Sunday 17 May 2015

Curried Haggis in Georgia

Curried Haggis in Georgia!
A lot has changed in the two years since Curried Haggis went to the Andes. Sunny is starting to lose interest in cycle touring (in favour of driving and climbing), Andy very briefly owned an expensive bike (which miraculously was more ridiculous than his shitty Trek) and Toby has FACIAL HAIR! Yes, the man who only two years ago could produce a barely visible tash after two months of growth (below, left) now has a beard fine enough to inflame jealously in the man who almost overnight grew a textbook handlebar (below, right).



The team members have also changed; we’ve lost Andy to a gay road cycling holiday in France but instead we are being joined by Guy who brings with him an unfortunate track record of multiple almost-critical mechanicals on bike tours and a vast vocabulary of Peep Show references. 


Some things, however, will never change. With 5 days to go till departure:
  •  We have done precious little planning/organising and almost all of it will inevitably get done at the Weatherspoon’s Gatwick airport.
  • 2 out of 3 of the bikes going on this trip are undergoing quite major maintenance/upgrades
  •  The success of this trip relies quite heavily on a lot of good luck with the weather and mechanicals

Also unchanged is the comically wide range of bikes being ridden. At one extreme is Sunny’s new Surly Long Haul Trucker, a bike that has only one purpose in life and that is to be a perfect touring bike. 



On the other extreme, we have Guy’s purple bike, which is built around an ugly old eBay frame (whose only redeeming feature is its cheapness) and old worn out components found lying around the house.



 And in the middle is Toby’s Dawes; a bike that isn’t quite shit enough to be a joke bike but also nowhere near good enough to be taken seriously.   



Anyway, so in 5 days’ time we will be flying out to Tbilisi in Georgia. Georgia of the FUSSR variety, not of the home of Coca Cola variety. We are flying with Ukraine International Airlines which is rated worse than North Korean and Tajik Airlines and requires you to fly Business class in order to enjoy luxuries such as in flight meals. We have a brief 7 days of riding time and we intend to make the most of it by heading straight into the Svaneti National Park. The scenery looks incredible and the people are supposed to the most hospitable.





 We were keen to avoid going somewhere with rubbish food after lessons learnt in Peru and the fact that the Georgian language has a word meaning “to continue eating even though you are full just for the pleasure of eating” fills us with much hope about Georgian cuisine. The language barrier promises to be a source of continuous confusion and entertainment as not only is the script totally alien, the pronunciations of many letters, let alone whole words, are impossible. 



Other things we are excited about include a brief jaunt into Kiev during our long layover on the way out and the look of pure misery on Toby’s face after each night of camping in his bivi bag.

Anyway, that’s enough for now and here’s hoping that in true Curried Haggis style everything will come together perfectly at the last moment, or perhaps we have used up all of our good luck by now? Getting stuck on a snowed off pass after a horrible cold wild camp and having to ride back to the start of the route is an uncomfortably plausible reality.   




Thursday 27 June 2013

Slightly delayed post about the Yungas

So it´s only been 16 days since we started our ride from La Paz to Konani through the Yungas region of Bolivia (check out the previous post for photos from this leg).

The day started with a typically large breakfast/lunch at a cafe near our hostel. Slightly less typical was the fact that the waitress ran out of the cafe to buy the ingredients after we placed our order. Also rather typically, we spent the final hours just before leaving on figuring out the exact details of our route and where we could find accommodation/supplies.

