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Two Feet in the Andes

Life here in Peru continues apace, with adventure around every corner. We’ve decided to keep the finer details of our discovery of Manchester a secret for now and continue this literary diversion with our next little escapade. Consider this a sideline.

Ever since the internal combustion engine was first mounted onto a chaises and two or more wheels people have gone for scenic drives in the country. There’s nothing nicer than the relaxation of the open road, the sound of the miles rolling away under turning wheels and undiscovered countryside revealing itself from behind sweeping bends and undulating hills. With the addition of a lazy sunny sky and a picnic basket there is no finer way to spend any day.

Of course, this is all based on the assumption that the vehicle has working brakes, an engine that can pull its own weight up the hills and that the sunny day isn’t 40-something degrees in the shade. Furthermore, its making the assumption that the scenic drive isn’t taking place on one of the worst roads in Peru (as described by the Peruvian Department for Civil Engineering), that the road is tarmaced and that the vehicle isn’t a 3-wheeled motor taxi, or tuk tuk that was never intended by its designers to be taken outside of city roads. And flat roads at that. Only a couple of English travelers with a bit of time on their hands and far too much imagination would dream of such as a so-called scenic drive. Or to be more specific. Only Elizabeth Peel would dream up such an idea.

Yes, I wash my hands of this idea. This time it was all Liz’s doing. Not content with paddling a canoe into unknown parts of the Amazon for months on end, she cooks up ideas like this while actually still paddling the canoe in the middle of nowhere. “When we get back......” She didn’t specify where ‘back’ was. “.......we should buy a tuk tuk and drive over the Andes to Nasca. Just think, we could drive all the way through the cloud forest and up onto the high altiplano of the Andes. Then we could drive all the way down the other side. Wouldn’t it be wonderful! What do you think?”

I thought it was a crazy idea and quite frankly, it’s turned out to be exactly that. Totally and utterly crazy. However, I answered with my heart and not my head. The heart said 'You have a passion for fun and adventure. Live life. Give it a go.' The head said 'That’s as crazy an idea as I’ve ever heard.' The whole idea was so crazy I was laughing about it every time I thought about it over the next few days while we negotiated swamps and muddy waters. Eventually my head thought that anything that made me laugh so much couldn’t be such a bad idea, perhaps. The plan was hatched and all we had to do was buy a 3 wheeled motor taxi somewhere, load it up with everything we’d brought over to South America with us, including a canoe drive off into the hills. Of course we had to finish negotiating the anacondas and caiman and get ourselves out of the jungle first but that was by the by.

A month and a half later we had indeed negotiated our way down the Rio Manuripi and got ourselves back out of the jungle via a fast and dusty blast of a few hundred miles up a dirt road to Cojiba, a quick hop west through Brazil and a final leg down the border of Peru to Puerto Maldonado. There we spent a day or two putting the word around town that a couple of Gringos were in the market for a tuk tuk and eventually found Jose. A young failing taxi driver who under instruction from his young wife had been told to swap the smell of exhaust fumes in Peurto Maldonado for the smell of wood smoke in Cajamarca as a charcoal burner. He needed the money and we needed the tuk tuk. Within four days he was richer, we were then new, sort of proud owners of a motor taxi and the local Peruvian Customs Officer was a little bit richer from the bribes we paid to get the ‘special permission’ required as non citizens to buy a vehicle in Peru.

A 3 wheeled motor taxi or tuk tuk is nothing more than a cannibalized 125cc motorcycle that’s been chopped in half and had a double sedan chair and a couple of wheels added to the back with the addition of a windscreen and canopy to the front. Out of the factory these things have a claimed break horsepower of 9.6bhp. Ours was four years old, the odometer had broken when it read 41,000 kilometres and now probably had a break horsepower of 7bhp at best. It had also lost its brakes and some important parts had been replaced with pieces of stretched rubber. We now intended to drive, or ride it (I’m not sure which) over some of the highest mountains in the world and on one of the worst roads in the world at that. It was always going to be more of a question of how close we were going to get to Nasca on (or in) our little motor taxi that how long it was going to take to reach Nasca. We were never under any illusions that we would make it but we were going to give it a try. We spent a couple of days riding around Puerto Maldonado getting used to the heady acceleration of it and having minor things like breaks fitted before setting off into the western horizon and to the foothills of the Andes.

