All I will say is that Richard Carapaz recognized us first. Ceci & I, we were minding our own business, we’d woken up in Colombia that morning (where Carapaz is not from), packed up our things, crossed the border into Ecuador, and perhaps we’d cycled 20kms on the Trans-Ecuador route we’ll be following for the next 1,100kms, when Richy Carapaz came zipping by in his pink EF Education EasyPost kit with a couple of his friends. He said hi to us. Now, of course, you’ll say: so what? And that’s fine, you know… Winner of the 2019 Giro d’Italia, 2020 Olympic Road Cycling Gold Medallist, Podium Finisher at all 3 Grand Tours (Tour, Vuelta, Giro), First Ecuadoran to accomplish any of these feats; says hi to us. To us. So what? That’s fine… Of course, we said hi back, don’t get me wrong the respect is fully mutual. But see the thing is, after the out-of-this-world fame we had to contend with day-in day-out in Indonesia, all the bazmillion Hello-Misters; Ceci & I, we chose Ecuador as a way to lay low for a while. Go incognito for a bit. Return to the motherland, you know, until things cool off. So as to not always have to share our precious time together with all our fans. And here we are, day 1 in Ecuador, going up a hillside in the middle of nowhere, a dirt road for crying out loud: you look up and there’s no one in sight for miles, only cows grazing and alfalfa fields forever; and it just so happens that down comes Richy, barreling down the mountain on his million dollar gravel bike? I mean, sure… okay Richy… But you can’t make up these odds. And meanwhile, we’re the ones who are actually doing all the work, putting in the hours as they say, cycling uphill with brutally heavy bikes we got on a Black Friday deal, fully-loaded with all the gear we’ll need to survive a 3-month epic through the Andes, at altitude and during the rainy season… So of course, we smile patiently and take up precious oxygen to say hi back. What else are we going to do? Fully resolved to have to stop our arduous ascent for a selfie or an autograph or something… but here, we have to hand it to El Richy, (although you could see the yearning in his not-even sweaty face), he just flew by without another word, probably satisfied with the sheer experience, god bless him, of bumping into us “accidentally”.

We cycled on shaking our heads at the improbability of it all. Richard Carapaz, of all people, coming to disturb our little getaway from fame. Only a kilometre or two down the way, as we turned off onto the road into La Reserva Ecológica El Ángel, we realized how close we were to never even seeing him. Were we to have left a few minutes earlier or him a few minutes later we would have missed each other completely. I wonder if he knows just how lucky he is…

But anyway, as we began negotiating the increasingly technical path, we decided that all in all, it was all for the good. We got rid of the only person who knows what true fame looks like (enough to recognize it when he sees it) in the whole country on day 1, and what’s more we left him with a story to tell his friends. A good deed, leaving us to our increasingly difficult initiation into cycling the Ecuadoran Andes.

As we furthered our ascent towards 4,000m, rain began to fall, giving us our first taste of how fast the weather can shift. And the landscape. From one moment to the next, we were completely surrounded by a sea of Frailejones. As far as the eye can see and beyond. A cactus-like plant from afar, which, from up close, turns out to be anything but. The long trunk is covered in dead leaves and flowers, whereas the topmost, living leaves are soft and hairy to capture every last ounce of moisture from the air. For uncountable hectares in every cardinal direction, the hills were peopled with these tall silent vigils of the paramó, watching on as we slid and fell and generally got stuck in the mud. And every time we would stop to add a layer or drink or eat or simply contemplate our surreal surroundings, they would be there still, silently witnessing our strenuous efforts. And time and again, their peaceful silence would pull us out of our own minds, out of the noise of our inner dialogue, out of the bodily alarms of freezing fingers, of hunger and aching muscles, and we would be reminded to breathe, to unsquint our eyes, to take the day as it came, weather the weather with patience. This was Ecuador teaching us about our trip, in real time. About us. Us finding a place where who we are as athletes—as human beings—weighs less than a drop of rain in the breeze, where all there is, all day, is uninterrupted nature, nature on such a scale that it is utterly oblivious to our presence, biospheres of such redoubtable complexity that it humbled our every effort of travelling it. Less than ants in Pachamama’s hair with only Richard Carapaz to ever know that we were even there.

Buenos Aires

Seven thirty post meridian, Pan-American highway after dark. After eleven hours in the saddle, seventy kilometres with over two thousand meters of uphill, at altitudes around 4,000m above sea level; we’re sunburned, soaking wet and somehow there’s algae hanging in our spokes. Is there another way to arrive here but accidentally?

