When I began planning this little adventure I knew that it would either be one of the greatest things I had ever done… or it would turn out to be one of the stupidest, most painful things I’ve ever attempted. Unfortunately, my little trip by trike through Southern Peru was largely the later.

I’ll write more about this and in greater depth on my website at www.bicycletouringpro.com, but for now, here are the highlights of what happened to me while trying to ride a single-speed Peruvian tricycle taxi cab from Puno to Cuzco, Peru.

On Thursday February 10^th I left my hostel in downtown Puno and walked a shot distance to the home of Ivan the tricycle owner. I knocked on the gate to his home and a few minutes later he came out.

The tricycle was waiting for me when I arrived, but it was dirty and covered in trash. Ivan insisted on washing the trike and making some small adjustments and repairs to the vehicle before he handed it over to me… so I took some photos and videos while he went about this work.

After thanking Ivan for his tricycle, I rode the trike a few blocks west to the street in Puno where bicycles, tricycles and motorcycles are repaired. Once there, I asked one of the mechanics on hand to make a number of tweaks to my vehicle. The seat post needed to be raised, the bottom bracket needed to be tightened, the front left wheel needed a bolt to be attached so that it didn’t completely roll off the axle while I was riding, and I needed the pedals to be threaded in correctly.

All of this (and a few other repairs) took about 3 hours to complete… and as the mechanic went about his work, my bill gradually went up. In the end, I paid 86 Soles for the repairs and new parts to my lime green tricycle taxi cab.

By the time the repairs were finished it was a little after 1 PM and I was anxious to get on the road. So I took off right away. I cycled a short distance across town through heavy traffic and then began and hour-and-a-half long effort to push the tricycle and all my belongings up the hill leading out of the city.

The first part of the push was the most difficult. There was the most traffic here and the grade was the stepest. Luckily, there was a spot about half-way up the hill (shown above) where I could park the trike for a few moments and take a breather.

Then, further up the hill, a curious bunch of children saw me pushing the tricycle up the hill and ran over to help. I let the little ones push the tricycle for a short distance, but after they nearly ran the trike down the mountainside I took back possession of the tricycle, thanked the kids for their effort, and did the rest of the pushing up to the top of the hill on my own. My arms were shaking when I finally got there.

After reaching the top of the hill leading out of Puno there was a long downhill stretch. This was my first time driving the trike down a steep hill, so I had the brakes on almost the entire time and I wobbled from side to side as I tried to keep control of the wide metal beast.

A short distance down the hill I ran into a police roadblock and was forced to stop. A large burly police officer asked for my passport, information on where I was going and what I was doing, and he questioned me about the video camera I had bolted onto the back of the tricycle. After a few minutes of questioning, he let me through and a large group of police officers on the other side of the roadblock smiled and waved as I cycled past.

Further down the road I saw four people pushing a small blue sedan up the hill that I was descending. I had already down my fair share of pushing that day, but I decided to pull over and help the lot push their vehicle to the side of the road. The four thanked me for my assistance and I continued on my way.

A short distance down the road I passed through a small village and picked up my one and only passenger during my short tricycle touring adventure. The man in the photo below (I never got his name) was walking along the side of the road and when he saw me he acted as though he wanted to get a ride. So I stopped and waved at him to get in.

At first the man was hesitant. He kept saying something about “2 Soles” and I figured that he feared that if he got into the trike that he would owe me 2 Soles. But I tried to tell him that the ride was “gratis”. Eventually he hopped in and I drove him about one-tenth of a mile down the road to a small liquor store that he either owned or had friends at.

When we arrived at the liquor store, a small group of people came out to see the gringo, his tricycle taxi cab, and the passenger he had picked up. At first, everyone there seemed really nice and interested in my adventure by trike. I took a photo of my passenger in the trike and everyone in the group laughed and smiled as I did so. But soon the group of people (and my only passenger) started demanding money. Instead of the man paying me 2 Soles for his trip in my tricycle, he was asking me for money just because I took his photo.

In an instant, I hated everyone there, gave them a nasty look, and jumped back on my tricycle and rode off into the distance.

It was around this point that I knew I would never reach Cuzco on the tricycle. It wasn’t my passenger that had discouraged me from making it there, but instead a whole host of problems with the tricycle.

For starters, the seat on the trike was far too low and because of this I couldn’t put much force behind my pedal stokes… and it was killing my knees to have the seat so low.

The fact that the tricycle only had one gear didn’t help either. If that one gear had been a really low gear, that certainly would have helped, but the one gear the tricycle did have on it was much too large. Even on flat ground I could barely get the tricycle rolling.

And besides all this, the trike was making all kids of noises. It was creaking, cracking, and scratching. As I pedaled along, the trike made an incredible ruckus that was hard for me to ignore.

