Well folks, I am moving to Oregon. I’m going to be building bicycles for Bike Friday in Eugene, Oregon. After spending my entire life in the Bay Area it is slightly daunting to be moving to a town where I don’t know a single person.

Since getting back from my trip I have been working at the the bike shop, getting back into shape and looking for longer term work. As much as I like working at a bike shop, it’s not exactly work with a future. Given the economy and such, the job search has been frustrating, which is why I feel so amazingly lucky to not only have found a job but a dream job.

Bicycle fabrication has been an interest of mine for quite awhile. I took the bicycle frame building course at the United Bicycle Institute awhile back, took TIG welding at The Crucible and have been slowly acquiring the tools to build my own bicycles. I’ve always assumed, however, that it would be a hobby I would do in my spare time as it wouldn’t be possible to make a living at it.

There are a number of things cool and unique about Bike Friday, two of which are:

• They practice Lean Manufacturing which is a pretty cool strategy for both keeping the company healthy and for competing with overseas mass production. They are probably the only bicycle company in the US that exports to Asia.
• The bikes they make are high quality, custom, fast folders and travel bikes. Folding bikes are one of the best strategies for making mass transit feasible in the US where automotive influenced development patterns have created wide spread suburban areas which are difficult to service by bus or rail. Folding bikes allow people to commute to bus or rail stops without worrying about room to store or lock their bikes once they get there.

As far as Eugene goes. It sounds pretty cool. Everybody I’ve talked to to raves about it. Home of University of Oregon and known as “Track Town USA”. Hopefully I can finish rehabbing my knee and get running again. 400 miles of single track starting a short distance from downtown and cool running weather rear round.

Luckily I have been reducing my “stuff” for a few years now so moving shouldn’t be too difficult. I have had to minimize my toys just a bit. I am now down to 1 motorcycle, 6 bicycles and various and sundry camping/touring essentials. Might try and sell one more bicycle but that should be it. Just need to rent the U-haul and head North.

Oregon here I come.

Here’s Walter demonstrating one of the fast folders.

So I am working on the successor to my PocketMail device. I am one of the few people who really loved that device. I’ve used it on a couple of trips and found it a great way to write and update my blog on the road. You can read more about it here but the basics are that it is a small device that allows you to send and receive email from any payphone. For the techies among us it is handheld note taking device with a small lcd screen incorporating an analog modem. I found it really cool to sit and write in a campsite and then walk or ride to a payphone to update the blog and get email from friends.

In the US there is an 800 number to call which makes it reasonably cheap to use as the monthly fees for the device are around $8.00. Using it in South America wasn’t so cheap as there is no toll free number to call, plus there are a ton of internet cafes down there. I pretty much stopped using it other than to take notes from time to time, which then had to be retyped when I got to an internet cafe. I don’t find most internet cafes to be creative environments, however, so I think my writing suffered a bit.

I am in the process of creating, “Son of PocketMailer”. For Christmas Santa brought me an Eee PC 901. This is the coolest toy I have had in a long time. It is a full computer, just shrunk down to ultraportable size. It is called a netbook and has all the attributes to make it the perfect traveling companion. 9 inch high resolution screen, small size, light weight, long battery life and, best of all, it uses a solid state hard drive (SSD). Normal hard drives have spinning disks and fragile arms which tend to get damaged through the hard use and vibration that occurs when traveling by motorcycle or bicycle. The SSD is like the memory in a cell phone or MP3 player and has no moving parts so is much more robust.

Up to this point I have been playing with it stock. Geeks have adopted this device so there is a ton of information on the web for modifying it. I have more RAM and a larger hard-drive on order. I’ll probably avoid the more extreme mods such as installing a touch screen and removing the keyboard. When the new hard drive arrives I am going to install a new operating system, the default one is a neutered version of linux and a bit weak for my taste. Down the line I am hoping to fab a dynamo powered charger for it so I can recharge the battery while riding my bike.

Stay tuned….

Well I am back.

I have actually been back for over a week now but have been somewhat surreptitious in announcing my presence. Just took a look at the blog and realized how long it has been since an update. Once I made the decision to leave Colombia, I pretty much put my head down and headed for the states. Strange that as one of the reasons I wanted to ride home was to visit places I had missed on the way down and revisit places I had liked. As it was, I certainly enjoyed the ride back but didn’t take the time to do much tourism. Only two rest days between Panama and Colorado.

