YAOGBB

The kitty litter gets more interesting when it is juxtaposed with El Mar Pacifico.  I have been following the coast for about 2,000 kilometers, but the ocean is always out of sight, except for the odd glimpse in the distance.  Today I chose to head for Arequipo and the world's deepest canyon instead of Machu Pichu.  A few kilometers out and I was right beside the ocean for most of the way.  I stopped here in Aticlo, about 300 km from Arequipo. This may be why the road stays away from the ocean :-)  Actually for most of the way there was very little sand, mostly kitty litter.  The next picture was taken by setting the camera on the ground on a typical spot, thousands of kilometers of this, it looks like those mars pictures.   I have been trying to be polite about the food in Central and South America, but the truth is I don't really like it that much, overcooked and bland.  Peru will change all that.  Along with the pretty girls, Per...

Check out the license plate on the bus.   Today or early tomorrow I will have to make up my mind which road to take, the road that will take me to Cuzco and Machu Pichu, or the other road which will take me to another archeological site and Chile.  Machu Pichu has been closed becuase of rain, it is supposed to open April 1, but there will be a long line of people waiting to get in.  Decisions, decisions. Today I landed in Nazca, the place with the lines in the sand,  where the ancient indians left secret messages for the flying saucer folks.   I am staying in resort type hotel right across from the aeropuerto that takes el turistos to see the lines.  I saw one set of lines more economically (1 Sole) from this tower.   I don't know why it looks so crooked in the photo, it looked pretty straight when I climbed it. I had expected that each figure was like a half a mile long or something.  Maybe some are, but this one was the siz...

This is Lima So is this This was my hotel in Lima.  Looks not too bad right?  Inside though, there are jails with less security.  You get in by knocking on a door, which is unlocked electronically if you are allowed in.  You can`t get in or out unless the invisible man with the button lets you.  Nevertheless, with all this security, somebody got into my room and pilfered my cell phone, and all my USB and SD cards with photos on them.  Fortunately I have already mailed my backups to Alberta, so I only lost a few hundred Peru pictures, and my cell phone which did not work woth a tinkers damn anyway.  Did I mention that Bell Canada sucks? It does, just like all the other cell phone companies.  If ever there is an industry crying out for regulation, this is it.  Anyway no biggee, life goes on.  If this is the worst thing that happens than I will have been lucky. Southward Ho.  This part of Peru, the coast,  looksmo...

This part of Peru is not a pretty place.  It is a desert and everything is monotone brown.  But people have been living here for thousands of years, and developed products and technologies that are still in daily use all over the world.  Hands up who knew that potatoes, tomatoes, and the cotton variety most grown, originated here?  I did not.  What is really cool is that the people here, who are thoroughly modern by the way, still use the stuff developed by their ancestors many thousands of years ago. Fisherman put their nets out in reed boats (buttressed with a styrofoam core)  A lady I spoke to lives in an adobe house made of sun dried mud bricks that was built by her father about 14 years ago.  The next day I visited an archeological excavation of a 1300 year old (huge) temple made of adobe bricks.  The people who lived here 3000 years ago developed irrigation systems to take the water flowing from the mountains and make the desert fertile....

People have been asking me about driving in Latin America, and how dangerous it is.  If you are reading this in Canada or the United States, I'll bet you saw more accidents in your morning commute than I have seen since I entered Mexico on February 5.  But, if like me, your driving experience has been limited to Canada and the US, riding a moto here can be terrifying. If you want to ride here you have to unlearn everything you thought you knew about how riding in traffic.  If you have ever raced, the unwritten rules are sort of the same as on the race track, pass the slower guys anyway you can, but never recklessly, if you are slow, expect the fast guys to pass you anyway they can, you ride your bike, they ride theirs. Most of the highways are two lanes or 4 lanes with a divider.  You share the road with cars, trucks, other motos, mostly of the small variety, buses, dogs, donkeys, horses, pigs, goats, chickens, pedestrians, bicycles, moto taxis, just about every...