Because of my late start, I didn’t get much distance behind me on day one. I cycled for a few hours and when it began to get dark and cloudy I pulled the tricycle off to the side of the road and hid it in what seemed to be the village dump. I then climbed a small nearby hill, set up my tent and went to sleep just as it began to pour rain.

The following morning I woke up early with the intention of getting as many miles behind me as humanly possible. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far. I spent the entire day riding through remote farming villages and probably spent more time pushing the bike and/or resting than I did actually riding my three-wheeled taxi cab. The landscape most of the way looked a little something like this (see photo below).

Every once and a while I’d come across a small hill that I had to climb and then descend, but most of the way it was entirely flat. I kept thinking about how if I had my regular touring bike I would have been flying down this road… and I kept wondering to myself why the hell I was doing this to myself.

All day long I passed hundreds of beautiful ranch homes like you see in the photo below. Most of the houses had several small buildings located within the bordering walls of the property… llamas, sheep, dogs and people sitting outside the structures… and almost all of them had clay cows standing over the arched entrance-ways.

The road all day long was pretty quiet. Most of the time I rode the tricycle right down the middle of the road… or I’d weave in and out of the yellow lines painted down the middle of the street.

Cars would pass about every 5-10 minutes… and I’d see an occasional cyclist or two every couple hours.

Note how the guy in the photo below is using an orange construction helmet as his bike helmet.

I like this bike the best. It’s a total piece of junk, but it has been lovingly decorated by its owner.

The farmers in the photo below were using their bicycles to move their herd from one area to another. See the bikes on the left-hand side of the photo? This was a common scene during day two of my trike ride.

I didn’t speak to hardly alone all day long. I just got a lot of strange looks and casual waves from the people I passed by. I did, however, run into one individual who really, really scared me.

As I entered a small remote village I saw a guy standing by the side of the road with a bucket of white paint. As I approached on my trike, the man began walking toward me and I could see that he had paint dripping down his face. As he got closer, I realized that this man had been inhaling and possibly even eating the white paint that was now coming out of his nostrils and mouth.

As the man reached me, he stuck out his paint covered hand so as to introduced himself, and I didn’t want to be rude, so I shook the man’s hand and introduced myself in return.

The man began speaking to me and I couldn’t understand a thing he was saying. He was either speaking a completely different language or he was plastered out of his mind. By the way his breath smelled, I figured it was likely the later. As the man spoke I kept telling him that I didn’t speaking Spanish and that I couldn’t understand him, but he kept on talking… and as he did so he’d lean into me and put his face just a few inches from my own so that I had no choice but to look at and smell the paint that was dripping from his face.

After just a few moments of this, I tried to say goodbye to the man, but he wouldn’t let me leave. I was on a small hill at the time, so I was pushing the tricycle (not riding it) and as I started up the road, the man began to follow me.

For more than two kilometers the man walked alongside me as I pushed the tricycle up the road. The entire time the guy kept talking to me… and the entire time I kept telling him that I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

Numerous times I stopped and tried to get a photo of the guy, but when I pointed the camera at him, he’d run and hide as though I were pointing a gun at him and he was trying to dodge a bullet.

When we finally reached the top of the hill I saw a small park bench just a short distance away and tried to tell the man that I was going to stop and get some food. I thought that this might get him to go away, but instead the man decided to sit down with me and continue to stick his pain-covered face into my own.

At this point I began to get somewhat upset with the man. I was doing everything I could to ditch him and he just wouldn’t go away. It was then that I began thinking to myself that the man might be trying to rob me… or at the very least, trying to get some money out of me.

As we were sitting there on the bench I tried to play it cool and ignore the man jabbering in my ear. But all of a sudden the guy reached into his jacket pocket and to me it looked like he was reaching for something. “A gun?” I thought to myself?

At this thought, I jumped up from the bench and prepared myself for whatever the man might be getting ready to pull from his jacket. I seriously thought the guy might have a gun… or a knife at the very least. But then I saw it! It was a radio!

A few moments later I said “Adios” to the man… and he finally got the message. He stuck out his hand for another quick shake, pressed his face nearly up to mine and mumbled a few more phrases into my ear, and then took off walking back in the direction we had come.

Back on the road, I spent the rest of the day cycling and pushing my tricycle through more remote farmland.

As it began to grow dark… and I began to grow very tired.. I began to look for a place to spend the night. But with most of the surrounding areas being completely flat with only a few small hills off the the sides of the road, I was limited in my camping choices.

It was then that I spotted a small cluster of clay homes perched up on the hillside and I thought that whoever might live there would be nice enought to let me camp in their field.

