The Elephant's Travels 2016

There is something about inertia, something that drives me crazy. It is the way that our lives take on inertia as though they were physical objects. We settle quickly into routine, whatever it may be, and the longer we don't change the harder change becomes. Six months back on the Gold Coast and it was a wrench to pack the bags and go. Two months in London, buried in our London routine, and moving on seemed so much harder than just staying. And we know that after months on the road, that life too, will become a habituated norm and the simple act of stopping will be a wrench.

Our arrival in Cartagena was something of a relief for poor sailors likeTeam Elephant. Although neither of us succumbed to sea-sickness while others of the motley crew did, this was more to do with canny use of the drugs than tolerance for sailing. Sea dogs we ain't. We were glad to take the dinghy ashore leaving Elephant on board waiting for the “customs guy” to arrive the following day.

We hailed the first passing taxi to the old city to look for a hotel. There is problem, the driver said. The city is blocked off for the signing of the treaty, he said.

So, it all came down to this. I turned the key, watched the dash lights come up and listened for the faint whine of the ABS. “It lives”, I said, then smiled at Jo and pressed the starter. The engine cranked, then caught, then died, then caught, then grumbled and finally banged into life. We were dehydrated and hot but suddenly we were happy. Suddenly, we were really off on another adventure.

There is a road. Sometimes it is called the Pan American Highway, sometimes the Carretera Panamericana and often by a local name. In some places it is a super highway; a wide multi-lane divided road. In others it is long neglected, narrow and pot-holed. People will tell you that the Pan American is one of the great motorcycle journeys and that it links the Americas from Alaska to Patagonia. They are wrong on both counts.

No sooner had Blog 4/16 been posted that the answer to the question of the vote on the Colombian peace contract was known. Colombia voted “ no”. The feeling abroad the following day was strangely familiar to us having been in London a few days after the Brexit vote. The similarities were uncanny. There was low voter turnout and the “no” vote won by the slimmest of margins. There was also a similar bifurcation of the nation. Those who travelled or worked in the areas affected by FARC voted “si” because their lives were directly affected.

In the last years of the 18thnCentury and the early years of the 19th, the great hero of Latin American liberation, Simón Bolívar, spent years in Spain, France and the United States. He saw first hand the weakness of the Spanish king (Bolívar's house-mate was the Queen's lover for a time), saw Napoleon crowned Emperor of France, sought support for his revolution from the British and Americans and vowed to rid the continent of South America of its Spanish oppressors. The great revolutions in France and the US were fresh and he studied them voraciously.

The equator is a big deal in Ecuador. If the name doesn't give it away then the early advice that you must visit Mitad del Mundo (The Middle of the World) does. It may well be the second thing you hear when you come into the country. The first is likely to be the interesting fact that Panama hats are in reality Ecuadorian hats made from Ecuadorian reeds. Many thousands of them were exported to Panama for the workers on the famous canal and hence the association with Panama.

One of the things about travelling on a bike is that stuff just happens. Sometimes good stuff, like an unexpected new friendship. Sometimes bad stuff like breakdowns or worse. For us this gives life a nice balance. The good day made perfect because of the bad day that preceded it and the bad day made bearable because of the good days ahead. Just like life in general really, but somehow writ large and immediate on the bike.

After the gritty working town of Chepén, and the long grind south through villages struggling to survive on the edge of a great desert, arriving in the swank southern suburbs of Peru's capital Lima was like dropping into some parallel universe. Coffee shops, US dollar prices, an army of street sweepers and cars that occasionally stopped to let a pedestrian cross, all marked this out as a place apart; a place protected by a hard shell of surrounding barrios that could be intended to keep the desert out, or the residents in.

We have long since ceased to be surprised when our experience of a place differs wildly from that of other travellers. Sometimes the difference is all down to Elephant. It is hard to get enthusiastic about the preserved history of a beautiful historic centre if getting there involved a three hour nightmare of traffic, cobbled streets and sweat. Somehow the reality of the city, as it is, seems much more pressing that the history of its colonial past. But the difference can also be explained by our personal response to what we experience.