Whenever I cross a border it is like entering an entirely different country, this would be because I am entering an entirely different country.  The effect is often a shock to the senses, but rarely so much as entering Peru from Ecuador.  I have posted 138 pictures on Picasa taken in the last 36 hours.  I think the pictures speak better than my words so here goes, off to Picasa .  (I promise I won't it again) Someone was asking if I was taking lots of pictures, a friend wanted to know what the women were like in South America.  The answer to the first is, yes, when I am not riding I am snapping.  The answer to the last, all's I can say is that the ladies of Peru are easy on the eyes.  I have also been accused of not taking 'people pictures'.  People react in various ways (mostly bad) when they know their picture is being taken, so I have started to hang the camera around my neck and and just push the button while I am strolling through a plac...

Before I left Ecuador I made a side trip to Zamora to see Podocarpus National Park.  Ecuador is green in more ways than one, they are at the forefront when it comes to protecting their environment, no basura here, you can't even fumar in the park.  The park starts high in the mountains just outside of Loja and descends into the Amazon watershed at Zamora.  I visited the amazon part as I had yet to see the rain forest.  It met all expectations, including the rain part!  I left cool Loja wearing all my cold weather gear (10 C in the morning) , and was down to a T shirt when I got to Zamora two hour later.  Follow the link to more pics https://photos.app.goo.gl/c7xyjsNRA7X5Txcc6 Peru was an easy border crossing, everybody was super helpful on both sides.  No Tramitadors needed or wanted.

This was a roadside food stand, one of about a half a dozen all roasting pigs like this in La Paz Ecuador, (3085 meters elevation!).  They were also doing interesting things with all the stuff that used to be inside the pig.  I had a coffee and a cheese sandwich. Yes, the lady is roasting the pig with a tiger torch.  I may try this at home instead of one of those fancy ceramic barbecues.  Seems to work pretty good. The Indian ladies in Ecuador wear fedora hats.  Sometimes they wear one on top of the other, or maybe top off their fedora with a ball cap.  These ladies are from Tiobamba, where they favor dark colored felt hats. This lady is from is from Cuenca where the white panama is the only hat to have. The police in Columbia and Ecuador use mostly motorcycles, and mostly Kawasaki KLR 650s.  In Columbia they might also ride a Suzuki Freewind which is a DR650 with a large tank and windscreen similar to the KLR or my KTM (and not available in Cana...

Make sure you click on the picture above and make it full size.  Then look up, look way up. Ecuador improves markedly once past Tulcan and having quit Quito.  Riobamba and Cuenca are way nicer.  I stopped over in Riobamba on my way to Cuenca where there is a KTM dealer.  The bike is way overdue for an oil change and assorted maintenance tasks.  Leaving Riobamba I just headed south instead of seeking out the Pan American Highway, and ended up in some amazing places, and as a bonus I got to Cuenca as well.  I also got full use of the off road capabilities of the KTM :-)  All in all it has been a great ride, every day I can´t imagine that it can get any better, but somehow everyday it does.  More on picasa, https://photos.app.goo.gl/yNBKvvykxN8BoJPa8

Comida means food and also lunch or dinner. One of my fans (thanks Dave) was asking about food, and how I am making out.  First off in Latin America they don't eat when we eat.  Most restaurants do not open until 9 AM for desayuno (breakfast).  Desayuno is best eaten just before noon, and here is why. This was today's desayuna, sopa (soup) with large chunks of potato, a beef rib, very tiny noodles, and unidentifiable yellow blobs floating on top, a glass of orange juice, a banana, a plate with arroz (rice), carne (meat), and frijoles (beans).  In Ecuador this set me back a whole $1.75, I thought I was robbing the lady, she even wanted to give me back the 25 cent tip I left.  Another desayuna came with the above, a chicken leg instead of carne, and two very well done sunny side up eggs, and a pan (bun).  I think that one was 2,700 Columbian pesos or about the same as Ecuador, but it sounded better.   These meals are not what I want to be eating f...