The red reflective pavement markers, cla-clunk, cla-clunk, swallow up what little shoulder there might have been for us to claim. We huddle close, cast our dice with the semis and the buses, and guide ourselves by the sparse road signs for the city of Otavalo.

A spin of the wheel.

Somewhere between utter exhaustion and adrenaline rush, there exists a limbo, more alchemical than scientific, wherein any sense of safety is foregone for expedience. Wherein any sense that a narrow crimson-lit path between a ditch and vast careening projectiles might rather lead towards one last ferry ride and a man named Charon than towards a warm shower and a seco de pollo; is utterly moot.

What key, you might rightfully ask, unlocks this Pandora’s box? What erroneous life choices, what possible self-hatred, what traumatic experience, might lead us to contort ourselves just so, in order to scratch such a cruelly specific itch called the Ecuadoran Pan-American highway after dark a week away from Christmas?

Well, yes. Touché, of course. However, lean over just a bit, don’t be shy, just so you can see things from where we’re sitting. There, can you see it now? How the question is actually backwards? The question is not what kind of key, but rather, what kind of Pandora’s box requires this kind of key to unlock?

Because, extrapolate with me, here. Just while I have you here on the pan-am hwy balancing on my handlebars. And be honest: There is no conceivable spot where you might stand, in your life, no cardinal nor intercardinal direction you might face that might offer even an angled glimpse at a path that, stretched to its logical conclusion, would lead you to be riding your loaded bike on the Pan-American highway after dark, is there?

Well, us neither. That’s not how these adventures work. That would be to put the cyclist before the bike, so to speak. The key before the box. So while I have you here, looking back, can I get you to squint farther into the distance? Or maybe it’s too far and too dark. Just close your eyes, then. Let us backtrack. Let us go through the motions, cast the dice, spin the wheel; let us place ourselves on the board, together.

Thirty-six hours ago, one thousand meters above sea level, the foot of the Andes in the rain. We are at the lowest altitude we will reach in our entire Trans-Ecuador trip, glancing at a muddy road snaking its way up lush green mountains. And away, beyond sight: a muddy road that will lead us to 4,000m, a whole 400m higher than I’ve ever been in my life and that height was set only 2 days back.

For the next 9¼ hours, we climb in the rain. A steady 10% grade between alfalfa fields, guayaba trees, grazing cows and shifting clouds. The road sucks at our tires, the clay caking the tread, adding weight, veto-ing grip, further slowing our progress. We ascend almost 2,000m before we reach La Merced de Buenos Aires, a small settlement where we find alms deep inside la Casita de Verito who offers a veritable sauna of an almuerzo.

Caldo de pata, seco de pollo with lentils on the side, a mountain of white rice and a few chunks of Fritada de Chancho to try. And to complete the steam bath, a mug of hot milk with cocoa powder to add al gusto.

A whole pig gets delivered while we swallow and inhale as much steam as we can. They hang it on a hook outside the window and begin dressing it on the spot, right next to our bikes. When Ceci steps out briefly for a wardrobe change, she finds the fat-smeared butcher’s knife resting on her saddle. But after skirting around chicken fingers and chicken necks in your broth, the scales tend to level themselves into an even tare. When in Ecuador, as they say…

In no time flat, Verito gets us rosy-cheeked and whistling like piping kettles. At the neighbouring panadería we stock up on chocolatines, cakes and croissants, on suspiros (meringues); as well as on the locals’ curiosity and wonder. What’s out there but the high-altitude desolation of the stormy paramó, they wonder. What else could one possibly want, we naively answer.

From here on, any progress chips away at the gargantuan day to follow. For the next 2½ hours we pedal under the rain, the roads only growing runnier and steeper and looser as we climb. A few sections forcing us off the bikes completely, to push and pull and pause for breath and purchase; which all-in-all is hardly more productive, only easier on our sore backsides. All the animals are spooked by our passing—grimy, grinding, mechanical creatures, all wheels and flesh and creaking gears that we are. Of course, it doesn’t help that Ecuador is full of newborns at this time of year. Calves, foals, lambs and so forth. Which is not the cow, horse, sheep and so forth’s fault; only that every time Ceci sees a miniature being, she expresses her overbursting love by screaming about exactly as though she just slipped off the side of the cliff.

My heart instantly leaps into my temples at the sound of her yelping and I immediately stop my pitiful but unrelenting slog up the hill—a slog, mind you, based entirely upon a momentum which I cannot hope to restart if I stop—and pivot to try and possibly save her life, or at least witness her last moments on this earth; only to see her trying to pet a poor newborn calf who is by any and every measure of the imagination indicating that the last thing on earth it wants is a pet. So I sigh, unsaddle, shake my head and start pushing my bike.