I crossed the border in El Paso, Texas spent some time in Colorado and then crossed over through Southern Utah, Arizona and Nevada on my way home. It was really nice to enter the US through Texas and New Mexico. The southern hospitality was welcoming and very comfortable after a year of Latin American hospitality. On my way across to California I visited Moab, Bryce, Zion and the Grand Canyon. Hard to believe I have lived so close to those places for so long without visiting them.

So now I am back in San Francisco. Coming back at the time I have, when people are so focused on politics and the economy, has exacerbated the foreignness I feel. The first thing I noticed on arriving back in SF is how guarded people are. So many people seem to exist within a suit of urban armor to shield themselves from those around them. It makes it hard to get to know or even meet people as you have to work so hard to get to the person inside. I noticed this in Panama and it is similar here. Most people are friendly if you make the effort to get through to them, but are so wrapped up in their own concerns that they don’t make the effort to get through to you. I am glad to have friends here where that is not an issue.

I am finally becoming accustomed to the ebb and flow of normal conversation and sharing my trip with others. Sometimes it is difficult as people I don’t know hear of and ask me about the trip. It is hard to know exactly how much to share as often times, just as I start to re-live the trip and remember cool things to share, people get tired of hearing me talk. At first it would be quite disappointing but I am now comfortable with the fact that most people just can’t relate to my trip experience.

A funny thing happened upon my arrival here in SF. I stopped in San Jose and had lunch with my mom on the way home. Bike was running fine but started to run a little warm as I passed Daly City. I exited the freeway at 7th street and was going to do a little tour of the city on my way back to the outer richmond. My bike had other ideas. At the first stoplight in the city it died. Smoke from burnt oil curled around the tank and it made a horrible metallic racket as it quit running. It has not run since. After 50,000 miles of solid work this year, it gave up the ghost the moment we got home.

I can’t be too disappointed. There are so many places it could have died that would have been so much worse. My mom tells me that she has been praying to St. Jude through my entire trip to get me and my bike home safely and this shows that he came through. Of course she didn’t say anything about after I got home.

I don’t relate well with the saints or a compassionate controlling god so perhaps it is good that my mom takes care of that for me. I do know, however, that when something like this happens it’s hard to believe in a universe ruled solely by chaos and probability. Magical realism anyone?

Good Days.

They sure have been. I arrived in Cali, Colombia three weeks ago. One of my major goals of the trip was to dance salsa in Cali, the world capital of salsa. I figured that if I arrived on Monday and started lessons immediately, I could be ready to hit the clubs by the weekend. That didn’t work out for a number of reasons. One reason is that, never having danced before, I started out looking more like a third string defensive back doing warmup drills than a dancer. After one day of classes I realized it would be quite a bit more than a week before I could be seen dancing in public. The other reason is that my knee, which was only mildly painful and stiff when riding the motorcycle, flared up under the daily stress of dancing and running.

My dance instructor referred me to a knee specialist who turned out to be one of the best in a country of great doctors. He is the doctor for the under 23 national football team here so he has some experience with tweaked knees. Turns out I have a grade 1 tear of my medial collateral ligament as well as a torn miniscus, prescription: three weeks of daily physical therapy. So I have been taking salsa classes, rehabing my knee and running as much as my knee will allow (don’t tell my therapist).

After three weeks of salsa classes, there has been some progress. Rather than simply knowing that I can’t dance, I now know all the specific and detailed ways in which I cannot dance. As of a few days ago I was beginning to think that the main takeaway from this experience would be the character gained from repetitively doing something that I am neither natural nor good at. Attempting to keep my hands, hips and feet moving in unison while negotiating my way through the reasonably complex salsa moves is a bit, for me, like trying to play chess while patting my head and rubbing my stomach in circles. The look of focused concentration on my face is a far cry from the relaxed enjoyment I see on the faces of people on the dance floor.

A couple days ago, I had a breakthrough. While practicing on my own I found my hands moving in concert with my hips without my conscious attention. This reduced by 25% the things I have to think about while dancing. At my current rate of progress, I feel that in as little as a decade I could be dancing comfortably on the dance floor.

