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What pops up in your mind when you hear about a bicycle race/expedition of 11.000 kilometres which is called “The Andes Trail”?
What can you expect from a tour crossing the south American continent in almost its full length?
Adventure, stunning scenery, thin air, remote villages, tough times, Indians in colourful costumes, endless rough roads, freezing temperatures, impressive snow covered mountains, llamas, determination, extreme winds, Machu Picchu?
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| A modest bikeride route |
All answers are true. But where do you start your story after cycling four months with an international group of 20 persons from the Mitad-del-Mundo monument at the equator near Quito, to Ushuaia, the most southern town in the world nicknamed the Fin-del-Mundo? A ride along, through and over the longest mountain range in the world. All participants have their own version of the “story of the day”. In total hundreds of “Cycle Diaries”. We picked a few of the most memorable days to get an impression.
Peru – September 2nd, 2008
Parc National Huascarán
The night has been freezing cold. The measurements range between minus 4 and minus 10. The tents are covered with a layer of frost and the drinking bottles are filled with ice. Everyone is shivering at the breakfast table with hot coca-tea, which seems to be a good medicine to avoid altitude sickness. Our cook Kirsten is it still too cold to fold her tent and others miss the ability to spread the jam on their bread. The first sunbeams make life much more comfortable and the temperature rise rapidly.
Start of the day : a bush camp at 4.200 meter. Destination of the day : a bush camp at 3.000 meter. In between : 119 kilometres including 90 kilometres off road and a lot of climbing. I can think of easier rides, but also one of the most beautiful days of the tour with brilliant mountain scenery is waiting.
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| Huascaran National Park |
We enter after a couple of kilometres the entrance of Parc National Huascarán. The parc officials ban most cars from their ground, but we are allowed to drive our 4×4 to support the cyclists and provide lunch. The road is a vague chain of loose sand, gravel and rocks. It’s rock-no-roll. For the next couple of hours we don’t see cars or other kinds of human civilization. Groups of giant Puya Raymondi along the road gets our attention. The large bromeliads can only be found in a few isolated places in the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, the flowers reach 10 meter in the sky and can grow more than 100 years.
The dirt road continues to climb and climb to an ear-popping altitude of 4.882 metres; the highest point of the whole expedition. The condors in the sky observe us from above and see how we are absorbed completely in the immense landscape. The smaller you are, the greater you feel. This is thé Andes, this is thé Trail. Not many people have cycled here before. We pass ice fields, see turquoise little lakes, can spot our first herd of llamas, cycle below massive glaciers and set our eyes to the even higher mountains in the far distance. One of them is Peru’s second highest peak, Yerupajá with 6.634 meter. Fortunately no one gets really altitude sickness and everyone can enjoy the breathtaking scenery. Literally. We are grasping for air – it feels like breathing through a straw – and cycle for 20 kilometres on a ridge at an altitude between 4.600 and 4.900 meter. The ridge marks also the river basin. Rain drops which fall on the right side of the road will end up after a only a couple of hundred kilometres in the Pacific; rains drops on the left side of the road end up in the Amazon basin and thousands of kilometres further in the Atlantic Ocean.
The lunch is after 40 kilometres and most of us reach it after 6 hours cycling, including taking countless stops for pictures. Still 80 kilometres to go and the time is close to 2 PM.
Sunset is 6 PM and darkness half an hour later. What to do? Just keep on cycling and see if you reach camp before dusk.
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| Huascaran National Park |
The first half after lunch is a spectacular fast downhill on a well paved winding road. We drop in 40 kilometres – and in less than an hour – 1.500 meters, before the dirt road starts again. The last week we have learned that 40 kilometres on Peruvian dirt roads means at least 3 hours of cycling. We all forget that we are fatigue and keep on pedalling. We wave to little kids and greet colourful dressed Indians with “hola”. They welcome us – or not – with “gringo, gringo” which means something like foreigner or stranger. Some kids start to cry and run to their parents when they see white people moving forward on blinking aluminium creations. We try to avoid crossing donkeys, pigs, sheep, goats and chickens and are stopped a few times at some police checkpoints where the officials try to do their job properly. Their eyes fall open widely from disbelief as we explain in our few word Spanish where we come from today. If they ask us our destination, we tell them that we are on our way to Ushuaia, another 9.000 kilometer further south, they declare us for insane and let us roll on.