We scare a herd of horses, next, one of which seems quite convinced that the best strategy is not to veer off the road, like the others, but rather to outrun us on the same road. The only road. And so we play a game of hide and seek for 45 minutes, wherein the only place to hide is the road and whereby the horse’s irritation with being found over and over again, only grows.

When at last, we reach La Primavera, a tiny mountain village shrouded in clouds, we chat with a few villagers who ask us where we will sleep and inform us that there are only 40 minutes of sunlight left to the day. Ceci & I look at one another, incredulous. Two and a half hours got us about 10kms up the road from Buenos Aires. Despite our best and most honourable efforts.

Just then, a woman on horseback wearing a thick leather poncho, slick with rain, comes trotting down the mountain. Doña Sarita, she informs us, instructing her daughter, who is sitting behind her, to open up the school gates for us to camp on the grounds. Finding the gates locked, she invites us instead to her home. When towering Doña Sarita steps off her horse, to show us around her yard, we suddenly and abruptly realize that her magnanimity is exactly reversely proportional to the humility of her height. She’s actually about a meter tall and endears us on sight.

We eventually timidly agree to set up camp under the stairs leading to the top floor of her house and fall asleep to the angry snorts of the spooked horse who obviously thinks the game of hide and seek is still on and is letting us know how little it thinks of our tent as a hiding spot.

In the morning, Doña Sarita offers us a breakfast of local quesadillas (bread with egg, no cheese) and tortillas (fried doughnuts). And a Café de Olla so diluted that her children drink it. We break up camp as her 5 daughters ready themselves for the bus to catechism school, back in Buenos Aires.

Wearing our wet gear from the day before, we set off into the unknown again. It rains on us all the way to the false summit of our climb where, for the briefest of interim, we are granted a glimpse at the Andean paramó in all its glory and vastness. We take a few pictures as we eat lunch and set off once more. The rain starts up in earnest as we reach 4,000m. Hands numb, shuddering with cold, we effect a river crossing, icy water up to our knees, leaning into the maelstrom; and when the downhill, at last, begins, we are so nearly hypothermic that all we can think of is getting off the mountain. We negotiate a downhill worthy of Ceci’s enduro races, risking way more than we should just to reach a warmer altitude. And just about when the technicality of the downhill eases up and we can finally make some process, I hear in my ears the TA-TUN, of our gps app, telling me we’ve gone off-course.

With a squeal of our wet and gritty brake pads, we eventually manage to stop and look back to where we were meant to go. Seeing nothing, we backtrack and find ourselves in front of a barbwire gate. Is this who we are now? Dropping our bikes, we force the catch open and dropping the gate to the ground we go back to our bikes, cross over, drop our bikes once more and return to latch the gate behind us. The non-existent novelty wears off after the third of these gates we need to cross. We cycle furtively by someone’s house, close enough to here the radio playing, and down a farm path and up into a grassy field full of flowers. The grass is so dense and deep that it officially enters the competition for the most progress-slowing texture. Let’s see: mud, cobblestone, loose rocks, volcanic sand, puddles, cow and horse manure and now: alfalfa. We trudge on only to arrive at another barbwire fence, only this time, without a gate to unlatch. The highest wire is only about hip height, but the bikes are so heavy that, between the two of us, Ceci on one side, me on the other, we have to give it five tries before we can successfully lift our bikes high enough to clear it.

We already feel like we’re unknowingly participating in a prank adventure race when we arrive at a stone water canal. The calf-deep water rushes onto a bridge made of half-50 gallon drums, cut length-wise, which extends over a 30m-deep canyon. Ceci and I look around, look at the bridge again, look at the map, look around and shrug. One by one we lower the bikes into the canal, slipping on the long strands of algae flowing like Kate Winslet’s hair on the prow of the Titanic, but less romantic. And green. Like Kate Winslet’s hair in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, come to think of it, but also less romantic.

The drybags we’ve Bear Gryllsed onto my front suspension won’t fit, so I have to turn my handlebars sideways and slide my wheel forward, which all and all is easier than it sounds because as soon as we leave the stone canal and hop onto the half-50-gallon-drum bridge, the floor is like a crazy carpet on ice, and with one hand on the rail, the other on the saddle, and the flowing rapids, it’s all we can do not to slip and slide all the way across. Two of these “bridges”. Except that the second one is also playing hide & seek and we’re the ones snorting with irritation trying to find it. All this while the driving rain is trying to mow us down and a cow is giving us the evil eye as we perform back and forths through its green green diarrhoea in front of its newborn calf. Not all colours are Kate Winslet’s hair-related, relax. I googled it.

