I am the proud and temporary owner of a new bike! New to me that is. I have bought a weather beaten Kona Coiler; a full suspension mountain bike made for jumping off things and going down hill fast. I bought it from Dougie at Gravity Peru and I plan to sell it right back to him when we leave Peru.
The thing is heavy, but its weight is trumped by how much fun it is to ride. I spent some time setting up the cockpit to fit my body last night, and headed off on my first ride this morning at 6:15.
The Andes don't bear much resemblance to coastal Maine. Both places are on planet Earth, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. I began by riding on Tanda Pata, a pedestrian street that contours around the bowl of Cusco. After riding down one staircase and carrying the bike up another, I was on the paved road up to Saksaywaman and the highlands beyond. I climbed up this road, in my granny gear the entire time, for fifty minutes! I estimate I may have been averaging 3 or 4 miles an hour. All this work landed me at the same tiny settlement I had arrived at via truck last week, and there's no denying it, the truck option is a hell of a lot easier.
Now, has excitement and adventure ever gotten the best of you? If so, the next series of events may sound familiar. I took a moment to get off the bike and stretch, lower the seat and take in the view before beginning the great descent I wrote about last week. It was amazingly quiet as I gained some distance from the road. I tried a wee jump on the bike and landed it softly. Yeah! I was feeling great as I entered a small stand of trees exactly 7 minutes into the downhill. That's when I heard the whirring hiss and I knew, I had a flat.
I also knew I had no spare tube. No pump. No patches. No money.
Ride over.
Back in Maine, I would walk back home or maybe hitch a ride if I didn't have my repair kit. But I almost always have my repair kit. In Peru, well I wasn't quite sure how this would work out. I figured the odds of getting a flat on my first trip out were pretty slim. As it turns out, the odds-meter was pegged at 100%.
For just a few seconds, I started to completely lose it. Then (I am not making this up) I put the bike down, stood in Tadasana/Mountain Pose, softened my focus, and returned to my current reality. It worked. I sang one of my favorite songs out loud as I pushed the wounded bike up the hill: "Se me Poncho la Llanta" by The Iguanas (roughly translated as "I got a flat," and totally apropos for the occasion). It took only fifteen minutes to get back to the road and it dawned on me that a flat fifteen or twenty minutes further down the mountain would have been WAY worse.
As I walked along the road toward the tiny gathering of adobe homes, I wasn't quite sure how to handle the situation. There was a group of five or six "combis" filling up with passengers headed for the city. One by one I explained my predicament to them, and each time when I got to the part about me not having any money they literally shut the door in my face. So here I was with my fancy flat-tired bike, in my stupid spandex shorts and my Patagonia Hoodie, surrounded by campesinos in much more practical clothing looking at me like I had dropped out of the sky from a spacecraft. I put my head down and started to trudge.
About five minutes down the road, a tiny Daewoo Tica taxi blew by me. I waved at him (as I had to at least ten previous cars) and amazingly, he stopped! "Por supuesto" he told me, I'll give you a ride. And so he did. I got home just an hour later than planned, changed my clothing and went directly to the bike shop in town to buy patches and tubes. Amen.
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