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10 Days in Peru with Porter and McGarry

Oct 3, 2013

Back in May of this year, Kelly McGarry and I travelled to Peru with our good friend Justin Olsen along to document the trip. We spent 10 days traveling and riding our bikes, raced the Inca Avalanche finishing a respectable 5th (Porter) and 7th (Kelly) place, and visited a remote community to see how they lived and help improve their infrastructure a bit. We learned a lot, met a lot of amazing people, and had a great time. Here is our story by way of photos, and captions. Enjoy!

Kelly and I exploring the streets of Cusco shortly after landing. It's a beautiful city with a ton of culture and history.

Eating breakfast at a small restaurant in Cusco, the food was amazing the entire trip.

Our guide Alistair Matthew knew all the best spots for food..

Building up the bikes at KB's while Kelly reads about molecular biology and the finer points of the theory of relativity...

Kelly scoping a step down over a donkey path. Pretty fun feature on one of the local trails here, with a ridiculous view. At one point we actually got to jump over a local walking his daily harvest up the hill by donkey train.

Kelly with a fun hip in the high grasslands.

Taking advantage of the last sliver of light on this ridge line. This is in the same zone as Kelly's hip shot above. This was a pretty cool zone with a lot of possibilities for cool features to build, unfortunately we just didn't have enough time to build more!

Nice sunset on our first day riding, the trails were fast and flowy dropping back down into the sacred valley.

This was our van for the trip, it got the job done! Interesting fact... vans in Peru do not come with seatbelts, it's an additional upgrade, so obviously most don't have them. We had more than one sketchy situation on the roads that we were lucky to make it out of!

Quick snack stop at the salt mines. There is a really fun trail that snakes around the outside of these cascading pools of water that eventually evaporate and just leave salt, which is then harvested.

The trail through the salt mines was one of the most fun and easily accessible rides of the trip.

The roads here are crazy, snaking through the mountains, and you are sharing them with everything from horses to semi-trucks.

Top of Abra Malaga pass, almost 15,000 feet. Neither of us were ready for how tiring everything is at such a high altitude, hiking just 50 feet up the hill would put you out of breath.

Kelly grabbing a quick nap in between shots after multiple flights and an overnight at the Lima airport. Keeping your helmet on makes for a nice pillow apparently.

Inching up the mountain at Abra Malga pass was very hard work.. But once we started to descend, it was all worth it!

High mountains and glaciers are above the entire area, it's beautiful there.

Grabbing a quick solar charge on the phone in the middle of a long day on the hill.

This is near the beginning of the ride down to Panticalle, it was a really fun and wild ride!

The ride to the community we visited was about 2 hours, mostly downhill on some amazing sections of trail. To bring the Goal Zero solar panels, LED lanterns and battery to the village, we had to strap everything to our packs or fit it inside. I used old tubes to strap this panel to my pack.

Most of the trail was above treeline and very rocky. With the solar panel strapped to my back I had to be pretty conscious not to make any mistakes and wreck, which could break the Goal Zero panel we brought down.

I think we got 3 or 4 flats on the way down, it was just that rocky and harsh. We ran out of tubes even and had to start patching!

This was our formal introduction to the community. KB was our translator and we took turns sharing stories with each other and getting a brief view into each other's lives.

Their community is called Panticalle, and it is school and community center high in the mountains, but is considered part of the jungle region. They are the most remote community in the jungle region and rarely get visitors or aid. They actually received their first electricity 8 days before we got there, by way of a small hydro-electric dam that runs from glacial snowmelt high above the school. Due to the inconsistent nature of this type of power, the solar backup power we delivered them will be well used.

We had a typical lunch with the community, consisting mostly of eggs, rice, beets, and potatoes. Of course everything was grown right there, and was absolutely delicious.

We did a lot of laughing with the kids, it was really cool.

We spent some time teaching them how to use the panel, battery, and lanterns to provide electricity and light.

The kids all took turns riding and playing with our bikes, they loved it!

We spent a good part of the afternoon running laps on the soccer field with the school kids. At this elevation, it was a serious conditioning exercise!

This was the whole crew, such an amazing group of kids. They have to walk up to 3 hours each way to get to school here, and they really appreciate the opportunity. Makes you think about how many people in the USA just take it for granted and don't care.

Kelly and I about halfway up the hike to get back to the road, and back to where we were staying. The mountains are steep and unforgiving here. You can see the community buildings at the bottom of the valley.

At the end of our trip we were fortunate enough to visit Machu Piccu for a day. It was only a couple valleys over from where we stayed in Ollantaytambo, but another world once we got there. We were blown away, there is no way to prepare yourself for the scale of what the Incan people built by hand hundreds of years ago, and the size and steepness of the mountains surrounding it. This is a really special place that everyone should try to see in their lifetime.

This was a trip that we will never forget. More than anything it made us appreciate what we have that we may take for granted; access to schools, clean drinking water, consistent power supply, seatbelts, etc. The Peruvian people are so generous and welcoming, and happy with what that have. I can't wait to return to Peru for another visit in the years to come!

A huge thanks goes out to the sponsors of this trip for making it happen - Kenda Tires, Diamondback Bikes, Clif Bar, Goal Zero, and Backcountry.com. We also couldn't have done this trip without our friends KB at KBPeru.com and Alistair at Gravitybolivia.com.