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Claire’s video of our ride through Canyon del Pato and the Rio Santos:
Monthly Archives: July 2011
Canyon del Pato is Hell on a tandem, pretty much two days of Hell. It was the best way north in the Andes from Huaraz without backtracking to a road lined with illegal coca plantations and bandits; not our favorite type of cultural interaction.
By Bob and Claire Rogers We leave Huaraz northbound eventually to Cajamarca, in hopefully less than two weeks, probably our next usable Internet. We hope to catch a large agricultural fair there. The route will stay high in the Andes, …
by Bob and Claire Rogers It sounded like a parade, a particularly raucous parade. It seemed to be on the same alley as hospedaje Nana, in Huaraz. We love a parade. This parade, this band, was very special, from Jardin …
I was very very sick with bronchitis in the room below where this band and dancers performed constantly. Imagine being unable to breathe, coughing, sweating and freezing, not eating, and having to listen to this from dawn until after midnight.
httpv://youtu.be/l0ExMLY9zB8> After the first days along the Pan American highway, we turned inland and began climbing the foothills, and started getting sick. first Claire had a cold at Barranco, along the coast where we took a couple of days off, …
The traffic in mid-town Lima seems a bit better than most large Asian cities, but still a challenge. Claire claims I get a little macho in city traffic, and she might be right. It does take a bit of aggression to get anywhere, always with a bail-out in mind; she doesn’t always see that from the back seat. She’s the brave one, and I listen when she says “enough.”
So, will this be the tour that starts in a monsoon and finishes in a hurricane? Claire here, so far all I’ve forgotten is my hairbrush, but I`ve decided that for now I don’t need it. Bob put the bike back together in record time. We arrived around 9:00 and he was done by noon. We slept the rest of the day, had cold showers and went out for dinner (burger and fries). Today we took a shakedown ride and everything works. Zippy appears to have an especially romantic appeal here.
We were fortunate to have uphill headwinds on the downhill side of the Tien Shen mountains in Western China, or it could have been a problem. Our loaded tandem, including us, weighs around 400 pounds. That weight puts such pressure on standard brakes and brake pads that we risk an exploded tire from overheated rims, not a good thing at speed down a steep mountain.