First ride in Peru, unless I count the
short ride from Cayma to Umacollo to Dante’s Bikes in Bartolome Herrera
yesterday. Tried out the Troll. Seems like the gear Hwood chose will work,
though there were moments when I remembered the sensation of riding my (bian)Chi
in the highlands outside Mexico DF, just about exactly 2 years ago. Must be
what 10 weeks off the bike at 43 yo feels like or… just the tiniest pang of
terror, remembering the struggle to make any headway like riding uphill through
treacle (molasses) into a headwind as my body succumbed to the cumulative
effect of decades of heartbreak cum leukemia, or as the consultant in Wales put
it “with an 80 yo body”. I needed to go through that to be able to start letting
go, letting go of attachment, let myself go. Still some way to go.
We’ll see how I feel riding tomorrow, today’s
ride was all uphill for an hour followed by another hour coming back down and
then cruising around the centre of Arequipa. reckon I must have reached close
to 2500m altitude, so can’t really expect to feel like I did in September
around Lake Pepin or Minnetonka or up the Bwlch in August. The landscape is so
arid, eerily similar to Queretaro, MX except for the western horizon…I could
have sworn I sensed the ocean over yonder as I got further from Arequipa,
though I couldn’t see it. looked like a bank of fog below the setting sun, classic
Pacific coastline sunsets all the way up and down the Americas ayayay Big Sur,
CA that’s fog mmmmm
