One of the many trails in town.  Unfortunately, they all go up.

Nice view.

Suspension bridge.

They do a little bungee jumping off of this bridge.

Yet another church.

I left Baños headed to Cuenca.  It was a long day of riding through high elevations, sporadic rain showers and dirt roads.  I pulled into Cuenca cold, and exhausted, so stopped at the first hostel I found, which turned out to be a dump.  All the rooms surround the bar, which has the house music thumping loud until midnight, even though there was no one in the bar.  They said that they had hot water, but the shower was ice cold.  Oh well, no shower for me either.  I was too tired to move all my crap to another place.   I slept a total of 5 hours that night, then got up the next morning and promptly rode out of town.  I didn’t feel like hanging around in Cuenca as I was a bit burned out on big cities, and the experience in the El Cafecito hostel just sealed the deal for the me the get the heck out of town.  Sometimes I just get bummed out on a place and have to leave.

So I headed further south to the small hamlet of Vilcabamba, Ecuador.

Scenic riding as always in Ecuador.

I stayed at a very nice German run hostel just south of town.  In my experience, the German owned hostels tend to be well run, and very nice.  It was a very tranquilo place to chill for a few days and do nothing but walk around town.

The town church, of course.

I did meet some cool people at the hostel.  The guy on the left is my hero.  Neil is the real deal.  He has been all over the world on a motorcycle.  He goes home to the states and works for a while, then flies to some spot on the globe, buys a small thumper and rides his brains out.  He is also an avid photographer and showed me some really amazing images from South America.  He is currently riding a Falcon 400 and is headed north.  Neil is a super cool and interesting guy and I enjoyed hanging out and swapping stories with him.

The folks on the right, and in the below photo are Lars and Janni from Denmark.  They have been traveling in South America for a full year now in their VW camper and are headed north to Alaska.  Very cool people.  So us four overland travelers hung out well into the night and swapped stories of our experiences of life on the road.  Very cool stuff to bond with fellow overlanders in the middle of Ecuador.  I really enjoyed my time in Vilcabamba just chilling the days away and doing nothing but hiking and being geeky and exchanging  GPS maps and route suggestions with Lars and Janni.

I left Vilcabamba headed straight south on 100 miles of dirt road to the tiny border crossing at La Balsa, Peru.  This is a highly recommended route and crossing with a caveat………. Make sure you have some time. Iron Butt riders will not like this route.

OK, the crossing.   Its all dirt, but easy dirt road.  You don’t really even need knobby tires, well, you might during the wet season.

I ran into plenty road construction as they are grading from Vilcabamba south in anticipation of paving.  However, there are so many landslides along this route that I cant see that happening anytime soon. The construction areas will slow you down.   Twice I got stuck for over a hour waiting at a construction area.  Secondly, I had 3 front pinch flats that I had to deal with. Totally my fault for jumping whoops and flying over sharp rocks at 50 mph on a overloaded bike.   The throttle on the 990 is like a bad crack habit.

So, with the construction, plan on about 4 hours to get to the border (100 miles of dirt) if everything goes smoothly and you don’t wait too long at construction stops.

This is Fernando, road construction worker.  Cool guy.  He helped me change the tube from my first flat, number 1 of 3 that day.

At the border, Ecuadorian Migracion and Aduana were very efficient. I was checked out of Ecuador in less than 2 minutes, seriously.

Peru. Well that’s a whole nother Oprah. Seems that the Migacion girl likes to take “lunch” from 11 am to about 4 pm. So, if you show up at noon like I did, you’re pretty much not going anywhere, so kick back, have some lunch, and take nap.  Besides that, the girl has an attitude like its a big problem for her to stamp your passport.   She was allagitated that I couldn’t understand her rapid fire campesino accented Spanish and asked her to repeat herself.  Apparently, from talking to the customs guy, “she is like this all the time.”  Great.

However, after she saw I was on a bike, her attitude completely changed. “ah, me encanta tu moto, que linda….” and she smiled at me over and over again and asked me all kinds of question about my trip in nice, slow, clear Spanish of course.  I told her that she was pretty when she smiled.

Amazing what an attitude changer the bike can be for people.

The customs guy is very nice and friendly.  However, he seemed to have some difficulty doing the paperwork, so I had to politely tell him what I needed, and helped him with the numbers. Make sure that he gets all the numbers correct on your paperwork. That will take another hour or so. But, he is a very nice and mellow guy, very easy to deal with.

