Josh, before he left for Cuenca. He never made it.
Josh was trying to figure out a way to get Mancora, Peru, in a minimal amount of time. He works as a programmer and his job expects him to keep pretty regular business hours. They kind of don’t know that he’s on this trip. He works remotely, so as long as he has an Internet connection, it doesn’t really matter where he is in the world. This has impacted his ability to travel.
He can’t exactly ride around on a motorcycle if he’s supposed to be working, so for his sake the three of us have mostly been traveling on the weekend. For the next leg of our journey, Josh decided to try something different. He wanted to try riding really hard over a weekend and covering a ton of ground. How much ground? His plan was to go from Baños, Ecuador to Trujillo, Peru over the course of three days.
Here are some pictures of the route:
Baños to the Peruvian border
The Peruvian border down to our first stretch of desert
The end of the road…Trujillo
The route is more than 20 hours of riding, and covers nearly 1,300 kilometers. To put that in perspective, the most we generally get out of a day of riding is 6 hours’ worth of distance. Riding more than two days in a row is hard, because our bikes are not the most comfortable to sit on.
I think his plan was doable, even if it wouldn’t have been a very enjoyable ride.
It didn’t happen, though. This is how far he actually got:
What we didn’t know before we got to this area of Ecuador is that clouds ascend and descend all the time on these mountain roads and make visibility extremely difficult. Josh was riding on a mountain road and lost visibility. He couldn’t see far enough ahead of him to realize that the road quality was about to drop. He was going too fast, hit his brakes, and lost his balance. He crashed.
People stopped to help him out. One of his legs was messed up. He thought it might be broken. Some bystanders called the police, and they escorted Josh into the nearby town of Alausi. Fortunately, Josh could still ride his bike and his bike was in good enough shape to be ridden.
All this happened on Friday night. Josh got in touch with us on Saturday to let us know, and we encouraged him to get his leg checked out. The doctors put a cast on his leg to help with the swelling, and when he got an x-ray the following day, he got the good news that his leg was not broken.
Over the next few days while he was chilling out in Alausi, he started reflecting on the trip so far, and realized that he had really had all of the experiences he wanted to have.
He decided it was time to go home. On Tuesday he sent out a text message letting me know that he had decided to leave. The next day he sold his motorcycle and booked a flight back to the United States from Quito. His flight leaves this Saturday.
He and I spent more than a year planning this trip, and for him to leave unexpectedly like this is a pretty big surprise. It completely changes the tenor of things.
Our trio’s down to two!
So for Josh, the adventure is over. It’s back to real life.
I’ll miss you, man.
So what were Elizabeth and I up to while all this was going on? I’ll write about that next time.