To Chiclayo, Sunday 3 September
The Peruvian customs inspector sits at a table on a veranda outside the Customs House. The inspector is new to the job. This is his first shift. Ming and I are his first bikers. He says, ‘Look, everything will be easy just so long as you don’t hurry me.’
Guidebooks to South and Central America continually warn of corrupt officials. Perhaps I have been fortunate in my experiences – or possibly fulfilment follows expectation. I don’t expect to be asked for a bribe. I presume the inspector is seeking compassion. He has come to the right man. I am panicked by paperwork.
A uniformed customs officer sits beside the inspector. The uniform is neat and carries a burnished pistol with burnished bullets in a polished leather holster on his polished leather belt. He has worked this beat for a while, sitting beside previous inspectors. Unfortunately, he hasn’t paid attention and is less help than wet bread.
Completing the paperwork takes the best part of an hour. Success is accompanied by many sighs of relief and much shaking of hands and wishes of good luck. Ming and I leave the bikes and cross the road for a juice – freshly squeezed oranges – delicious.
The inspector calls us back. He is suffering doubts. He has a nagging fear that we are short of a document. We should wait. An experienced inspector is due on the next shift, a mere matter of thirty minutes.
The uniform considers our delay to be a great waste of everyone’s time.
The inspector enquires when the uniform last experienced a foreign biker.
The uniform is unable to recall.
Ming and I sit and read our guidebooks while the inspector talks on the radio.
The radio advises him not to worry.
The inspector is a worrier (as am I). Why do people tell worriers not to worry? And the inspector is correct. Delving through back files, he discovers a foreign biker’s papers. We require a customs permit to export our bikes from Peru. The inspector finds the permits, fills in our details, stamps and signs them and we are on our way – except for one final piece of advice: ‘Be careful. Don’t ride through Sullana. In Sullana you will get robbed. Lots of tourists are robbed.’
When officials in a country keen on tourism warn you to avoid a place, avoid it. Ming and I avoid Sullana – although not entirely. The highway south to Pirua forks left at the outskirts to Sullana. Hence my knowledge of the city …
Not only is Sullana remarkable for its citizens’ propensity for robbing tourists: Sullana has also discovered a method of counteracting global warming. Citizens spread plastic garbage across the country. The garbage helps retain the soil’s humidity and reflects the heat back up at the sun. The city saves on garbage disposal and the world profits from the lack of pollution caused by garbage trucks. The sole disadvantage to this system is the stink. The surrounds of Sullana stink of wet putrid fish.
We ride in shirtsleeves across flat dry land. At Pirua we join the Pan-American Highway. Chiclayo is 264 kilometres south across the Sechura Desert. For the first fifty kilometres the desert is studded with flat-topped thorn trees. The trees are decorated with plastic bags and plastic sheeting blown by the wind off heaps of garbage dumped along the road edge. The road is straight bar a few gentle curves. White markers register the distance from Lima. A shrine at K931 is in memory of Riki. Was Riki driving? Did he lose control? Fall asleep? Did a tyre explode?
And what did for Tony Ramirez at K909?
The desert is full of mysteries.
Why did someone select the shade beneath a particular tree as home for his nine beehives? The tree is no different from its neighbours. Tracks cross from nowhere and lead to nowhere. An isolated hut stands sixty metres off the road. Why sixty? Why not one hundred – or fifty metres further south or north?
Everything strikes me as haphazard.
The greatest mystery is why people live here.
They live in low huts built of adobe brick. A fence of sticks offers minimal privacy and protects a yard against wind and sand. The sand, the poverty, the thorn trees are all familiar to me. This could be Somalia, Kenya’s Northern Province or the Ogaden. Only the game is missing, and the camels.
I note small efforts at humanising existence: a sand football pitch, the net missing from the goals and the net supports broken, an adobe church, a basketball ring. Many huts are abandoned, stripped of their roofs. Other huts, exactly similar, are under construction.
