Cuenca/Ecuador – Trujillo/Peru
Almost 4 days we spend in the nice, Ecuadorian town of Cuenca mainly because of modifications to our bikes. We want to convert the brakes. Zooming down hills up to 25km in a row with a heavy recumbent, the rim brakes are not up to it – enormous wearout at brake pads and rims (at the moment I have the 4th front rim on this tour), lack of braking power, constant readjustment. Now we try it with front disc brakes.
This pays off immediately, because in contrast to first-class roads in the north of the country, the roads here are sometimes very holey. Behind every curve of the asphalt can suddenly be interrupted.
After we drove through all Ecuador through the mountains, now we go into the lowlands. With each level meter counted down, it becomes warmer and warmer.
We reach the Peruvian border.
At the border station we meet an elderly lady from Berlin, who is travelling alone in a van through South America for more than a year. She is happy, after bad experiences with the Peruvians, the leave the country behind. The Ecuadorian border officials adopt us, as some of their fellow countrymen in recent days, with a warning that Peru is dangerous.
The landscape changes. It is flat, the vegetation is meagre. Where isolated trees still grow in dry sand areas they reworked to firewood. Harvested fields are burned. Garbage burns. It stinks. The isolated, small towns look colourless, poor, neglected. Abruptly almost any vegetation ends, and instead there are garbage dumps as far as the eye can see.
The people change. ‚Gringos‘ we now need to hear more often. When cycling we annoy us on buses and trucks that seem to try passing us as close as possible, although the opposite lane is available and freely visible to the horizon. From a more aggressive mood of the Peruvians, we have occasionally been reported.
In a place that looks like any other, we stop, we want to eat something. Before our bikes are parked, a police officer stands next to us and tells us every hand to a pistol-shaped, that we are in the ‚Red Zone‘. We should better eat somewhere else, and he escorts us a step further. Later, another police escort. At least they keep the buses at a distance.
So far we don’t have any problem, we do not feel unsafe, but the first impression is not very positive.
We encounter an incredible cricket plague, even the locals have not yet experienced. Two places on our way are entirely covered with about 3-4cm wide crickets. At each step it cracks like the crushing of bubble film. In the restaurant they jump to our heads. The hotel bed we share with more crickets than at a night outdoors. By all means they are tackled, brushed together, with large scoops shovelled into bags and burned.
Likewise, there are numerous motor rickshaws, known under its name used in Asia ‚Tuk Tuk‘. In red, yellow and blue they vitalize the streets, and again and again you have to wonder how much you can transport with it.
We are in the city of Trujillo in the ‚Casa de Ciclistas‘, ‚House of the cyclists‘, by Lucho, a bicycle madman, who welcomes every cyclist, and many were already here, you know from the media. Meanwhile, it is almost 1000 long distance cyclists in 23 years.
What happens next? Through difficult mountains on unpaved ways or through drab desert with a constant, strong head wind, but on a good and flat road. First, a little break.
Tom
photos to this article: Cuenca/Ecuador – Trujillo/Peru : Fotos
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