saltwatersteve.com/travel

For fans of the Motorcycle Diaries, you’ll love this story. Alberto and Ernesto set out aboard a 1939 Norton 500. Our bike was 66 years newer and its engine had only half the displacement (250cc), but how mighty it was. It hauled us up the hill north of town as fast as we wanted to go. A couple thousand vertical feet of windy dirt roads in just over 20 minutes. I was grinning from ear to ear, remembering the glory days of riding dirt bikes in Oklahoma while taking in the smoky views of the active Volcán Tungurahua.

We took the bike up near the radio antennas but backtracked to take our pictures - so there wouldn’t be antennas in them. Then Meghan wanted to learn how to ride the motorcycle so, despite the fact that a 250 was a bit much for little Meggie to learn on, we made do. I now know how much running around Dad must have done when I learned, because I was chasing her up and down the dirt road quite a bit. I think it was a bit more difficult at this altitude than in Oklahoma however. Her clutch experience with driving a stickshift car came in handy but it proved tricky to start going uphill since she had to hold the bike with the front brakes while working the throttle, but she got it after a few tries.

We were only going to rent the bike for two hours but by the end of the lesson, we had burned up most of that so we decided to explore the road over the top of the mountain, based on the very basic 3 line map the guy at the rental shop had drawn us. There were a few little towns we could go through on a big loop that would get us back to our base town of Baños. After a few wrong turns (but wrong turns that yielded incredible views) we found the first of these towns and the people hanging out pointed us down a road saying it was the most direct route back Baños. I don’t imagine a more direct road would have been possible. It was insanely steep, rutted out by erosion and gravelly to boot. There was one section that I had to ask Meghan to get off the bike because I didn’t trust my bike piloting skills well enough to put both of us at risk. Safety First! (At least Meghan’s safety)

After the grade of the road became more sane (i.e. flat), we encountered several orchards and eventually the second small town and nearby we saw a sign pointing us down another road to Baños. Taking this road, we came out on the north side of Rio Pastaza. This dirt road was just barely wide enough for one car and the cliff to our right dropped several hundred feet to the water below. Most of it was nice and hard packed but there had been rains the previous night so there were some muddy spots. At one point we came around a corner and there was an old Honda Civic stuck in the mud. Uh oh.

Once again, I asked Meghan to get off the bike while I tried to navigate the sticky brown lake at the edge of the cliff. The left side of the car looked like a landslide so I decided to drive the bike on the right (cliff) side of the car. I had about a 4 or 5 foot wide path between the car and the edge of the cliff, completely mud. It was here that I got the bike stuck. The wheels were about 8 to 10 inches deep and not moving. This mud was like being in peanut butter or marshmallow topping - really thick and sticky. I’d put my feet in, burying them up past the ankle but then not be able to move them again. Great. So I ask Meghan to dig herself in and help push the bike. So there we were on the edge of a cliff with an overdue rental motorcycle huffing and puffing, getting nowhere, with no one else around to help, and it was getting dark. At one point I tried firing up the motor again and using its power combined with both of us pushing, we got it out.

We got some good pictures of our feet covered with mud. When we got back to Baños (4 hours after taking the bike), we learned a new word from the rental shop guys: lodo. Spanish for mud.

Oh, if you click on the Map View below, you will see a sweet satellite photo of Volcán Tungurahua smoking away near the bottom of the map window.