Two women spur their donkeys across the road. The women are muffled against the wind. One carries a baby.
A family of three, mother, father, early teenager, plod across a clearing. Each is burdened with firewood. How far have they carried their loads? How far will they travel?
Ming and I zip by on our bikes. We come from a different planet. We possess untold riches – not of money but the riches of escape artists, immense freedom of choice. Our concern is which hotel we should stay at in Chiclayo.
The Royal Horse Artillery mount displays at London’s Royal Tournament. Teams of horses dragging guns and ammunition weave between each other at full gallop. Chiclayo traffic is similar. No one halts at intersections, red lights are for chickens. Fortunately the vehicles are mostly slow and relatively harmless: a mix of yellow Daewoo Tiki taxis the size of fairground bumper cars and 100 cc motorbike rickshaws.
The Daewoo Tikis are manufactured in Korea. Import tax on used vehicles is lower than on new ones, and so all Tikis are pre-used or, as a cab driver tells me, almost new. I imagine an industry in Korea: drivers collect new Tikis from the factory and drive the necessary mileage to satisfy Peruvian customs. A great job for students.
Chiclayo, Monday 4 September
We have found an excellent small hotel. The hotel is a little out from the city centre – Hospedaje San Eduardo on the extension of 7 Jenero. Water is hot, the beds are new, we have tables in our respective windows at which to write. Good tourists, we eat an early breakfast and ride forty-five kilometres to inspect the pyramids at Tucume. The pyramids were built between 1000 and 1300 AD. They are vast and built of adobe bricks. Ming believes that kings wished to demonstrate their divinity by building mountains. I have a different theory. Adobe is made of clay bound with rice straw. Rice straw was the garbage of the period. The kings were attempting a clean-up programme.
Ming climbs a god-made hill to look down on the pyramids. I will look at his photographs. Meanwhile I sit with three students in the site museum’s open-air caféteria. Food and maize beer are typical of the first millennium. I fast while the students chew on goat as old as and tougher than the pyramids. The students find the site magical (or have been told to find the site magical). Their professor tells them that without slaves there would be no monuments. I am delighted by this splendid excuse for slavery. Perhaps the kings, in their divinity, foresaw Peru’s need for a tourist industry and way back in the first millennium set their slaves to work for Peru’s future.
We have done the pyramids and the museum. The museum has the usual ceramics and crudely beaten gold ornaments. Ming descends from a culture that had discovered the wheel and bone china at a time when we Brits were running around in animal skins and painting ourselves blue. Ming is also accustomed to an accuracy in his work that is measured in fractions of millimetres. Peruvian arts and crafts don’t do it for him. We head for the beach.
I lead down a dirt track beside an irrigation ditch. The track ends at a five-acre garbage dump. A small upmarket resort sits right up against the dump. We drive through the resort to a parking lot on the seafront. A dozen open-fronted seafood restaurants face the sea. Monday, and we are the only visitors. Waitresses compete in pleading for our custom.
First we stroll and inspect the fishermen’s traditional boats of reeds bound to a chunk of balsa wood. A few fishermen paddle out through the surf; a few surfers ride the surf back in. The wind is chill. We eat shrimp ceviche – perfect – and crab cooked in a tomato, garlic and onion sauce. Ming drinks orange juice. I have a big bottle of beer. Our combined bill comes to fifteen dollars. The manageress at our hotel earns 150 dollars a month. She works a twelve-hour day. She lives with her mother and her grandmother. She longs to escape to a job in Spain. She can’t. Her mother and grandmother need her. I take her to dinner at a pizza parlour.
