided to take the bus, leaving at 6 pm, and arriving at 9 am the next day, roughly 15 hours of travel time. We were surprised by the tight security along the route. First they checked everyone’s IDs and scanned their signatures, and then the passengers were filmed getting on the bus and finding their seats. The bags were also searched, and scanned with a metal detector. Interestingly, the security measures seemed a little more optional for foreigners (maybe just cyclists?) and we didn’t have to undergo much.

Our great leap forward means that we can spend more time climbing the Andes in between Lima and Lake Titicaca, and visit all the microfinance institutions in the region.

Sara & Sébastien