By the time I finished up, 5 hours after showing up at the border, it was getting dark. So, the customs dude tells me that I don’t want to go anywhere at night since there have been a lot of car jackings in the area recently. Well I figured that they wouldn’t be quick enough to catch me on the 990, so I took my chances riding to San Ignacio.  Besides that, there was really no place to spend the night at the border.

San Ignacio is about one hour away by bike, if you ride fast in the dirt, two hours if you’re slow.  It is your best bet for a hotel after your crossing. Its a friendly and tranquilo small town with about a dozen decent hostels.

If you decide to press on in the dark after San Ignacio (like I foolishly did) you will ride 60 miles of really crappy, wide graded dirt road with super deep potholes everywhere.   I had to ride at least 50 mph to float the front wheel over the holes, otherwise it was a brutal beating. Besides that, at night, I couldn’t see many of the holes, so I just pinned it and prayed.

Next large town after the pot hole route is Jaén.  Once I got a look at Jaén in the dark, I wished that I had stayed in San Ignacio.  I wound up paying 25 bucks for a hotel that turned out to be very nice with great parking, but the rest of the town is nothing special.   San Ignacio is a nicer place to stay for sure, so I would plan on a night there after your crossing.   That way, you don’t have to worry how long the Peru Migracion girl will take for lunch, so you can just chill out, wait, and enjoy the remote little hamlet of La Balsa.

After you leave Jaén, get ready for a spectacular ride through canyons to get to Chachapoyos.

Saludos, Vicente

©2012 South on Two Wheels. All Rights Reserved.

After hearing so many people rave about the Galapagos Islands, I decided that I had to go see them for myself, since I was in the neighborhood.  For some strange reason which I still cant figure out, they would not let me ride my moto all over the islands.  Its too bad because the Galapagos looked like some great off-road riding. Ha ha!!  Yes, lots of rules here in in Ecuador.  So, at the last minute I booked a trip on a boat called the Samba.  Here is what our route looks like.

The boat is an 80 foot motorized yacht called the Samba and there were a total of 12 passengers and a crew of 6 on the boat.  Over the course of 8 days I must have taken over 3000 photos of birds, lizards, seals, turtles, beaches and other such stuff.  I wont bore you to death with all of the details of each island or all the pictures.  Just a few select pics and a little commentary.

The terrain, climate and general topography reminds me a bit of the Cortez side of Baja California.  The general idea is that you island hop on the boat, then take a zodiac onto land and to snorkeling spots a couple of times each day.  There are literally animals everywhere.

The animals for the most part do not fear anything, since there are very few predators that were introduced to the islands and those that were introduced years ago are slowly being eradicated.  So the result is that you can get very close to the animals and they are totally unfazed by your presence.

Bear in mind that none of my photos were taken with a telephoto lens.  I only have 17mm to 55mm zoom, so its a very widefield lens.

Albatros.

Babysitting. Maybe this is where the term comes from. :-)

We also witnessed a type of mating ritual between the birds.

A big hit with most tourists are birds called the  blue-footed Boobie.  Funny name for a funny looking bird.

I saw one doing a funny little dance where it would lift its feet up and down and sway back and forth.  I forgot the significance of this little dance, but it was funny to watch.

Bad day for the Boobie, good day for the crab.

I don’t know why I was compelled to take hundreds of pictures of these little guys, but they are colorful little buggers.

There were some beautiful beaches along the way.

Sea turtle tracks going to the nests.

And of course lots of sea turtles.

And curious little Mockingbirds.

That would get all tweaked when they discovered that you were an intruder in their territory.

The paparazzi were always in action.

They were relentless.  If those cameras were guns, all the wildlife on the Galapagos would have been decimated in only a few short days. Ha!

The big tortoises were really cool.

Dude, do you mind getting out of my face with that stupid wide angle lens on your camera?

Like the rest of the pacific ring of fire, these islands are volcanic, so there were some huge lava flows.

And some cool sink holes from some collapsed lava.

This little guy is called a lava heron, for obvious reasons.

Another cool bird.  Some kind of gull I believe.

I knew you guys wanted more Boobies.

Random beach shot.

There were some beautiful tidal pools.

Blow holes.

This one was pretty impressive with just a little swell in the water.

Of course plenty of sea lions.

We even saw them fishing.

Hey buddy give me a little break here, you’re scaring the fish away.

Sorry man, no milk for you.

Hey I think I just saw that sea lion poop.

Jeez, I cant even poop and nap in peace.

And of course, there were many, many land iguanas.

They kind of grow on you after a while.

Watch your step, thats a big-un.

And marine iguanas as well.  These guys were literally everywhere and you really had to pay attention not to step on them.