Garbage to Cajamarca, Tuesday 5 September
The Pan-American Highway south from Chiclayo crosses what I think of as proper desert. Large road signs announce zones of dunes. The dunes are larger than the signs and announce themselves. Here, on the littoral, no one waves as we pass. Why would they? God created their environment on a bad-hair day. People have turned it into a vast rubbish dump. Not all garbage is dumped in the desert. Many a load is simply dumped on the highway’s hard shoulder. Roadworthy garbage: broken bottles, cans …
We pass an encampment of garbage pickers. Some have built small huts of adobe. Others have erected tents of discarded black plastic sheet – imagine the heat. Three men pick through a recently dumped truckload. Watchful vultures perch on a broken trailer. Cacti are nature’s only representatives. The cacti stand on a ridge above the desert and hold their arms aloft in despair.
Ming wishes to discover whether Peru’s uplands are as desecrated as the littoral. We turn inland through hills that resemble large heaps of builder’s rubble – not a good beginning.
Cajamarca is situated 180 kilometres from the coast and at an altitude of 2750 metres. The road follows a river. The valley is narrow. The hills are naked rock. At their base grow lines of fruit trees. The trees shade water channels that irrigate every inch of flat land. Each small field is loved and cherished, each field a victory won through generations. The emerald of rice paddy gleams against grey rock face. Mango trees glitter with golden orbs.
We climb from valley to valley. Thirty kilometres to go and my rear tyre develops a slow puncture. Ming has a pump. We pump and I sprint. We overtake a convoy of tanker trucks heading for a recently opened gold mine. Cornering becomes difficult. We pump again. The tyre loses air more rapidly. Damn! Sprint and pump. Sprint and pump.
We reach the head of the pass. The terracotta roofs of Cajamarca spread below in a broad valley. Ming rides on ahead while I stop at the first puncture-repair shop. Dark and with tousled hair, the owner has the face of a fourteen-year-old. A baby crawls between his feet; two fighting cocks are tethered outside on a tiny patch of grass. He calls for his wife to care for the baby. The wife is heavily pregnant.
He fixes my tube while I admire his cocks. He is a cockfighting fanatic. His wife doesn’t approve. She yells at him for wagering money they don’t have. He finds two punctures in line with previous holes. He advises me to buy a new tyre. I pay him a dollar eighty for patching the punctures. I add two dollars and tell the kid the extra is to wager on the next cockfight. He giggles happily.
Ming is back. He has found rooms at a hotel where the cash goes to charity. We reach the hotel. In Ming’s absence, the manageress has let all rooms for the night to a German tour group. So much for charity.
We find another hotel, big rooms, a rude manager. The handbasin in my bathroom leaks onto the floor. The towel might dry the nail on my little finger. Walls need painting. Floors require a clean. No undersheet and the mattress is stained. Yuk!
Built on the lower slopes of a mountain valley, Cajamarca is early Hispanic colonial. It is a town of small, mostly single-floor houses facing cobbled streets and should be charming. Cajamarca is dingy. Atahualpa, last of the Incas, was trapped and executed here by the Spaniards and their Inca allies. Now the inhabitants concentrate on tourists. Beggars beg, street traders pester, everything is overpriced. And at high altitude the gas in one’s belly expands and then escapes – often noisily. My advice? Give the town a miss.
We find one positive: a restaurant on the downhill side of the central plaza, Salas. Customers are local bourgeoisie. The food is excellent (main courses three to seven dollars), the waiters ancient, welcoming and professional.
Cajamarca, Wednesday 6 September
Cajamarca remains dingy. Stomach gas continues to expand and escape. Walking to breakfast, I fart as noisily as a flatulent cow. We ride six kilometres to the sulphur baths at the local spa. Ten dollars gets us the full treatment. First we are instructed to walk back and forth for ten minutes on a bed of loose cobbles. The exercise stretches our calf muscles and insteps. Better still, it demands no effort from the white-coated staff. Neither does the next twenty minutes in a single-seater plastic jacuzzi. A fifteen-minute massage completes the treatment. Fifteen minutes does little for biker’s back. In the good old pre-Hispanic days, a visiting Inca would have had the staff’s heads lopped.
This is my fourth month of travel. I have been cold each day that I have ridden across mountains. Ming asks how I expect to survive in the true Altiplano and for 2000 kilometres in early spring through Patagonia. I relent and buy myself a leather bomber jacket for fifty-five dollars.
