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"On the Trail"
Monday, October 30, 2000: Hoeing the fields and Cutting through the fog--
Other side of the mountains, just barely (40 kms)
Tad here,
Today was an uphill day. For a cyclist the usual connotations of uphill and downhill are flipped. Uphill means work, slow and steady, setting your focus on the next 10 meters. Downhill means cruising, sailing, speed, MOVING EASY, and the open eyes for potholes that do great damage if not foreseen. Well, we were getting our fill of uphill. We climbed first to the small town of Balbanera, home of the oldest Church in Ecuador, built in 1534.
Next stop was Cajabamba, a very small town where a lot of buses seem lodged in a mini-traffic jams. Our last bits of bread for pre-breakfast snack were now fully digested and we were looking for a real breakfast. A nice gal at a little tienda answered the call! She even had grapes, organic from her mother's vine. She had two bunches but when I wanted to buy them both she said she would only sell one as they were a gift. I asked her again if she was sure she wanted to sell them and she said yes to the one bunch. I haven't had grapes since those iodine-flavored ones back in Mexico and these were GOOD! These grapes along with bananas, bread, pasta, and some vegis filled the paunches and the panniers.
I took a picture of some guys loading cajas of cheese onto a bus. It is just another example of how people around here can be make it happen, always room for more. Three guys were loading these big boxes of cheese when one fell from the top of the bus. No matter, they lifted up the broken box and, with cheese juice streaks on their shirts lifted back up to the roof.
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Later mid morning, we stopped for a break and to watch a family plow their field. One of the women (relative to the culture, quite bold) asked me if I wanted to work with them and then jokingly added that she would pay me a dollar. Something in me clicked onto "this is what it is all about" mode and I said sure. For the next 45 minutes first I and then Frank helped break big dirt clods worked up by the cow-plow into little dirt clods. Sebastiana, her aunt, brother, and a few others laughed with us and taught us a bit of Cichua. I learned "May God take care of you"....Tie-tia-meetu-kuidachu. They were preparing the small plot for potatoes, which they would plant the next day. The women were almost all barefooted, the brother cajoled the two cows to pull with a wooden and metal tipped plow.
Stopped at a gas station for a bathroom break. Met a bunch of students and Dr. Martin from the US who hopped out of a bus for a pitstop. One of the students told me about the latin american fiction they were studying and I traded him a book I had for one he really enjoyed. That was a cool connection!
More and more climbing, huffing and puffing in the high altitude. Frank stopped to wait for me at one point and when I got to him he was surrounded by school kids and adults, talking about the trip. People are very interested in our odd two man caravan. Up more and finally hunger pulled us off the road and onto some boulders for a barefoot lunch break...leftover lentils in buns, carrots, and more grapes for dessert. We had a bag of bread but a sneaky dog came around behind us and took off with it. I chased it just for to give it a little lesson, "Don't steal bread from hungry PeaceBikers 101".
Finally, early afternoon we got to the top of the never-ending climb. It looked a lot like my visions of some places in, say, Tibet... high, ridged grasslands, wind, and lonely roads.
We looked over the hills on the otherside and saw some clouds below us. As we rode down, for a change, the clouds turned into a fog. Soon our sunny day had turned into a glowing foggy blanket. And then it got darker, deeper, and colder. After a few minutes downhill with fog droplets condensing on my armhair I finally pulled over and put on my jacket. Frank, decided to tough it out and we both thought that the fog would soon pass.
It was tough to see vehicles but I saw two busses and a truck nearly collide. Another five minutes of the freezing fog and I stopped again, shivering, and put on more of my winter wear. It was a bit ironic because we had, just a few hours earlier, joked about packing our winter wear away for a few weeks now that we were heading down to the coast. I was now bundled up but still cold and the fog was not letting up.
We stopped and asked a family constucting a house if there was a place to stay and they said we could stay at the newly constructed Campesinos Hostal. This place was perfect, 60 cents, clean bunks, and for 40 cents more we got a rice dinner from the watchman Segundo! I was too tired to do anything more than eat and then grab a couple extra blankets and hit the bunk. Frank worked at fixing his odometer which had stopped halfway through the fog.
Finally warming up,
TAD