We pass narrow gorges, follow fast floating rivers and the scenery is once more fabulous; it’s like the décor of a western movie. The setting sun between the mountains makes the panoramas even more striking. Geert and Gerard are first and reach camp just before sunset. The others arrive all within an hour. Some before, others after dusk. Georges and Cees arrive as last with help of the shining headlights of the 4×4. What a day! 11 hours on the road. But what a road? Everyone is full of stories at the dining table, which is 25 degrees warmer than the breakfast table.
Bolivia – October 6th, 2008
Salt, Salt, salt…
The destination for today is Tahua, a small settlement at the north side of Salar de Uyuni, world’s largest salt lake. We cycle the 75 kilometres as a group to avoid getting loss around the labyrinth of roads on the slopes of Volcán Tunupa of 5.400 meter. The roads look more like single mountain bike tracks, than proper roads which lead to the largest salt lake in the world. It is once more a great challenge for the support vehicles. We know that we have to follow the electricity poles and that we make a big loop around the red coloured cone of the volcano before we get the first glimpse of the massive salt plain.
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| Salar de Uyuni |
After tens of little climbs the Salar appears suddenly like an ocean of white snow, salt, ice… Stunning. Dazzling. Startling. Impressive. Extraordinary… Do we have more words to describe it? As an instinctive reaction we stop all together our bikes to sink in the first impressions of what we see. I think that Moses must have felt the same when he saw for the first time the Promised Land when he was standing at Mount Nebo. The feelings are maybe the same, the actions probably not. We take our digital camera’s to make pictures and shoot film. If Moses would have had the opportunity, he would probably have done the same.
We cycle slowly down and end up in a nice western-style accommodation in Tahua. You wouldn’t expect this in such a deserted village where all houses are very sober, abandoned or destroyed. A few of us go directly to the shoreline of the Salar, to get a taste of what the day of tomorrow will bring. A special day is waiting.
Each of us cycled already on many places all over the world, but how should you call cycling on the Salar? It’s bizarre, it’s unreal, it’s surrealistic. It’s Salvatore Dali in optima forma.
No tracks, or should we say tracks everywhere. It depends how you look at it. With a size of 12.000 square kilometres, which is a quart of the Netherlands, you can cycle with closed eyes for tens of kilometres. No problem. Even closed eyes and your hands not on the handlebars. No Problem. The only thing you have to do is to pedal, pedal and pedal. One problem. It looks if you don’t come an inch closer to your destination. But, what’s your destination? The only navigation you have are the mountains in the far distance, 50, 100 or even more kilometres away.
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| Salar de Uyuni |
Nature created salt ridges of half a centimetre high. Everywhere on the salt lake hexagonals – a shape with six angles – have been formed. Strange. Why not four, five or seven angles ? You can find other shapes, but that’s the same as to find a clover with four leaves. Nature is weird, but fascinating.
You hear the salt ridges crackle below your tires like fresh snow. Stopping your bike for a second means : silence. SILENCE in capitals. No breeze, no wind, no car engines, no birds, no nothing. Absolute silence. Silence and surrounded by a white plain as far you can look!
Yes, you see in the distance your fellow-cyclists as small black dots moving slowly forward, like ants on a giant sheet of paper. Heaps of pictures are shot and the film camera is running out of batteries. Too much to shoot unique pictures.
We cycle 40 kilometres from the shoreline at Tahua to Isla de los Pescadores in the heart of the Salar. The small island is overgrown by thousands of Trichoreus cacti. Huge cacti of 4, 5, 6 meters high. Impressive. Especially if you imagine that the island is surrounded by white, white, white salt. We make lunch at the island and Irishmen Sean and Mick, Frenchwoman Bene and Dutchman André dress up like the Four Daltons : Red striped ponchos, a cowboy hat and a cigar. Great fun. The cameras keep on clicking.
Another 60 kilometers of cycling on the salt lake is waiting for us after lunch. Destination : Hotel Playa Blanca also located at the salt lake, and made of… of course : salt. Walls made out of salt blocks, salt tables, salt chairs, salt beds and a small museum with salt sculptures like llamas and Indians. The salt hotel doesn’t have electricity or heating. The altitude of the lake and the hotel is 3.653 meter and results in freezing temperatures after sunset. The dinner is served by candle light and everyone wears his or her warmest clothes. The soup, plain spaghetti and chicken taste wonderful after a day out in the Salar. For the taste we add just a little bit of … yes, salt.
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Copyright © 2009 Wilbert Bonné
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