Word had soon spread around Puerto Maldonado that two crazy gringos had bought a motor taxi and were going to Nasca on it. Peruvians love a good belly aching laugh and as a consequence we set off early one morning with a crowd of onlookers blocking our way, running alongside us, and easily keeping up as we navigated our way out of the town. Taking a couple of unplanned shortcuts down a few back roads we left the crowds behind and it was just as well. With less than a mile under our belts the engine died at a set of traffic lights and I set off on foot with a petrol can for the nearest gas station. A precursor of things to come I wondered. Absolutely.

With the tank now full of petrol we drove up and down streets bereft of street names or directional signs looking for the road to Cusco. There’s only one road out of Puerto Maldonado; in one direction is the ferry crossing over the Rio Madre De Dios to Brazil and in the other is Cusco. We asked a few people for directions to the road for Cusco and five times we ended up at the Airport. No one drives to Cusco. The road’s too bad so everyone flies; except us of course. Eventually we left the shops and streets behind and the road opened out before us with cut forest and cows all around us. The potholes on what was once a surfaced road in the town soon turned to loose stones and sand as it made its way out across the remaining edge of the Amazon Basin to the cloud forest foothills. The road had been bladed to a rough finish with a sharp camber into deep ditches to catch the rapid run off of wet season rains. The tuk tuk soon developed a love affair with these ditches instead of the road. At a limping speed the rear suspension would bump over stones and rocks, bouncing us from side to side. Liz had to sit on the up-camber side of the vehicle to help me battle to keep it on the road as the front wheel continuously tried to turn into the ditch and the whole thing would progressively rock from side to side, more and more until only 2 wheels were in contact with the ground for most of the time. As local buses pelted us with missiles and dust we realised this was going to be quite a challenge. Or at least, even more of a challenge than we first thought it was going to be. This realisation was a little worrying as we knew it was a crazy idea right from the beginning and now our initial doubts had turned to a steady determined terror of a ditch hunting see-saw on wheels and gob-fulls of dust while being randomly shot at by hurtling stones. Ah, the stuff of adventure.

Surprisingly, we made good progress and the miles rolled away and Cusco crept slightly closer. The road from Puerto Maldonado to Cusco is just over 500 kilometres. 300 miles or so. On the first day we covered 80 kilometres in 9 hours. Day 2 saw us covering 28 kilometres in a wheezing 7 hours. After that we realised it was wiser to stop counting and would know how close we were to Cusco when we got there. Low, flat plains of sand and stone turned to undulating hills and a thousand wooden bridges. Every bridge was a variation on the same theme. It would begin with a bumpy slide down towards the bridge as the rear wheels locked up on the loose road. Liz would jump out of the back and grab hold of something to add her strength to the breaks. Sometimes we'd stop before reaching the bridge. Sometimes we wouldn’t. If we did, Liz would throw something under the front wheel so that I could let go of the brakes and get off the tuk tuk to inspect the dubious integrity of what we were about to cross. Once or twice the makeshift chock slipped and we chased the tuk tuk into a ditch again. It took a surprisingly long time for me to realise that life would be easier if I parked the tuk tuk with the wheel facing up the camber of the road. Sometimes the bridges were ok and sometimes they weren’t. We’d collect what we could find along the road and use old pieces of timber to rebuild the bridge or smooth out holes left by trucks on either side where the wheels had slipped and dug out the loose road. The bridges were designed with two lines of running boards over a supporting horizontal supporting frame. They were designed for cars and trucks with four wheels. Not a motor taxi with three wheels. We tried different approaches to getting across the bridges and they were all scary. The most successful approach that we settled on in these early days was to cross with one wheel on one of the running boards while the front wheel and other rear wheel ran down the middle of the bridge. A tuk tuk isn’t wide enough to get both rear wheels on both running boards so we’d go across at a precarious angle as the top heavy weight of our luggage (including the canoe) tried to throw us off the other side. At the other end of the bridge Liz would put her shoulder behind the tuk tuk and I’d set the engine to a steady scream and between us we’d nurse the tuk tuk up the hill.

Alls well that ends well and we crossed an uncounted number of wooden bridges to emerge out of the foothills into cool air with a red-hot clutch. The poor tuk tuk is now resting as 12 school children climb over her. Yes, her. We named the tuk tuk Anna after a friend who also has issues with hills.) We’re also resting and the school teacher at this little village we are now in, called Quince Mil has kindly let us turn her classroom into a hotel room and use her computer. The Internet is everywhere now it seems. But for the moment, we nurse our aches and adjust our mechanical parts as the saga (adventure) continues.