We weren´t keen to ride out of town in the afternoon because of the horrible traffic and many steep, cobbled streets in La Paz. So we jumped into a taxi and got a lift 30 km out of town, which very conveniently happened to be at the top of a rather large climb (La Cumbre, 4650m). It was raining by now and the taxi skidded around a bit on the steep, wet roads. The fact that the driver kept eating coca leaves and crossing himself didn´t help increase our confidence in his ability to deliver us safely to our destination. At the top of the pass, we reassembled bikes, layered up and freewheeled down a dreamily smooth road. Descending through layers of clouds and being surrounded by huge snowy mountains (which became more and more green as we lost altitude) was truely epic. The only problem was the cold and rain but we were at our destination for the night before anyone could begin complaining. The ´village´of Unduavi where we planned to spend the night turned out to be no more than a police checkpoint and a few shacks selling food by the road . There was no accommodation and camping wasn´t really an option in the surrounding terrain. After talking to practically every person in town, we managed to find an empty room where we could stay for the night for 30 Bolivianos (3 pounds). The price included mattresses (sacks stuffed with straw), a stove with no gas canister and a wheelbarrow that should be used to keep the door ´locked´overnight. The owner helpfully warned us that we would be electrucuted if we tried to use certain switches in the room. As hungry cyclists do, we went out for dinner and ordered the biggest looking meal on offer. This time, it happened to be fried chicken and corn and  it was only after it was served that we began to consider how long the pre-cooked chicken  had been there for. Andy devoured the slightly cold chicken whilst me and Toby nibbled reluctantly. Andy prepared a vomit kit containing toilet paper, wet wipes and freezer bags in anticipaction of the chicken´s revenge before going to bed.

We woke up to some heavy rain and decided to sleep for an hour more, hoping it would go away. Luckily, the rain did get a lot lighter and we were riding before long, continuing our long desecent from the altiplano down into the Amazonian lowlands at around 1500 m. The tarmac ended pretty quickly and we were treated to a long rough and muddy descent to a low point at Puente Villa (1240 m). The scenery continued to be dramatic and it was hard to believe how quickly it changed. Being surrounded by waterfalls and lush greenery was a very nice change from the high altitude scenes we had become accustomed to. About half way through the descent, Toby stopped to do something very unusual... hitching a ride DOWN a hill! He had been having issues with his braking fingers for the last few weeks and the bumpy descent seemed to have made it much worse. He jumped onto a passing bus whilst me and Andy continued on. The painful descent ended soon and after a Bolivian cena lunch (just as bad a Peruvian food, but cheaper) we began a painful climb up the other side of the valley. It was long, hot and bumpy but the oxygen-rich low altitude air certainly made it a lot easier. Despite this, we were more than happy to grab the back slow passing trucks to get some help up the hill! From the top of the climb, it was a short descent into Chulumani, our destination for the night where Toby had sorted our accommodation for us already. That descent must has been the slowest I have ever ridden down a hill due to the atrocious road condition and very regular dog chases. By now, we were pretty much experts at handling the dog situation and we always had rocks handy to drive the stupid animals away. This was the first time we noticed what we call the ´small dog syndrome´ where the smallest, fluffiest dogs are the most aggressive and first to give us a chase.

We slept through our alarm on the morning of day 3 and had to get a taxi 5 km out of town (all uphill!) to make sure that we would get to the next town with accommodation at the end of the day. The driver was of the coca-chewing variety and he also crossed himself regularly as we drove along. Andy´s standard taxi driver small talk led to the mention of Colin McCrae and we noticed a step increase in the aggressiveness of our taxi´s cornering after this. We were soon descending through the rain on a wet, bumpy road which led to a 10 km climb, a 20 km descent and then another big climb to Irupana. We made the schoolboy error of skipping breakfast and lunch today and our constant snacking wasn´t enough to power us up all the hills. We were all feeling very very low on energy by the end of the day and Toby´s grumpy bonk face was quite a sight! We checked into the only accommodation in town, which just so happened to also be the town´s bakery. The owner was just finishing a fresh batch of bread and Andy, with his obessession of baked foods, was over the moon.

Having learnt our lesson the previous day, day 4 began with a big breakfast of scrambled eggs, fresh bread and tea. The day´s riding was fairly typical for the Yungas, i.e. big climb, big descent, big climb, big descent and awesome views all the way. The weather had changed overnight and we were finally treated to a dry, cloud-free day. Within minutes though, we began complaining about how hot it was and started to wish for a bit of cloud cover and maybe even rain! Andy was determined to make sure he took in enough calories today but probably took it too far by eating 10 cakes over the course of the day. He also had another mechanical today (a chain breakage) and Toby and I milked the situation to hurl as much abuse at Andy´s bike as possible. We finished the day in Licoma where the owner of the accommodation was slightly scammy and charged 5 Bolivianos for every warm shower we took (he kindly offered cold showers for free).