All this while the sun is starting to go down, our phone batteries are about to die and we are inevitably covering ourselves in freshly rehydrated cow-digested grass while manipulating our bikes in and out of tight spots.

After crossing the second bridge, the adventure race turns into a XC Mountain biking World Cup as we rush to get as far as we can out of the wilderness before our phones (our only navigation tools) die out on us. A death we eventually celebrate by finding ourselves in sight of the cobblestone streets of a village, the only detail being that we are stuck behind a brand-new gate. Which is not on our map. And which is quite thoroughly padlocked.

So here we are, 55kms, 2,000m and 8 hours into our day, yelling at the top of our lungs for someone, anyone, to please come and open the gate. We’ve already lost the battle against our phone batteries and we’re now progressively losing the battle for daylight, when a man finally shows up only to ask us who and what and how and just why he should open the gates for us.

Somehow bypassing this unnecessarily inquisitive gentleman, we find ourselves navigating by sheer word of mouth for the rest of the day. Except that, as the day progresses the mouths smell increasingly of alcohol and the advice is increasingly long-winded. We try to be judicious in who we ask, but the options never quite line up. A lady turns out to be listening to her headphones, a family turns out to be a funeral party, a man turns out being far more elderly than anticipated, a woman that turned out to be a tourist…

It’s been dark for an entire hour by the time we reach the Pan-American highway 10 hours after starting our day. We perform all sorts of acrobatics to navigate lateral streets and sidewalks as we near Otavalo. I only vaguely remember booking a hotel that said 250m from the city center, so we keep asking everyone we meet until we arrive in the main Plaza, where we ask some police officers to use their phones to locate our hotel.

We’re fully ready to have the cameramen pop out of the alleys as we reach the final prank of the day: we have to hike our bikes up four flights of stairs. By now we’ve spun the wheel of: “Oh, this is just hilarious!” & “Okay, this isn’t funny anymore!” too many times to know where we stand.

Once checked-in to our room, we shower with all our clothes on and all our bags to get the mud and grit and cow shit off, hang the clothes, bags, tent, sleeping bags and mats to dry, get changed and walk across the street for a seco de pollo bug-eyed and incredulous that this reality, full of tvs blaring reggaetón & cumbias, full of people doing people things; can somehow coexist with starting 37½ hours ago on the other side of a 4,000m mountain pass through the Andes. That 13½ hours ago, we were chatting with Doña Sarita’s 3-year-old daughter, who was telling us that the cat on her shirt eats ice cream.

The trouble is, once you know that this is what 37½ hours can hold, once you know that this is what a trip can hold, once you know that this is what a life can hold; how can you resist seeing what a key such as the Ecuadoran Pan-Am highway after dark can open. What kind of key would you not justify to open such a box of wonders?

I believe a part of us knows, even as we are still teetering on the edge of the Pan-American highway after dark that our Pandora’s box of a 36-hour experience was in the process of acquiring its unique key. One that would seal its content, one that would allow us to revisit, at will, by the mere mention of the key.

Somehow, I think this is how our minds work now. Over time we seem to have evolved this philosophy that, generally, if you dive into an underwater cave and swim one stroke at a time with the faith that air pockets await, you will be able to swim longer than if you panic. Not that faith will somehow manifest pockets of air where you can breathe, gather yourself and set off once more. No, that would be magical thinking.

We just play the game, that’s all. We put ourselves on the board. And trust that our life experience gives not miraculous pockets of air, but an increased opportunity to find them. And, lest I forget: enjoy the process.

Cotopaxi

It’s not a long journey from Pintag to Cotopaxi, from a damp, leaky guesthouse room we baptized la cueva to one of the highlights of the trip; not even 40kms with less than 1,300m of vertical gain. However… in the Andes, there is always a however.

Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Cuba, Indonesia… And yet, and however: the Andes. Confidence in our ongoing mastery of the craft of cycle-traveling got us about as far as the foot of the Andes. Which, all things considered, amounts to… what? Empowered ignorance?

I often wonder, now, if there would have been a way to convey to our past-selves how impossibly little our being well-versed in the craft of 100-300km days gets you when faced with the redoubtable Andean 1-5km. Hours spent slushing in the mud, churning through rock fields as we inch our way up mountain-sides; clouds shifting as the world spins around us, as evening gathers, as another day ends, leaving us full in the knowledge of just how much—or how pitifully little—we can achieve in a whole day on earth.