I’ve decided that bike problems are good luck. I seem to meet the coolest people when resolving bike issues. I had pretty much decided to head for the coast and pound pavement to Ecuador. I need to meet my mom there on the 2nd and can’t be late. As I wrote previously, my subframe broke and I met the guys at the shop in Cuzco. They convinced me I could make it to Ecuador in time going through the highlands, which I did.

I rode through the sierras from Cuzco to Huarez then down through the Canyon Del Pato before hitting the coast south of Trujillo. The mountains were amazing, a bit like hiking in Big Sur. Coming to a valley, I could see the road I was following on the other side but wouldn’t reach it for another hour until I had traversed up and back through the valley….. plus one or two other valleys I hadn’t seen. Due to the rough roads and the somewhat transitory nature of my sub-frame fix (three hose clamps and a come-along strap), long stretches of 50 km per hour made averaging 300km a day hard work.

As I was on my way to the border with Ecuador at Macara, I had another piece of good luck. Out of nowhere, my bike went dead…. no lights, no computer, no ignition, no nothing. Being as I have some experience with this by now, I was pretty sure it was YABW (Yet Another Broken Wire). Fixing it, however, required taking off the fairing and dash and taking some time with the volt meter to figure things out.

As I was buttoning things back up, two girls from the next town stopped in a pickup to see if I needed help. At that point I didn’t but seeing as it had taken me awhile to fix the bike, it was too late to cross the border. I spent the night in Sullana with a local guide to show me around. You could walk all the way across Sullana in 15 minutes but we saw every bit of it from the viewpoint of her Toyota pickup.

So here I am in Cuenca. It truly feels like I am on my way home as I cross familiar borders and stay in familiar cities. I am on my way to spend a week with my mom in Quito and then on to Colombia. Assuming I don’t get diverted along the way, I expect to arrive home in late August or early September.

I am planning on having a party for my birthday on September 27th. Save the date, you are all invited.

Please excuse me if I wax poetic. I have just had an absolutely transcendental
meal. If you ever go to Cusco, you absolutely must go to a restaurant called
Tabasco and try the Rocota Relleno. It may have had something to do with
reading the Bhagavad Gita as an appetizer, or perhaps the lack of spicy food
lately, but I am not exaggerating (much) when I say that soon after the third
bite I lost all sense of self and became one with the meal. I didn't return to
myself until ten minutes after I had wiped my plate clean and realized I was
sitting staring at the wall with a silly grin on my face.

Earlier in the day I had my bike in pieces…. again. Upon returning from Machu
Pichu, I noticed that my sub-frame and panier rack were broken…. again.

Removing the sub-frame to get it repaired was quite a piece of work as many
things are mounted to it. The good thing to come out of the experience is I met
some cool guys who are into motorcycles and they are helping me to plot the best
ride through Peru up to Ecuador. Another bonus is that, after putting everything
back together, my GPS is working again after months of delinquent behavior.
Can't explain why (bad ground?) but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.

I've put a thread up on ADVRider with pictures from the absolutely gorgeous
Machu Pichu ride. Go here if you are interested:

http://advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=353151

Peac

Hello from Coroico, Bolivia

Coroico sits at the end of the "Road of Death", a dirt road that wists and turns through mountains northeast of La Paz. To be honest I was a little disappointed in the road. It was on my short list of things to see in South America because of posts like this:

http://www.fundumper.com/weird/road-of-death.htm

Well it turns out the pictures on that page are not of the "Road of Death". The Road of Death in Bolivia is quite tame and, although scenic, pales in comparison to many other roads I have ridden on this trip.

La Paz was cool. The city covers a steep valley so it is quite surreal to look up at night and see the city lights climbing into the sky. It is also, however, one of the smoggiest cities I have been in. The valley traps the exhaust from countless vehicles stuck in non-stop traffic. After one day in La Paz I felt like I was a pack a day smoker and had a headache from the smog and non-stop honking which seems to be everyone´s favorite pastime.

To get to La Paz from Sucre I had to wind my way through multiple road blocks. Truck drivers all over Bolivia are protesting road taxes by blocking road access to major cities. It´s what they call a "contundente", which I think loosely translates to "show of force". The entrances and exits to Sucre, Potosi and La Paz were filled with a maze of trucks parked at odd angles for up to a mile. I was a bit concerned at first but found the protesters to be very civilized. The truckers were parked so that walkers or cyclists could easily zig-zag through and there were busses waiting on either side to pick people up. Often people would point me to the correct path for making my way through with my motorcycle.