A face only a mother could love.

The good ship Samba………..

…..showed us yet more spectacular coastline.

Sei whale.

Galapagos hawk.

Heron.

The Heron got a little tweaked when that hawk landed so close to him.  He was not happy.

Flamingos.

Goat man.

Penguins!!!

more beautiful scenes……………

I was a little ambivalent about going to the islands but it turned out to be a great experience.  We also had some absolutely fantastic snorkeling with seals, sharks, turtles, and all kinds of interesting fish, but I didn’t have an underwater camera to capture any of those scenes.

Yes its touristy, yes there are many boats and many tourists, yes its expensive, but I found it to be a great experience, one of those “once in a lifetime” things.  What made it much better was that I booked a small tourist class boat rather than a large first class boat.  Being with a small group of people made for a very mellow experience.

So, two thumbs up for the Galapagos Islands.

Saludos.

©2012 South on Two Wheels. All Rights Reserved.

View Equator in a larger map

As I headed down to Quito I would be crossing the equator, so naturally, a stop was in order.  In fact at a town called Cayambe, there is an equator monument.  Very cool!  I love this kind of stuff.

I had a funny feeling that if I put half of my bike in each hemisphere, it might suddenly turn into a KLR or something.

Nothing like that happened, although I did have a sudden urge to go watch a toilet flush.

Yup, the GPS says that we are on the equator.  Imagine that.

I suggested to one of the guys working at the monument that to make the monument really cool, they should install a toilet on each side of the line. For some reason, he failed to see the humor in that and didn’t even crack a smile, but mumbled something about motorcyclists. Sometimes I crack myself up.

Actually, the two guys working there were very nice. When I pulled up there was a bus load of tourists there. One of the guys told me to wait around until the bus people left, then I could ride my bike into the monument and take a photo. The guys are actually pretty stoked when you pull up on a bike. They get a lot of moto travelers here and will accommodate you with taking pictures when you pull up.

The one guy looked at my bike and said, “I like seeing those KTM adventures on long trips, I think its a good long distance bike, and besides that, I get tired of seeing BMW’s and KLR’s around here.”   Seriously, when the guy said that I had to chuckle.

Actually this monument is a solar calendar of sorts.  during the equinox, the sun rises right over that line.  Where you see the two big rocks on the opposite end mark where the sun rises during the solstices.  At the bottom of that big orange cylinder, there is a mirror.  On the equinox, at exactly mid day, the sun shines right down that tube, hits the mirror and lights up the inside of the tube with brilliant light.   Like I said, I love this stuff.

After a couple of more days in Quito I wanted to go check out one of the nearby volcanoes.  Volcan Cotopaxi, 19,400 ft,  sits 30 miles SE of Quito.  I figured it would be a nice ride up to the end of the road at 16,000 ft at the base of the volcano.  So I threw my flat repair kit in my pack, found my way out of the city,  and took off down a stone road in search of the volcano.

It was a nice ride to the park.

Ah, here we are, park entrance.

OK, so I get ready to pay my 10 dollar entry fee like a good tourist, and the guy manning the guard shack just looks at me and says, “no motos allowed in the park.”  “Really?  So if I am driving a car, a noisy truck, or bus belching out clouds of thick black diesel smoke, I can go in the park?”  “Yes,” he replied, but no motos.  Well that’s just great.  “Why?” asked him.  “Those are the rules,” he quickly replied.  I told him I thought that the rules sucked, and he agreed with me, but still would not let me in.

So, shamelessly, I tried to bribe him to let me in the park.  After all, that’s the way things usually work in most of Latin America.  I started with 5 bucks and eventually got up to 40 bucks.  That was everything I had on me, and it didn’t work.  Apparently this guy was not going to break the rules for what I had in my wallet.

However he did point me in the direction of a very nice dirt road ride back to Quito and told me that I would enjoy it very much.

So, I turned around, defeated, and headed back to Quito.  It was too cloudy to see the stupid Volcano anyway.

I only got up to 12,108 feet.

But, it was a nice ride back.

I was enjoying riding the bike in some dirt without the bags.

Cotopaxi is behind those clouds, but I never got to see anymore than this.

My quest to see a big volcano tuned into a very nice dirt road ride around the countryside.  It was a good day on the bike.

So I went back to Quito figuring that I will visit one of the other volcanoes before I leave Ecuador.

This coming week, I have a very special side trip planned that involves airplanes and boats, stay tuned.

Saludos, Vicente

©2012 South on Two Wheels. All Rights Reserved.