leans on us as we pack the bikes. The
owner scrubs a large, cleanly cut log
under a block and tackle attached
to a metal frame. He had told us the
previous day that he needed the block
and tackle for "some business" and
both Gareth and I assumed it was to
lift the engine out of a car. However,
the tethered cow and its desperate
neediness sparks a thought: It isn't an
engine that is about to be sacrificed
to the block and tackle gibbet - it is
the cow.
We are sad. It's a friendly cow. But
such is life (or death, if you will).
Breakfasted, packed and loaded,
we set off into the mountains. Im-
mediately I can feel that my bike is
out of sorts. Gareth notices my rear
wheel bouncing repeatedly on the
stony road. We stop and check the
tyre pressures. And then I notice I've
blown my monoshock.
It's not terminal. I'll just have to
bounce along for the next few thou-
sand kilometres.
How can I best describe the day?
Playing?
What did we do? Well, we rode.
It was like four hours of solitary
enduro riding - rocky tracks; undu-
lating tracks; muddy, slippery tracks;
the mountains and the rivers and the
trees our silent companions.
Occasional villages surprise us,
tucked away deep in the mountains,
picturesque - I am sad to say - in
their rural, tumbledown poverty. The
beauty of decay. Neat suburban gar-
dens and corner cafes are not inter-
esting to ride past. Here the villagers
are clinging to survival; only the very
old and the very young and their par-
ents seem to live here. The teenagers,
the young men and women, seem
mostly absent. They - the old ones
left behind - watch us as we pass, a
fleeting intrusion into their struggle
for existence.
We pass oxen pulling wooden, log-
built sleds laden with hay; black and
white spotted pigs in the roadway;
TRAVERSE 45
small, straggly crops of maize; dusty
streets; logs cut and stored against
the high-altitude cold of winter; hay
filling barns to their roofs, forked
there by men standing on the top of
loaded wagons. Desolate and aban-
doned houses seem the norm, not
the exception. The most vibrant life
in these villages seems to be the trees
that often cover the road completely,
pooling it in shade. High up, the air is
cool. Stream water is blue and clear
and icy cold. We pass the remains of
a glacier left un-melted in a moun-
tain cleft close to the road. The ice is
dirty and brown but with traces of the
aquamarine blue that characterises
old, glacial ice. Outside one small
village we meet about twenty men in
the road carrying what I at first think
is a coffin. Closer, it turns out to be
a large black and gilt Madonna and
child being ceremonially carried on a
wooden bier.
But all good things must end and
we begin to descend into the heat of