Bolivia has a long history of direct action when the populace is unhappy with their government. Unlike other countries where people wait for months or years till the next election so they can feel like they are changing things by essentially electing the same politicians over and over again, Bolivians take to the street and demand change NOW. These tactics have led to a surprising 200 plus administrations over Bolivia´s 180 some year history.

I am off to Lake Titicaca today. Seems like I just arrived in Bolivia but I´ll
be leaving it soon. Oh Well … Machu Pichu here I come

I love the word entonces. It has so much meaning and is used in so many ways. The simplest translation would be “therefore” or “so” as in “The road is closed, entonces…, we must turn around.” It seems to have more meaning than just “therefore”, however. Something along the lines of, “This is how it is” or “There is no other way”. It can be used sassily as when I was in line at a supermarket in Colombia with an incredibly slow cashier. A woman stepped out of line and, voice dripping with sarcasm, announced “entonces???”.

The most recent use of the word which had me laughing seemed to exemplify an attitude I have run into a fair bit on this trip, especially in the highlands. I was limping up the stairs at a hostal in Bolivia having twisted my knee dropping my bike in the sand. Using the walls for support, I brushed my hand on a nail which must have pierced a power line as it had enough voltage going through it to make me jump. When I pointed this out to the owner he said “Entonces, don´t touch it” and that was the end of it.

I am quite sure the nail will stay there for awhile. Compared to the constant cold and other challenges of daily life in a town sitting at over 12,000 feet and hundreds of kilometers over crappy roads to anywhere, the nail didn´t even rate comment. There isn´t much pity around here. Life is tough, entonces….., don´t whine.

So yeah, I twisted my knee and ankle dropping my bike when what was hard packed dirt road turned into a foot and a half deep sand pit. I didn´t see the sand because my face shield and sunglasses were clouded with dust from the previous 120km of dirt road I had ridden that day, not to mention the scratches from the rest of my trip.

The roads here are the worst I have ridden; rocky, washboarded and narrow. Most of the roads have been in the mountains so at least they twist and turn through beautiful scenery. Everybody shares the same roads so it is frustrating coming up behind a slow moving truck or bus who doesn´t even know you are there, much less get out of the way. The only way to pass is to sit behind in the thick cloud of dust waiting for the road to straighten out enough that you can squirt by on the “shoulder”. By the time I had passed 3 or 4 trucks this way, my face shield and sunglasses were coated with fine dust both inside and out. I should have stopped to clean them but I didn´t want to have to repass the truck that I had just worked so hard to pass in the first place.

I hit the sand pit going too fast and sitting down which is not how to ride deep sand on a heavily loaded bike. I stabbed a foot as the rear of the bike slid left, got it stuck in the sand and promptly drove it into the ground with my aluminum panier as the bike went down. Entonces, my knee is pretty messed up and, entonces, I am not riding for a few days.

One day later

That was yesterday. I bought some anti-inflammatories/pain killers at the local pharmacy and spent the day with my leg elevated in the main square watching the town go by. It was pretty funny, when I asked for ice for my knee, I got the response,”Who needs ice?. It´s always cold here.” There is no ice or internet here and the phone is very expensive so there isn´t much else to to do. By the time you read this, my knee will either be good enough to ride or I will have hired transport to get to a larger town. There is a train that I can put the bike on in a few days but I am thinking positive, the swelling is starting to go down and there is no bruising. Hopefully I´ll ride out of here tomorrow.

Four days later.

So I was able to keep riding after a couple days off. I am currently in Potosi, Bolivia after riding to Uyuni and seeing the salt flats. I have a limp again. Not as cool as the pimp walk I had in Mexico, though. I just have to make sure to focus and keep my knee straight as rotation causes pain. I am pretty sure it´s just a strained MCL. I did it once before skiing and once before skating, entonces, the feeling is familiar. If it is still this sore when I get to La Paz, I´ll get it checked out.

That´s it for now. This has been a long post. I am off to Sucre now and should be in La Paz in a few days.