To Huamachuco, Thursday 7 September
Early mornings are best. I am alert and physically fresh. Today we abandon Cajamarca at six-thirty and with no regrets. The road climbs. Ming freezes. I am enveloped in the warmth both of my new leather jacket and of sartorial superiority. I look splendid. Farmers wave.
The road crosses pale upland pastures where both air and soil are thin. Cows are lethargic. Dogs don’t bother barking. Our destination is Huamachuco. The small town of San Marcos is our first halt. We breakfast at a restaurant on the square: eggs, rolls, coffee, fresh juice. Ming has thawed and the sun is up. We sit on the steps of a monument in the square. Small boys compete to polish my shoes. I ask why they aren’t at school. It is a dumb question and they shrug and giggle among themselves.
We feel good. Ming is content at the lack of garbage. Then we hit dirt. The map doesn’t say dirt. Short stretches of dirt are common in Latin America. Lack of road maintenance is the cause. The tar surface crumbles. Eventually it is scraped away by a mechanical grader. Further deterioration follows. I am confident that this will be a short stretch. The surface is loose stone, powder and deep ruts.
It continues and continues.
The Honda hates dirt. I achieve thirty kilometres an hour on the better straights, twenty on the climbs, down to ten on curves. The front wheel bucks in ruts and over rocks. The rear wheel kicks me in the butt. God knows what the countryside looks like. I dare not look. One moment’s inattention and the bike will slide. The slide could be over a precipice and a thousand-foot drop.
Fifty kilometres of this purgatory brings us to Cajabamba, a neat, clean market town. I am exhausted. I am not having fun. We stop for fresh orange juice at a café. The owner tells us the dirt continues to Huamachuco, a minimum of three more hours. She suggests we put the bikes on the Horna Transport omnibus (‘omnibus’ is Peruvian for a standard coach). We try. Horna will take the Honda. The Suzuki is too large. At least the Suzuki is built for the rough stuff. The Honda is a city girl. I fear the road will destroy her. And I am holding Ming back.
I have three hours to wait before the bus departs. I watch Seabiscuit on TV in the café on the corner of the plaza. A gang of kindly helpers lays the Honda on its side in the rear luggage compartment. I pay a dollar sixty as a passenger and nine dollars for the bike. The omnibus takes three and a half hours to reach Huamachuco. The distance is sixty kilometres. The road surface is awful. Some corners are so tight that the bus has to back up a couple of times.
I sit next to a young lady with a plump face and a quiet voice. Her petticoats splay her skirt and she wears a broad-brimmed straw hat with a high crown. She grabs my knee on a couple of bad curves, curves where the edge is so close you look straight down the side of the bus into the abyss. A video of a jungle horror movie plays on TV. The dialogue is English drowned by Latino pop from the hi-fi speakers. I feel a fool having to ask my quiet-voiced companion to repeat herself as she comments on the passing scenery. She clearly believes that, in my old age, I am simple-minded – or that all foreigners are simple.
‘That is a lake,’ she says, spacing her words with care. ‘There are many trout in the lake.’
‘That is the river.’
‘That is the irrigation ditch.’
‘That is wheat.’
‘Those are sheep.’
‘That is rice.’
‘Pardon me?’ I say, and she repeats, with patience, ‘Those are tiles for the roof.’
‘There they are making adobe bricks.’
‘That is a pig.’
My companion reports to fellow passengers the information she feeds me and on my lack of understanding. My fellow passengers listen and add further commentary. These layers of conversation become increasingly complicated. The bike ride has left me exhausted. Falling asleep would be extremely rude.
Ming reaches Huamachuco three hours ahead of the bus. He finds an excellent hotel. The Colonial is a converted colonial townhouse built around two patios. Ming checks the bathrooms: the water is piping hot. Ming books two rooms. He asks a cop outside the cop shop on the plaza for directions to the bus terminal. The cop drives Ming to the terminal in the police pickup.
