We had planned to leave San Francisco on Monday February 8th, but we wound up leaving on Friday Feb 12th owing to last minute mechanical issues… I won’t say whose bike was acting up, but it wasn’t mine or Larry’s.
Those extra four days gave me time to rethink my gear and try to anticipate what might be needed …and I even got to test-ride my bike fully-loaded which I never have time for normally.
But I still forgot, or didn’t think of, important stuff to bring… some of the gear I did bring was useless… and some things we only found out we needed when we were out in the field.
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Friday, March 19th – Day 36 since leaving my house in rainy San Francisco, and the day I pull the ripcord. I was up at 6am to finish packing my gear into my duffel bags, and sorting out what I was going to leave behind. Extra pieces of luggage would have cost $175 each on my TACA flight back to SF, so I weeded out a bunch of non-essentials, and packed ‘em into the top case on the bike, leaving the side cases mounted but empty.
Larry and Moe’s KTMs receiving freshie tires and airfilters at KTM Peru’s service department
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Thursday March 18th – I woke up in a slightly surreal mood – my travelling days were suddenly over after five weeks on the road. Things were different: in my mind I was already walking up to the check-in desk at the airport …I just had the small problem of what to do with my motorcycle. My ideal result would be to locate “bonded” storage, such as they have in Panama, where you can leave the bike past the standard 90 day temporary import permit, so I could return in November, or maybe February 2011, for a South America loop.
I went downstairs for a little internet interaction, and by the time the boys got up and came down for breakfast, my action plan and call list were set. I spent the morning on the phone in the room, and by noon I had a shipping company working on my storage problem, and the local KTM dealer, Carlos, who is also the importer for KTM in Peru, was hooking me up with his freight forwarder & customs guy. After lunch, I jumped in a cab to go see Carlos’ man, and after several phone calls to his contacts in customs, he told me that the customs guys told him that I have no option but to remove the bike from Peru after the 90 days, no “if”s, “and”s or “but”s.
I came back to the hotel feeling rather defeated – I had a flight out of Lima booked for the following afternoon, but no solution for the motorcycle. I called Carlos again, and he very kindly offered that I could leave the Multistrada in temporary storage at his service department. The boys had meanwhile set-up an appointment to get their tires changed the next morning, so I planned to run over there with them, drop the bike off, fly home, and deal with it later. I borrowed the hotel garden hose, and set about cleaning my bike up with my wash towel, and boy there was a lot of mud and crud on that bike after 7400 miles! We spiffed ourselves up and jumped in a cab to go get some dinner down on the Miraflores beach, and wound up at the fanciest restaurant out there – the Costa Verde. We had an excellent appetizer of ceviche and octopus (I would never eat octopus because they’re intelligent creatures – until I saw them eating each other on Planet Earth), a decent main course of seabass, all washed down with a pretty quaffable (sorry) bottle of Peruvian cabernet – the first bottle of wine on the trip. We caught a cab back to the hotel through a seedy part of Lima, and hit the hay - looking forward to getting on the plane, honestly.
The Multi looking kinda shiny ‘n clean outside our hotel in Lima
Wednesday, March 17th – We awoke in our suffocating little room at the Hostel El Farol after a poor night’s sleep – it had been way too hot without aircon, and Larry’s nasal passage vibrations had been a serious disturbance. We rode the dirt road along the bay to get some breakfast at one of the Playa’s cafes, and were back out on the highway before 9am, ploughing on southwards through the desert. About noon we got stopped by a highway patrol-type cop who tried to shake us down for some money saying we’d been overtaking over the double-yellow. We folded our arms, shook our heads and didn’t speak any spanish until he gave up and let us go. We cut off the PanAm’ into a little town – think it was Supe Puerto - and had a great Peruvian lunch at a cool restaurant we found after asking some locals.
