motor mechanical means in the time we were being franked out and in. All the tonnages, and they were considerable, were moved by a man and his sack barrow. Seventy-five kilos per second, four thousand five hundred kilos per minute, two hundred and seventy thousand kilos every hour. Man, woman and youth, each with their cart, all on piece-rates. Wheat flour, tuna fish, boxed wine, bottled water. It’s biblical. An un-peaceful, human powered, one-way conveyor belt, with the occasional crate of empty, deposit paid, beer bottles returning to the south.

It’s new, it’s novel and I’ve seen it before. The leaf cutter ant. The purposeful endeavor, the bustling scuttle, the

multitudinous organisation. The ants’ motorway. The ‘persona-pista’. There’s even a blue pinnied ‘cholita’, a crossing attendant to allow the occasional foot traveller or the rare cyclist to break through. We breach the flow and it immediately heals. Leaving me to wonder: Why? To ponder on pulled muscles,

Leaving us to collect another three stamps, bringing the trip total up to a page consuming, passport depleting twenty-seven. At this rate of attrition, we’ll both need new papers very soon.

The Establishment always has the last laugh. It needs its dollar.         

The change comes suddenly, created by a drop of only a few metres and a distance measured in cycle lengths: a new place, another world. We’ve been flat-running alongside a lake, the landscape high, open, impoverished Bolivian puna, when the road suddenly plunges into a tight ravine. The walls rear up, the horizon shortens, the sky shrinks. Trees swell and stretch, the cliffs drip ferns and vines. We’ve stepped over a boundary. Plunged down into cloud forest. 

The descent continues, this plunge through a tangle of contours, this dive into the dank arboreal. Humidity and heat in an inverse proportion with altitude, my bike in a thrall to gravity. Exuberant foliage swells and swallows all our views, a man leaves the road, the jungle eats him up.  The boiling mist that’s newly sprung from the valleys, the mossed limb that hosts a fernery. The tangled skein of trailing lianas, the swelling cordage of buttress roots, the vibrant flicker of  waltzing butterflies, the incessant cadence of vibrating cicadas, the raucous caw of concealed birds. The roadside weed of flowering orchids. 

passing through another boundary and along a timeline of geological evolution to encounter an agricultural revolution. The polychrome of tan and dun meets the monochrome of green and monoculture. The wind-vexed, desiccated sand

batters into flooded wetland paddy rice. A ribbon of monocrop fills to the brim the narrow valley, mirroring the twisting flow of the provender river.

Quintessential oasis.

Our last night in Bolivia, and the wallet is replete with a stash of miscalculated Bolivianos. That age-old dilemma: how many notes to extract from a bank, when you’re not sure if another source might materialise, how much the next few days will cost, even how many days are left in country. Better to play safe. Which is why we’re splashing out on an evening meal; the alternative is the sharks at the frontier in their temples of usury.

It’s a frontier town, the shops radiating out from the plaza reflect the various tax disparities between two neighbouring countries. Yacuiba specialises in bathroom furnishings: tubs and basins, radiators and Jacuzzis, whilst the standard fare of shoes and shirts, soap powders and hair gels line the route to the immigration office. It’s still a Bolivian town in that the plaza has a triumphalistic monument to the ‘Heroes of the Chaco’; Bolivar prances on his pedestalled mount, yet we’ve crossed a threshold. The boys sport River Plate futbol shirts and watch the AFA on the television. It’s ‘asado’ not ‘a la brasa’ in the pavement restaurants. It’s the schoolgirls that wear plaided, pleated, pelmet length skirts. It’s the stacked brooms for the yard sweep in all the shops. It’s the heladeria that offers thirty colours of ice cream, a third of which are a variation on a theme of dulce de leche. It’s ladies riding motos. It’s maté and termos. It’s my bife that comes with only chips; gone are the plattered heaps of boiled rice, fried plantain, shredded onion, with a single garnishing slice of tomato. True, it’s priced in Bolivianos but the sting is Argentine.

Yet where that threshold sits is difficult to determine. It’s been creeping over us for a few days. A dilution of the last vestiges of High Andean culture, that modest decorum now infused with a concentration of European genes, of the rising hemline and the plunging décolletage.  The attenuated transports, the public colectivos reduced to the private car. 

It’s a town that faces south, yet keeps it’s feet resolutely on Bolivian soil, as we’ll discover when we pedal the short distance to the border.