We eat an excellent dinner at a small steakhouse on the square midway between the police station and the cathedral. The sky is clear. The moon is almost full. Ming is in the mood for wine. Dinner for two accompanied by a litre of surprisingly good Peruvian red sets us back ten dollars. We like Huamachuco. We don’t feel cheated. Strange that two towns in the Andes, both Hispanic colonial and both sited at an altitude of over 3000 metres, should be so different in atmosphere.
On to Trujillo, Friday 8 September
Huamachuco boasts the largest Hispanic colonial plaza in Peru. Buildings are more charming than grand. The central gardens are imaginative and well maintained. The faithful and those without faith are united in their dislike of the cathedral. The original cathedral was built of adobe. It fell down. The new cathedral is a late twentieth-century industrial building in a seventeenth-century setting and resembles an aircraft hanger for small planes. The gates are locked. The janitor will open at eight.
I wait and talk with an elderly schoolteacher. She is an earnest lady, kindly. She cradles a large bunch of roses for the cathedral. A teacher’s monthly salary of 260 dollars is insufficient to help buy medicine for her parents and small gifts for her grandchildren. She asks where I am going. I answer, ‘To Trujillo.’
She tells me that the road should be paved. Funds were apportioned more than ten years ago. Officials embezzled the funds and decamped for Europe. Now the road is in a disastrous state. Huamachuco has become an island. She nods in agreement with herself as she relates the theft of the road funds. ‘Corruption is the tremendous tragedy of our country, señor. Corruption is present at every level of government – even here in the municipality.’
The cathedral janitor is a poor timekeeper.
I go in search and discover a priest raised in Spain’s Rioja. He has spent twenty-two years in Peru. As a young man, he travelled his first parish by mule. When he came to Huamachuco, the cathedral existed as concrete pillars and a curved roof. The parishioners made the bricks and built the walls. Their dream is to build a facade more in keeping with the plaza. A concrete crossbeam supporting the choir loft is the major obstacle.
‘That beam would survive a nuclear war,’ complains the priest.
We talk of the many Protestant sects proselytising in the province.
The priest doesn’t view them as competition. His sole desire is that people come to God. What route they choose is immaterial: Hindu, Buddhist (looking at Ming), whatever …
His might be an unpopular view with a conservative Vatican.
I suspect the priest is too busy struggling with the earthly and spiritual difficulties of his flock to give much care for such strictures. He struck both Ming and me as a remarkable man, kindly, gentle and deeply committed. A new facade for the cathedral would be a just reward for his years of service.
He asks whether I am aware of the first governor of the province under the Spanish. I admit my ignorance. He recites one of those splendid Spanish names that go on and on: Doña Isabella Francesca, Margarita Maria de … de … de … etc., etc.
‘Yes, a woman,’ he says. ‘A woman and an Inca. The names were those she took at baptism. Many of the early governors were Incas.’
The dirt road yesterday was a surprise. I hadn’t prepared myself. I didn’t know how long the dirt would continue or how much worse it might get. I felt that I was holding Ming back. Today I know. We face 160 kilometres of dirt and a wicked climb. I dress accordingly, two sets of long underwear, two pairs of pyjamas pants, two pairs of chinos – two undershirts, two shirts, two jerseys and my new leather bomber jacket. Mounting the Honda is a struggle.
I leave forty minutes ahead of Ming. The road is rutted at the corners. The ruts are filled with fine powder. I ease into the corners and use my feet to steady the bike. The straights are loose stone, ridges and craters. Some parts are only the width of a truck. The drop is terrifying. Traffic is minimal.
The road climbs and winds and climbs and finally frees itself to cross dry windswept fells. The grey crags ahead are lifted from the Scottish highlands. A reed-fringed tarn awakens childhood memories of casting for brown trout. The climb peaks at 13 700 feet. I have ridden forty kilometres in the first two hours. Rather than depressed, I feel elated. This is tough. I am in my seventies. I am riding a small road bike. Surely I am achieving some kind of old man’s record.