On a dark desert highway…
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Tuesday March 16th – Pacasmayo was very pretty, kinda like La Jolla, CA, but nicer because it doesn’t have that sheen of money separating you from a genuine beach-town experience, and because it’s way less crowded. We had some brekkie on the terrace and then went for a stroll to look at the fishing boats and the little pier where early-rising fishermen were selling their catches. My ”hail-mary” destination for this trip was Lima, Peru …Panama was the original goal, crossing the Darien was the icing on the cake, but reaching Lima was my fantasy, given the ultimate need to return to work – and now we were only two days away from Lima, I wanted to linger in this happy place. The lads were ready to go, so after the last coupla photos of the three amigos, we saddled up and took the thru-town route back to the highway getting lost pretty good on the way. Once on the PanAmerican, we were back in the desert and immediately into a mini sand storm, with sand spread liberally across the roadway, and gusts pushing the bikes around. Ten miles out, Larry swerved violently onto the hard shoulder and came to a rapid stop – he’d picked up a nail in the rear, our first puncture in about the 20,000 motorcycle mile total of the three bikes. Luckily we were out of the worst of the sandy wind, and spent the next hour in the blazing sun putting a new tube in.
Tres Amigos
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Monday, March 15th – Monday dawned bright and clear, but stepping out of our air-conditioned hotel room felt like stepping into a sauna. We poked around the town square for a few minutes, and bumped into one of the friendly customs guys from the border while I was taking a picture of a tree with weird tendrils hanging down with flowers on them, and pods the size of a large can o’ beans. We got rolling on the highway which ran out to the coast and through a lovely little seaside town, and we remembered how much we like the coast roads – we hadn’t been on a good coast road since the day we left San Jose in Costa Rica. And now we know: we want to ride in the mountains or on the coast, just not the inbetween bits. After a while, the road turned inland and headed due-south through a large desert via a couple of dusty towns. We spent all afternoon holding 70mph with a sandy wind gusting at us across the road, and after getting lost as usual in a large dirty town called Chiclayo, we started to look for the magical little seaside place to stop in – just like the one we’d seen that morning. As the sun was setting we found the La Estacion hotel in the little fishing town of Pacasmayo, and it was the perfect place to spend my birthday night. We had a really great fresh fish dinner at the hotel, and then took a contented evening stroll along the malecon and through the town
View from the terrace of the La Estacion
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Sunday, March 14th – Moe was feeling 75% better Sunday morning as we saddled up early for the day’s goal of making the Peruvian border. We jumped on to the main road only to be deviated back off and into the center of old Quito – and of course the deviation signs ran out leaving us lost in a maze of tiny, crowded one-way streets. With some aid from the locals we were soon back on the PanAmerican highway heading south along the mountainous spine of the continent. I had been watching the altimeter on my Garmin Rino GPS, and ever since we arrived in Bogota our altitude had varied between 6,000 and 11,000 feet - mostly around the 9-10,000 feet mark, where life seems remarkably similar to sea level except that the carbureted KTM’s were struggling with their overly-rich jetting. By contrast my altitude-compensating, fuel-injected Ducati engine was running incredibly well, and I posted my best gas mileage of the trip this day with a 150 mile stretch taken around 70 mph returning 60.2 mpg. Problem was the mountain roads were busy and winding, meaning we were making ground too slowly for our goal, so we decided to cut out toward Guayaquil onto the flat coastal plain and run for the border. The pass we took to descend westwards, shown on the map as Highway 60 (but the road signs said 40!?), firstly ran up to 12,500 feet which I was all excited about, and then descended through an absolutely beautiful valley, which made me sad to be leaving the mountains.
The bikes draw a crowd wherever we stop
Beautiful 12,500 foot pass coming down from the mountains in Equador
Saturday, March 13th – One of my arbitrary goals of this trip was to stand on the equator – and today we were going to do exactly that. But first we had to get over our Friday night hangover. We got in from our final Ibarran bar visit in the wee hours of Saturday morning, and thanks to my many years of empirical training, I was up at 7am feeling good and catching up with my log on one of the hotel’s internet computers. Moe was suffering from his last coupla whiskeys pretty badly, so he relaxed while Larry and I went out for a spot of breakfast at a packed corner caff with large pans of good-looking food and great aromas. $2.50 bought us a big plate of food, glass o’ juice, 1/2 an avocado – and it was delicious. We went walkies ’round town and had a great time looking through the super-busy market next to the railway station. I love poking around the market in a new place – it’s like looking in someone’s closet: you get insights into their life you wouldn’t normally find.
Killer Saturday morning breakfast spot in Ibarra
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