I don’t  think it can be rain, as when I turned in, the first stars were just arriving. Anyway, precipitation is generally preceded by a warning crump of thunder. Maybe it’s just a few mosquitoes trapped between the tent’s skins, yet there isn’t that tell-tale instant insomniatic whine as they try to tele-port through the screen. Still there’s the gentle patter of something outside. 

I’m roused in the night by a gibbous moon, glancing from behind a mottled, marbled sky, the jungle furnished in noise and shadow, frogs and cicadas harmonise, something rustles in the undergrowth, but still the patters fall. Maybe it’s a light fog, condensation falling from the leaves, or could it be that near-biblical phenomenon of weeping trees.
 It’s only in the early light of morning that I discover that we’ve pitched under a crop of incontinent caterpillars. The tent is latrined in their pooped dung. Yet another scatological addition to the list of indignities that our tents have suffered. The fruit bats of Queensland that ruined a drying shirt and pockmarked a flysheet with digested Moreton Bay figs; the packs of Argentine dogs that repeatedly squirt territorial urine, the cats that are determined to claw any taut nylon; the imprisoned moth that broke out, chewing it’s way to freedom through the mosquito netting.

That’s now countered by a break-in. A critter has eaten it’s way right through the waterproof membrane of a pannier, then around the edge of a Tupperware pot, through the intake pipe of the water filter, feasting on some water retention granules, only to nibble the foil from a cheese wedge. Such dedication to destruction, all for such small reward. The joys of jungle camping.

A day that has detoured and contorted, where the map has lied and the wind has been hot and head-on, then has insulted by not providing a room. The distance is mounting, the sun dropping towards an oceanic horizon; time to accept that we’ll have to camp in a tent rather than in a room. Only the possibilities for a stealth site are minute. The desert stretches forward into a blue vanishing point, out to an ocular infinity, these wayward undulations of soft dunes swaying west into the sea. A sandscape devoid of vegetation, a rockscape devoid of any apparel. Still the kilometres accumulate and it’s looking like we will have to wait for dusk and the hundred metre dash off the road, the dark time pitch and a pre-dawn departure, when serendipity steps in. Our guardian angel, who comes in many guises, offers up a series of small volcanic vents, a string of denticulated intrusions that sweep back from the road, a perfect shroud for a camp. Our own private hermitage. The wind packed grit has swept in flowing waves that curl around each protrusion, an interlocking successions of Fujiyamas. Minimised volcanoes with angles of repose. Outlines that please and calm the eye, a solemnity for the mind. It feels sacreligous to even walk, to footprint in this pristine space; and yet I have to desecrate, to dismantle the jigsaw of a shattered plutonic, plundering for guy rope weights to tether our bunkered tent. This humbling knowledge that no human has ever moved, nor ever touched one of these stones. A dispeopled space so devoid of human hospitality, yet offering so much imaginative stimulus.

These soothing sweeps have just one distort, a solitaire, one small insignificant granite stone, set in a monoculture of ground grit. A recluse that has forsaken, a ‘deserere’ that has left the mother lode, a true deserter. Round, pitted, worn down not by faith or water but by an aeon of flagellation. I pick it up; it’s leaden heavy, rough pocked and perfectly balled. Special. Cherishable. I want to own it. Another keepsake. Yet, too many of these windstones have been collected. They now lie, dysfunctional, in the air-conditioned reception courts and on the clipped irrigated lawns of the multi-starred hotels of the coast, in much the same way that the Inca era, immaculately cut, polished granites can be found in ordinary back gardens all around the Sacred Lake.

It belongs only here. I put it back in the place of no water, the northern Atacama.

It’s a  piece of knowledge that’s backed up with the formula. Water boils at a lower temperature the higher you climb. Tea on Everest is lukewarm, every expedition climber confirms this fact in any and every account. Only I hadn’t appreciated the significance on the Puno – that is until we ended back down on the Peruvian Pacific coast. I had got used to boiling water (with our electric boilie) for a coffee in a plastic cup. It kept it’s shape, I kept my fingers. We dropped 4,000 m or about 13,000 ft in one morning, a blast of freewheeling, a blaze of hot rims and twisting tyre walls. That evening I’m preparing the Forager’s fix of caffeine and nearly scald my fingers as the cup turns flaccid, wrinkles and crumples. Sure proof, an empirical scientific lesson.