I pull off the road at a sod-roofed café. This is the first building I’ve seen in ten kilometres. I am greeted by a party of roadworkers about to leave in a pickup. A couple of holes in the wall are closed against the cold by wooden shutters. Light leaks between the shutters. Four men occupy one of a dozen crude tables. A woman serves the men and returns to the kitchen. The men ignore me. They wear wool ponchos and felt hats and sit hunched over their food. I sit and wait. I wait twenty minutes. No one acknowledges my existence. Finally I give up, go back outside and remount the bike.
I ride a further ten kilometres and stop at another café. Although equally isolated, this café has a tin roof and two windows with glass panes. I clamber off the Honda. A small dog barks and wags its tail. The dog follows me indoors. Six tables have bright plastic tablecloths.
A young woman peers briefly round the rear door and sees an immensely fat bearded European stroking a small dog. Her surprise is natural. She vanishes. I hear voices in the back. The woman reappears in company with an older woman. I explain my bulk by remarking that riding a bike across the fells demands much protection against the cold.
Both woman peek through the window. Sight of the Honda makes them less nervous.
‘Yes,’ the older woman says. ‘Yes, it is cold.’
I ask whether it would be possible to eat.
‘There is soup,’ the older woman says. ‘Soup, and there is meat.’
‘Perfect,’ I say. I sit at a table in the sunlight by a window and unzip my bomber jacket. The café sits on a slight rise with vast views of moors and crags and of distant mountain peaks. A dot appears way down the road. The dot grows. Ming has arrived. Being Chinese, he appears less foreign to the women. The potato soup is warming. The meat is old goat in a charcoal crust.
We ride together. The road rises to 4200 metres. We pass a silver mine owned by a Canadian mining company in which Ming holds shares. Air is thin and cold is permanent. The miners are small men. They appear to crouch inside their coats as they shuffle along the road or ride in the back of a truck. We pass a village comprising mainly of tin huts. Compare the huts with a shipping container and the container would seem luxurious. Life has changed since the days of the Incas: miners have pneumatic drills.
Later, I ask Ming whether he is going to keep his shares in the mining company.
No, owning the shares makes him uncomfortable.
Thus are the perils for a capitalist who travels.
Finally we commence the descent. The road is tar and follows a river gorge, down, down, down. Ming stops to photograph. I stop to pee. I peek over the edge. Ming is photographing the skeletons of trucks that took a shortcut.
The gorge opens to a plain of vast sugar fields. Early evening and we stop at a gas station, drink good coffee and strip off a couple of layers of clothing. A further ten kilometres and we see the lights of Trujillo.
Trujillo has a good feel. It is a bright, open city. The buildings are painted in strong pastel colours. Much of the centre is Hispanic colonial. Our hotel is the Colonial on Independencia, two blocks from the main plaza. I am on the ground floor. Ming is on the first. I have two windows, one onto the rear patio. Our bikes are parked beside the fountain in the front patio. We stroll past tourist restaurants and up a pedestrian street to a small square with a fountain in the middle and four trees. We find a small bar-restaurant and eat shrimp ceviche at a table on the pavement. I follow with a steak. Ming orders calamari and rice. Ming drinks wine, I stick with beer. We have ridden one hell of a ride. We feel very proud of ourselves.
Trujillo, Sunday 10 September
A weekend in Trujillo and I have serviced my soul, the Honda, my belly and my writing obligations. The soul was easiest. Churches abound. El Carmen is a delight and full for Saturday evening Mass. The cathedral is splendid from the outside. I find the interior cold and Sunday service disappointing.