Bolivia is the poorest country in South America and it shows up in all sortsof ways. Sometimes the problems are directly attributed, if not to poverty, then certainly to a lack of wealth. The diet is plain. Accommodation can be hard to find of a fair standard. Money is also hard to get. ATMs are plentiful but often out of money, unable to communicate with the outside world or take only a specific local card. None of this causes us any real problems. This is just the way things are and we cope well enough.

We often tell people not to over-plan. Many grand journeys, we say, are never begun because the would-be travellers are overwhelmed by planning. Our idea is to do enough to ensure that the journey is possible, then get started and work out the detail as we go. As we get closer to each new phase of our journey we get to work on the detail. We find ourselves, as a result, constantly planning and refining.

Not many tourists go to Paraguay. The country is relatively small, land-locked and lacks the sort of spectacular physical features of other South American countries. The majority of people who cross the border each day are Brazilians and Argentinians who come to shop in the duty free zones. For Australians there is the added difficulty of obtaining an expensive visa in advance. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, we were glad we came and I think the Paraguayans were pleased to see us. And, there is a little bit of Australia in Paraguay if you can find it.

With a week on holidays, Team Elephant has been rather more idle than usual leaving our curiosity parked in the basement with Elephant. There has, however, been plenty to do and we have kept ourselves busy with administration, rest and a little tourism. Our layover was originally intended to allow time to rebuild Elephant's suspension but a four day weekend put a stop to that. With Christmas looming over the horizon, we don't have time for repairs so we will accommodate Elephant's breakages as we accommodate our own and press on.

We could never say we weren't warned. Every bike rider who has made the pilgrimage to Patagonia at the bottom of South America has something to say about it. Their stories and blog posts and their conversations huddled together at chance road-stop meetings all come back to this one issue. Here at the end of the world, the wind is a beast, a living breathing animal. When riders meet down here, the questions of wind are rhetorical, asked in shorthand and answered with raised eyebrows or wry smiles.

Team Elephant spent its Christmas in Ushuaia, in southern Tierra del Fuego. This is as far south as you can go on a motorcycle.  Riding to the end of the road, and taking a photo in front of the sign that says this is the end of the road, is something of pilgrimage for many travellers.  Like others before us, we rode down to where Ruta 3 ends and the ocean starts and felt quietly pleased with ourselves for having come this far.  We even went to the trouble of finding the most southerly Argentinian post office and sending a couple of post cards to our grandchildren.

In the course of a few weeks we have crossed into and out of Argentina and Chile several times as we negotiated the tortured geography and national boundaries of Tierra del Fuego. At one point we crossed into Chile only to cross out again a little more than an hour later. It would be easy to think that these two countries, sharing the longest land border, would be well coordinated and that the borders would be beyond controversy. After all, the countries have a long common history.

When analysts are baffled by the political contortions of a country they always go back to the basics and focus on geography for the character of every country is formed in the first instance by the land itself. Long term blog readers may have suffered through a little of my tub thumping on this in the past, but I have always found it an interesting and illuminating way to form an understanding of a new land. If geography is a good explanation of national behaviour in the past, there is a good chance it will be provide an explanation of the present and a prediction for the future.

Some places have names that stir the heart. Often it is a place far away and exotic, sometimes the site of grand legends, sometimes just a few lines of a tale told by a guest and overheard by a boy secretly listening long after being dispatched to bed. Over the years we have run down many of these legendary places and some names now have substance in our memory.  Vladivostok took form during a few weeks of summer we spent there refitting Elephant after a trans-Russia ride.

If Valparaiso had left us feeling good about the world, our ride up to the big city of Santiago brought us down to earth. Summer fires were raging in the hills and covering the land in smoke. In a city already smog-handicapped by its valley floor location, this added a sinister, choking, eye-watering layer to the misery. It would, we decided, be a waste of money taking the teleférico up to a mirador overlooking the city.