Mountain Biking

Back on our bikes! Well, not our bikes, but it sure felt good to be back on the trail with a couple of mountain bikes and seeing the terrain from a whole different angle. Finding good bikes was half of our adventure. After checking several bike shops, we were still in search of bikes with better gears and safer helmets. Someone had given us the name and number of a local guy who will occasionally rent out his own bike, so after days of procrastination we made the call in our best effort of Spanish. To our joy and surprise, he understood us, met us in the plaza to make plans, took us to his house to see the 2 bikes he had, and one of his friends even made plans to join us the following day for a long ride. We rode a bus with the bikes piled on top to a nondescript farm deep in the hills. The bus made a pit stop to drop us off on the side of the road, and we took off from there between women and children hurding cows and men hunched over in the fields. We passed piglets, roosters, cows, burrows, pigs all roaming freely beside us (except the burrows which are usually tied up and sometimes the large pigs). The entire ride was one giant descent for well over two hours. We came to a small, empty town where me met a few children playing in the street who loved eating our animal crackers and looking at the pictures we took of them. Later we descended to a natural salt deposit. In one of the pictures you can see burrows being hurded up a trail with blocks of natural salt strapped to their backs. The ride was rough in places and included a lot of single track, but the scarriest part of the ride was the final stretch along a paved road where we had to dodge traffic and buckets of water being tossed at us. I got soaked by a group of kids in the street and it felt great after the long and hot slight ascent to Urubamba where we ate lunch (mine included fried bananas, rice, and two fried eggs... hmmmm)and caught a bus back to Cusco... more about the water fights later!