Honda HardCorp on Avenida Nicolás de Pierola services the bike. The mechanic wears slacks and polished shoes and a clean short-sleeved shirt – sufficient cause for suspicion. So I watch. I watch keenly. He completes every job by the book. He changes the oil, adjusts the valves, changes the plug, adjusts the points, greases this, oils that, on and on for three hours. He works while squatting on his polished heels and without getting a single drop of oil on his clothes or on the floor.
He dismounts the rear wheel, has a fresh tyre and tube fitted, remounts the wheel and remains clean. I mount the wheel and I have to sit in the dirt and balance the wheel between my feet. My hands get covered in oil and dirt. So do my trousers and my shirt. And I habitually wipe the sweat from my brow on the back of my hand.
HardCorp’s general manager is a champion trials rider. The technical manager rides a 650 trial bike with the baffles removed from the exhaust. A full assault by a battalion of Special Forces would be quiet in comparison. He takes my little white Honda for a trial run. I tremble for the bike’s innocence.
New rear tyre, tube and a spare tube, new plug, oil change and a full 3000-kilometre service sets me back fifty-six dollars. Back home I would pay fifty-six dollars to have a bike mechanic sneer.
Up in the Andes a Peruvian road rock tore loose one hinge on the Honda’s rear rack box. I don’t know which rock. Maybe it was a pothole. I ask where I can have the hinge fixed. The technical manager inspects the box. The fibreglass is weakened. A new hinge will tear loose. He heads for a biker’s store. I follow. Ming brings up the rear. I am on a small bike and Trujillo traffic is scary. Being sandwiched between two maniacs on barking 650s is terrifying. The tech manager rides a race even when cruising round the block for a glass of milk. Other drivers are the enemy. One-way streets are a challenge. Red lights are for nursery maids. Across town takes twenty minutes. To hell with a bike shop. My nerves are shot. I need a pharmacy.
However, I buy a new box, bigger and stronger, for thirty dollars and, finally, a mirror to replace the mirror smashed when unloading from the hell ship.
Road to Lima, Monday 11 September
Ming the Adventurous scorns the Pan-American Highway as too easy a ride. He is convinced that a road marked as paved on his map is a paved road. I am a disbeliever. Now Ming is way up in the Andes scaring sheep while I take to the shifting sands of the littoral. The phrase sits easy on the tongue. Truth is seldom poetic. I am riding across real desert in a real sandstorm. Sand stings my cheeks. Visibility is fifty metres maximum. Cops nursemaid me.
The first two cops are surprised to see an old man with a sand-filled beard appear out of the mist of sand. They wave me down. Am I OK? Where am I going? Where have I come from? Mexico? On this little Honda? Never.
Except for the sea trip, I insist.
The cops think I’m nuts. A shortened version of the hell ship voyage convinces them.
They radio ahead a few kilometres to the next squad car. These cops disbelieve the first cops. In due course I appear out of the sandstorm. They wave me down. Is it true? That I rode from Mexico? That I am riding to Tierra del Fuego? That I am over seventy?
Absolutely.
They shake their heads and mutter the Peruvian cop equivalents of ‘wow’ and ‘crazy’. They shake my hand and clap me on the back and tell me to be careful on the Pan-American Highway in a sandstorm. Bus and truck drivers have no respect for small bikes. Better keep to the hard shoulder.
I would be impolite in mentioning that truckers dump garbage on the hard shoulder.
So the ride continues all morning and through the first hours of the afternoon: squad car to squad car, worries as to my wellbeing, wonder at my adventure. The storm clears in mid-afternoon. Finally the desert is visible. Through millennia, the sea wind has scoured the hills bare and sculpted the sand into curls and peaks and steep ridges. Long lines of surf unfold across the beaches to my right. Despite the garbage, the landscape is extraordinarily beautiful. I am having a great time.
