As we had leapt frog about 4 hours ahead of the other boys in the convoy, we tried to leave a little late, and had tentatively said we’d see them in Mayobama that evening. I grabbed a coffee in the morning, and Meg got to busying with the thousands of photos she had already taken.
One thing that did strike me while I was out, (besides the terrible lady boy attempts from the night before) was the number of what I thought were ‘tourists’. We were clearly in the middle of pretty much nowhere Peru, yet there were all these Westerners here. And some of them even driving mototaxis. What I didn’t realize until Meg pointed it out, was that Peru was in fact a major haven for ex-Nazis escaping war crimes. So in fact, all these tourists, must have in fact been 1st or 2nd generation German Peruvians. Now, that is a weird thing. What on earth do you ask your parents when you’re growing up, about your family history, why you have blond hair and blue eyes, yet everyone else looks completely different. And then once finding out, there must be this humungous open secret that never gets talked about, about the fact your father was pretty much an evil XXX. Tres bizarre.
Anyway, back onto the day. After getting some locals to help us find our way out of town (a common problem it seems for Meg & myself), we reached Moyabamba at about 3pm – even after an hour’s detour to some Llama village (false advertising if ever there was one. Not a llama in sight). It was just way too early to be stopping after only a couple of hours on the road. So, we carried on to the next town, and the next, and the next. In the end, we kept going until about 8pm until we reach Pumapeaches (or something to that effect). The decent hotel on the lake was all fully booked, so we had to settle for yet another pretty ‘basic’ set-up. But, today had suddenly turned into a bit of a long driving one, so we were just thankful for somewhere to hole up for the evening.
Another thing that hit me today, was that the roads were beginning to be pretty normal – straight and pretty flat – so it was now the speed of these mototaxis really came into their own. As the speedometer broke in day 2, I was never entirely sure how fast I was going, but suffice to say, it wasn’t much more than 40-50km/h at best. This meant there was some long, long stretches where you could see the road continuing on the horizon, but which we never seemed to make any progress towards. This, and the fact that you couldn’t hear Meg in the passenger seat, and headphones for music were uncomfortable for anything more than 10 minutes, it made for some quite tedious moments. There was only so much singing you could do in your head. Things that crossed my mind, whilst in such moments included:
– What would happen if I just put my feet down on the road
– Moving my head from side-to-side and the different wind noises
– Calculating the average speed by looking at the km markers at the side of the road
– Counting the number of dead bugs on my helmet visor
quechair 
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