Which now throws up a new line of investigation and a few new questions. What is the boiling point of water on the banks of Lake Titicaca? Will it kill protozoans like Giardiasis? And how do the locals cook rice? Answers: 88°C, don’t know and pressure cookers. So, tolerate cool coffee, use the ceramic water filter and resort to blind faith. Trusting that the rice you were served yesterday was properly handled, for it arrived at the table too fast to have been cooked from fresh.  Apart from chicken, what does e-coli taste like?

Each country has its supermarket idiosyncratic peculiarities, personalities that reflect ‘place’. In Bolivia the ‘whole-aisle choice’ was a multiple choice of rice grades, all with a confusion of names: from the cheap Gallito, through Cholo and Faron to the top end offerings from Saman, each further subdivided into a ‘tipo of zeros’, not dissimilar to wire wool. 

In Argentina, the perplexing choice is in Yerba Mates, where the options seem dependent upon allegiance, and your father’s preference, not dissimilar to the way you might once have chosen a bank or your profession. 

In the land of ‘the dream’, it’s canyons of confusion, stacked cliffs of high-fructose corn-syrup breakfast cereals, whilst in Scotland it would appear to be the ready-meal and soda pop.

However, today we’re in Peru and I’m presented with the stacked Doric columns of tinned tuna. Flaked and blocked, grated and filleted. I’ve joined the Forager for my occasional session of retail therapeutic education, or more accurately: her chance to show me how interesting and frustrating food shopping can become and why it’s such a protracted process. It’s duration, I’m well versed in, as I defend our parked bikes against reversing taxis, curious boys and the creeping interface between sunlight and sunshade.

Today we need porridge.  We always need porridge. We’ve met those who’ll not leave base without the comfort blanket of a sliced white and cheddar wedge, or the remodeled Mars Bar that lurks in the bottom of a rucksac that looks like it’s gone three rounds with an anvil. To forget is to induce instant ‘Bonk’, a collision with ‘the Wall’. When the day goes wrong and the intended re-supply point transpires to be but a name on an anonymous junction and not the hoped for emporium of calories, there’s always that bag of oats. A product on which I feel I’m becoming an international authority, not so much for it’s production as for it’s acquisition.   
In different countries it comes with differing statuses. In Bolivia it was easy to find, ready bagged or out of the bulk bin, but coming with an add-mix of  grit, stone and dust. In Argentina it’s the phonetic generic: ‘Kwacker’, stored in close proximity to the volatilic soap powders, from which it acquires an added piquancy. In the land of ‘the Free’, the message is simple; don’t hunt for your oats in the breakfast cereal aisle, they’re an embarrassing ‘basic’; try looking in that tiny section that has gelatine, flour and yeast. The stuff without added value. Your bag of carb’ will be on the bottom shelf, tucked away in the corner, taking up the least popular spot in retailing: The Unadulterated. It was whilst cycling the southern US states that we found how ‘Quaker’ had managed to circumvent this problem of adding value to oats: the addition of a ‘free’ bakelite beaker, circa mid 20th century gas station.
Here in Peru, things are different. I had speculated as to when we might start to find difficulty in sourcing ‘avena’, and what might we substitute in its place. I need not have worried; our difficulty is one of choice. Take it in the pure form, or with soya, quinoa, maca or kwichi, often coming with a condiment of ‘sticks and nails’. Soya is sufficiently ubiquitous as to require no explanation, quinoa is gaining a devoted following, even if it’s related to the gardener’s bete noire of fat hen. Both offer the addition of cheaper proteins. ‘Kwetchi’ is the Quechuan name for the purple or white flowering amaranth, an occasional British garden interest plant. ‘Maka’, was the new crop to me, a high altitude root brassica. All these permutations, and I think we might have tested all the choices, offer a tasty, if glutinous start to the day, especially if a tin of evaporated milk accidentally materialises in the basket. However on a blind tasting I suspect I might struggle to tell them apart, especially as they all come masked with the an add-mix of sticks and nails; the overtones of cinnamon and cloves.

The Forager enters the gloom of an unlit store, asks for ‘avena’, receives a blank look. This narrative is not new, she’s learning the language, so she asks for ‘kwacker’, and gets handed the requested item. The packet depicts cartoon characters: the three bears and the word ‘Avena’. Oddly there’s no references to a red, glossy-cheeked member of the Religious Society of Friends.