Peace

Lately I have been feeling like I was born to speak Spanish yet ended up in the
wrong country and thus speaking the wrong language. Somehow my heart feels
bigger in Spanish. Luckily I only have to learn a new language to fix the
accident of my birth, unlike someone born the wrong gender who has a much
larger problem to fix.

OK, maybe that comparison is a bit callous…. but there you have it.

I am on the border to Bolivia after spending the last week riding across the
Andean Plateau of Northern Argentina. Absolutely gorgeous. I had the wonderful
luck to fall in with a tour group for a day and do some of the best riding of
the trip in the open desert over dunes and through volcanic rock formations.
Not only was it great riding, but they were also truly womnderful people who
shared not only their food but their hearts with me. I feel like I have a much
better feeling for what it means to be Argentinian after riding, eating and
talking with them.

Seeing as I have been away from the internet for awhile and been unable to
update this blog, I have posted a few things directly to the website at
http://partialmemory.com rather than overload your inboxes with a huge email.
Head over there if you want to read more of my brainsplatter.

Hope things are well on your side of the equator.

Tery

I am sitting in the central plaza of Antofagasta de La Sierra eating crackers and a tin of something called “Jamon del Diablo” or “Ham of the Devil” in english. It is actually quite good but I had to get over the fact that it looks and smells like Whisker’s Fancy Feast cat food. Antofagasta is a small town, small as in I can see almost all of it from where I am sitting (actually a bit later I found it is a bit bigger than that). It sits high in the mountains of the Northwest corner of Argentina on the Puna, or Andean Plateau. The closest city is Belen, some 300 kilometers away, which is where I slept last night.

Belen was an interesting town. It seems to be devoted to two wheeled travel. Out in the middle of nowhere, I couldn’t see why it had multiple stop lights when I arrived. After siesta, however, the town came alive with 100’s of kids and adults cruising around on scooters, motorcycles and bicycles. I counted three motorcycle and scooter shops and more shops selling stuff to trick out your scoot. I also saw groups of roadies riding outside of town and a guy on a time trial bike motorpacing behind a scooter.

It has been three days since I left Mendoza and I am starting to get in the swing of travelling after three weeks in one place. I had an excuse for staying in Mendoza as my rear brake was shot when I got there and there were no spares in the country. I bought a used one on-line but it took awhile for it to reach Argentina and then even longer to get through customs. Parts in Argentina are amazingly expensive. Most new products are assessed a 70% to 100% import tax. Combined with the lower cost of labor it makes fixing things much more cost effective than just replacing things. I found a great welder to fix my subframe and it was amazing the things he had waiting for repair in his shop.

Even if I hadn’t been waiting for my brake I might have stayed that long anyway. Mendoza is a gorgeous city with tons of plazas and pedestrian boulevards lined with restaurants and coffee shops as wells as a huge park filled with people running, biking and picnicing. Mendoza is also in the center of Argentina’s wine region, kind of like Napa Valley except the people are friendlier and everything is cheaper. Still after three weeks in one place, it was time to move on.

Just short of Belen, I was at one of the many police checkpoints and the cop pointed out two giant thorns in my front tire. It was at that point that I remembered I had left my tire repair kit in Bariloche. I had noticed it missing before and it was on my list of things to do in Mendoza but with my rather long list of things to do and the unlimited supply of good four dollar bottles of wine, somehow it got overlooked. Luckily I still had a spare tube and the back of one of my wrenches can be used as a tire iron so I was OK. When I got to Belen I had my choice of shops to replace my tire irons, tube and patch kit.

A bit earlier ( back in Antofagasta) I went for a hike up a hill (really more of a mound) to take pictures of sunset when I was joined by three kids out for a hike of their own. We went through the usual where are you from stuff and then I took a couple pictures of them in front of the sunset. There is this big rock in the distance called the Pena and they asked me if I wanted to hike to it. As it was sunset it seemed unlikely, but they said tomorrow… or maybe Saturday. When I told them I was leaving tomorrow, they looked incredulous. It was the same look the woman I am renting the room from gave me when I told her I was only staying one night. The pace of life is so slow here that my travelling pace must seem like light speed. Sometimes it seems that my whole trip is just one long series of leavetakings. It seems that just as I get to know a place or people, I am saying goodbye.

Well… off to Bolivia. Time to say goodbye to Argentina…… sigh.