We rode through a busy market on the way out of town the next morning, buying lots of food as we passed the various stalls and were soon climbing up let another big massive hill. Toby had a puncture just as we got to the top of the climb and he took one whole hour and two tubes before he was ready to ride again. Me and Andy watched unhelpfully from a distance and the usual bike mocking continued. The view from the top of the climb was a frustating one as we could see the road wind its way all the down into the valley and then switchbacking up the other side to the town of Inquisivi. A zipline or a bridge of some sort could allow us to get to our destination in minutes rather than the half day´s riding that lay ahead of us, although you wouldn´t have heard any of us complaining during the awesome descent into the valley. The climb up the other side was a bit sloggish (Andy had another mechanical during this climb) but after a eating a bit of mac n cheese we felt we had enough energy in stock at the top of the climb to push on for another 20 km. This road was awesome, with huge 1000 m vertical drops off the side of the road into the green valley below. It was getting dark as we arrived into the town of Quime and we met a couple of cyclists from New Zealand near the town square. They had just cycled from Uyuni (destination of our final leg) and we got some useful information about cycling across the salt flats from them. We had stayed in the same hotel as these guys and the look on the lady´s face after her first breath in our room was hilarious. Toby´s feet had made an overly generous contribution towards the cocktail of bad smells that pervaded our tiny little, poorly ventilated room. For dinner, we had fried chicken and chips for a fifth nigth in a row because it was the better of the only two undesirable dinner options available in Bolivian towns (the other option being a set menu of bad soup, bad meat, bad rice and bad potatoes).

Our last day in the low altitude Yungas region inevitably meant an enormous climb up to the high altitude altiplano. We swallowed our pride after reading the description of this road (long, steep and bumpy) and got a lift in a taxi to the top of the pass (Abra Tres Cruces, 4729m). From here it was a great, easy descent on good tarmac down to the town of Konani, where we jumped on a bus to the large town of Oruru where we planned to rest and prepare for our final leg to Uyuni.

GPS tracks of Yungas leg
Altitude profile of Yungas leg




Monday 17 June 2013

Photos from Yungas

We are about to leave for the final leg of our journey to Uyuni so unfortunately we haven´t got time to write in detail about the last 5 days of cycling through the Yungas right now. A brief description and photos are uploaded below and we´ll do a proper blog post from La Paz in a week or so.

The Yungas is the region where the high altitude plateau of Bolivia drops down to the Amazon basin. We enjoyed the greenery and thick, warm air in the lowlands but our expectation of smaller hills was unfounded as the region was just as hilly as our earlier rides through the Andes. 


Zebras directing pedestrians across crossroads, a relatively common sight in La Paz!

Top of La Cumbre pass, and the beginning of our 3000 m descent into the Yungas

First night´s destination wasn´t quite what we had in mind... a street with about 10 shacks selling food and no accommodation

More riding through the clouds
Managed to blag the only spare room in Unduavi  for 1 GBP per person for the night (just big enough to fit three bikes and riders, came complete with sacks stuffed with straw for mattresses)

Scared faces whilst consuming dodgy chicken

Not a pretty face at the end of one our of biggest days

Toby not impressed with Andy´s recurring chain breakages

Finally, he crosses a river without falling into it

Lovely mountains, lovely road

BIG drops off the side of the road

Andy not impressed with Toby´s 1hr long puncture repair session

Longest mechanical stop on this trip
We found the source of the Amazon amazon

Another shot of the source of the Amazon

Back in the high altitude scenery before a massive descent on good tarmac

You did not want to smell this room, we have permentantly ruined it with feet and sweat smell I think

Awesome views

View from our accommodation

Lots of lovely scenery....





Claiming to find another source of the Amazon


Excellent breakfast scrambled eggs and bread



Jamie´s kitchen. I mean Andy´s kitchen. Owner of the hostal watched the process with much interest in our petrol stove

Awesome


Great descent

More scenery etc...













Andy´s boxers got blown off our balcony and onto the roof below. Andy exploited the full extents of his engineering eduction to design an elaborate system of tent poles and sticky tape to successfully retrieve this essential bit of clothing

Concentration face
Restocking on sugary snacks at a typical Bolivian village shop