So I parked my tricycle on the side of the road and walked up the hillside toward the cluster of buildings.

As I got closer I began to see a few small women running from one home to the next. They had obviously spotted me coming their way and the word was spreading that there was a stranger in their midst.

When I got closer I was approached my a single women in traditional Peruvian dress. She stood confidently at the top of the hill and looked down on me while a few women sat in the doorway behind her and took turns peeking out at me through the darkness of their clay home.

In my very best Spanish I explained to the woman that I was riding my tricycle from Puno to Cusco and that I was simply looking for a place to spend the night. I told her that I had a tent and I asked her if it would be okay if I camped in her field.

Without saying a word, the woman shook her head and agreed that it would be alright for me to spend the evening.

I then ran down to the road where my tricycle was parked and grabbed my bag containing my tent, sleeping bag and all my other worldly possessions. When I turned around I was met by a young boy who grabbed my tricycle and began pushing it up the hill in the direction I planned to camp.

The boy’s name was Julian, he was 15-years-old, and his mother (Alicia – the woman who had said it would be okay for me to spend the night) had instructed him to help me with my trike.

Together, Julian and I pushed the tricycle up the steep hill toward the family’s farm house and when we reached the lowest of the houses, we parked the tricycle in a big pile of llama shit and it was there that Julian instructed me to pitch my tent.

As I went about setting up my camp for the evening, the entire family began to emerge from the nearby structures. There were five of them in total. Alica (the mom), Julian (the son), the sisters (Ruth and ______ (I forgot the second sister’s name)), and another woman who must have been an aunt of some kind. The five of them huddled around me as I went about setting up my tent and as I did so they’d ask questions about the equipment I was pulling from my bags.

“How much does your tent cost?” Julian would ask.

“What is that for?” Ruth would then say as I began blowing up my air mattress.

“Will you be warn enough when it begins to rain?” the aunt wanted to know.

After answering all their questions and completing the set up of my temporary home, it began to rain and the family said goodnight. I said goodnight in return and waved goodnight to the donkey and numerous llamas that were tied up on the hillside just a few feet from my campsite. Then I crawled inside my tent, got inside my sleeping bag, rolled over onto myself and quickly went to sleep. I was exhausted!

The following morning I was woke up and noticed that there was now a dead bird hanging from the mud home nearest me. The bird had not been there the day before and I had heard it squawking all throughout the night. So seeing it there, hanging from a string that morning, made me realize that this was no accident.

It was then that I looked down at the tricycle and knew in an instant that I had a flat tire.

Over night the front-right tire of the tricycle had gone completely flat… and if I was going to continue on I would need to repair the puncture.

Unfortunately, I had very limited tools in my possession. I had purchased the adjustable wrench I would need in order to unscrew the wheel from the axel, but I didn’t have the tools needed to remove the tire from the rim.

The bicycle mechanic in Puno had manufactured a single tire-level for me out of an old kickstand, but even with this one tool in my posession I was unable to pry the tire from the rim. I tried for nearly a half-hour to repair the flat, but with no luck.

I thought about simply blowing the tire up, continuing down the road, and stopping every couple minutes to re-inflate the tire, but the thought of doing this for miles on end made me nauseous.

15-year-old Julian came out to help me at some point and even with the two of us we were unable to repair the flat.

Finally, I gave up! I had had enough of my tricycle touring adventure and I didn’t want to go any further.

In an instant I decided to give the tricycle away. Julian and his family had almost nothing… and so I asked Julian if he would want my tricycle. He shook his head in agreement, but wasn’t quite sure what I was asking.

In my best Spanish possible I explained to Julian that I was giving him my tricycle. I told him that I would continue on on foot and that I would leave the tricycle with him to do as he please.

“Es gratis” I would say. And Julian would smile, rub his hands together with joy, and then ask me if he could really keep my tricycle.

“Si” I would say. “It’s is all yours.”

At some point, Julian ran up the hillside to tell his family the good news. And at this point the entire family joined us down by the trike.

I asked Julian’s mother if it would be okay for me to give Julian my tricycle and she shook her head that yes, it was okay. She never said a word.

After taking a few photos of the family, Julian and my tricycle, I packed up my backpack with all of my worldly possessions and took off down the road. When I reached the road I looked back and the family was pushing my tricycle across the hillside in the direction of a nearby rain shelter.

I had wanted to ride the tricycle for at least another day or two as I had made very little ground during my two days of riding, but it felt good to give the tricycle away to a family that appreciated the gift that I was giving.

So I spent the rest of the day on foot, walking through remote farm villages, waving at cows, sheep, llamas and dogs. And by about 3 PM I had reached the Sillustani ruins, which I’ll share with you in my next post.