Peru is immense. Trujillo to Lima is 560 kilometres and this is a short leg. Lima to Cuzco comes next: 1100 kilometres. I stop at a small town that may have a name – if so, I missed it. A small single room with bathroom sets me back seven dollars. The shower is electrically heated. I check the wiring and choose to stay dirty. The internet café is safer. The guys and girls recommend a fish restaurant. They instruct a motor-rickshaw driver where to take me. The driver doesn’t listen. He is in shock. Here is a real foreigner, an old man with a beard. The driver is already rehearsing the tale he will tell his kids back home. So he turns left at the end of the block. He should turn right. I tell him he should turn right. What’s the point? He has no idea where the restaurant is. He can’t recall its name. So I walk.
I find the restaurant and order ceviche, which is vast and mostly fish and octopus, with a few prawns, and a big bottle of Crystal lager.
I am halfway to Lima. I am warm. I am not breaking wind. I prepare to drift into well-earned sleep and dream of Ming freezing his butt as he bounces over a rock road. Ha!
Road to Lima, Tuesday 12 September
I ride the desert again. A young man stands beside the road. He wears freshly laundered red jogging pants, blue top, white baseball cap reversed, clean trainers with their laces loose. He is miles from anywhere; miles, even, from the nearest bush. He stands with his hands in his pockets. His dress and posture are familiar from a thousand bus stops, London, Paris, New York: the confident kid ready to bop.
A few miles separate the kid from a middle-aged couple tending a roadside shrine. To a son? A brother?
No car. Did they come by bus or by collectivo (shared taxi)?
How often do they make this pilgrimage?
Does loss dominate their lives?
I stop for breakfast at a restaurant in the middle of nowhere. The restaurant is an industrial building with windows on three sides. Continual wind has twisted the arched side doors and broken the glass panes. Two waitresses huddle from the wind at a table protected by a pillar on the extreme right of the big space. Fifty tables are laid with red tablecloths. I am the lone customer. Did the owner expect coach traffic?
The waitresses invite me to sit with them. I order American breakfast from the menu: fried eggs, fresh orange juice, rolls with butter and jam, coffee. I ask for the eggs to be fried English style (soft yolks) – such are the last small futile claims of English independence.
The waitresses are young and pretty and giggly. They earn seventy dollars a month plus room and board. Seventy dollars is slave money. Yes, they say, but needs must. They are unarmed by education yet TV informs them of alternative worlds – there is the cruelty. One had a novio. He left. What is their future? Marriage to a passing truck driver? Oh, for a magic wand with which to change their lives.
Two cops enter, nod to me and sit at the far side of the restaurant. They finish their meal while I am conversing with the waitresses. I ask for my bill. The cops have already paid. Has an old man’s need for protection spread the entire length of the Pan-Americano?
The road passes vast chicken farms. Desert land is cheap. No need to clean up or reuse. Barns are full for a while, and then abandoned. Wind tears the sheeting. The barns become raggedy and spectral. Finally only the skeleton remains. The skeleton, too, buckles beneath the wind.
I take a late lunch at a four-table village restaurant: excellent tongue stew with rice, orange juice, coffee. Meals offer pot luck in whom I meet. Mada, six, and Rosita, twelve, join me. Mada shows me her schoolbook. Her handwriting is neat and her drawings are good and humorous. Rosita has left her schoolwork at home – or is shy of its quality (she has her backpack). They repeat for me my mantra: education is the road to woman’s liberty. I give Mada eighty cents for chocolate. Mada spends twenty cents on two huge chocolate-coated Chupa Chups. She will give the change to her mother.
The Peruvian cops of the Pan-Americano are correct: truck drivers and coach drivers show neither respect nor mercy for the rider of a small bike. The freeway into Lima is terrifying. The spires and domes of the cathedral are visible above the rooftops. I turn right across the river and am in Lima’s historic centre. The Hostal Roma is on Rica. I find it and am shown to a very basic room. Too basic. The hostal comes with the blessing of Journey Latin America and the Footprint guidebook. Sixteen dollars is way overpriced. I complain and am moved to a room with marginally more space and a bathtub of white tiles. The water is hot. The towel is adequate. Staff lift the Honda up the steps into the vestibule. Much is forgiven.