Empowered ignorance was elemental to the process of launching ourselves into this epic traverse of the Andes. And if it’s not exactly something I am overjoyed to admit, what other path leads here? Full or even partial knowledge of the trials awaiting us on this path would, I am certain, have led us to Tasmania or Madeira or even Japan and South Korea, in the snow.

Instead, we are here. Travelling, in half a day, what would otherwise be roughly an hour’s worth of cycling, were it not for the tiny however of large, widely spaced cobblestones. Cobblestones seemingly designed to the exact interval to make our wheels jam in between each and every individual stone. This, in turn, forcing us to adopt an awkward and strenuous pace just to keep the constant threat of inertia at bay.

There’s the word. We found it. Most howevers we face on a daily basis are inertians. They are the cordillera affirming its utter supremacy. Its momentum, measured in aeons, denying our every attempt at kilometres an day, let alone an hour. Denying our attempts to scale it up to the blistering pace of a mountain pass a day.

What happens next is what I would like to call reassessment of expectations, on our part. But what happens instead is something that might be best characterized as the clash of the howevers. The only adaptation that occurs when the Andes affirms its supremacy over us, the only reassessment that occurs, is to the floodgates of pain.

We wanted to reach the foot of Cotopaxi… however: the elemental wrath of the Andes threatens inertia.

The Andes threaten inertia… however: the floodgates of pain. If we knew how to reassess, we wouldn’t be here in the Andes in the first place. In full rainy season. With subpar equipment. After everything we read told us not to go in the rainy season.

So, you see, the journey from Pintag to Cotopaxi is not a long one by any stretch of the legs. However, after the clash of 30kms of cobblestone-flavoured and mud pit-flavoured howevers, with our own personal refusal-to-reassess-flavoured however… Let’s just say that when the journey at last chews and spits us out 4 hours later in the grass and volcanic sands of the approach to Cotopaxi: we are completely worked. From the cords in our necks tuned to F-sharp and our rattled molars; down to our numb toes and creaky rotulas: everything is flooded in hurt. At what price our successful raging against inertia, you ask? Yes. But at what reward?

When we pull into the mountain lodge a few hours of grass-flavoured however later, with a side of freezing river-crossing howevers; Cotopaxi hides inside clouds of its own making. Here, at last, we relent to the pace of the Andes. Here, at last, we welcome inertia in the shape of a steaming hot shower and a change of clothes. Cotopaxi will reveal itself on its own terms, in its own time, or not at all.

Off the bikes, we can afford to be patient.

So, with one eye on Cotopaxi still proudly wreathed in clouds, we set up camp. The only way we can afford the mountain lodge is by camping outside, which, in turn, moulds us into the exact humility to fully savour such otherwise everyday luxuries as roof, food and shower. Which, in turn, makes of lounging on the lodge’s comfy sofas and charging our various apparatus; into something sweetly clandestine. Which makes the contemplation of rain from the dry side of a windowpane into something naughty, if not entirely delinquent.

One eye on Cotopaxi, still obscured by clouds, we luxuriate in a late almuerzo: Tomate de árbol juice, Cevichito de fréjol, Quinoa soup, Trucha salmonada accompanied by a cheesy potato sidedish and a pickled vegetable salad, followed by a sumptuous dessert of chocolate volcano cake decorated with fresa and aguaymanto (Peruvian groundcherry) and a creamy hot chocolate digestive.

Cotopaxi, noticing our attention being infuriatingly distracted, snatches small glimpses at us through the occasional surcease in its thick cloud cover. Like a little princess peeking from her hiding place, wondering if the game is still on. If the grown-ups still take her seriously.

In the end, it is a hummingbird, flittering by outside the restaurant window, that calls our attention mid-meal to the progressive unveiling of Cotopaxi. Cotopaxi who, seeing us seeing it, finally decides it was tired of the game anyway and proceeds to unveil itself fully, like a Queen might, gracefully regal and majestic.

This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. Our Fuji XT-20 camera sits on the table, fully charged and ready for the improbable eventuality of this brief glimpse. However, what my hand reaches for is my phone. And with it, I step outside the lodge and call my mother.

This call is the fruiting body of a new sharing philosophy we’ve been experimenting with over the last few years, Ceci and I. And the child-like emotion that I feel as the phone rings is, in itself, the whole argument.

Counter-intuitively, perhaps, many of the philosophies we’ve developed together, over time, take root in some yearning or urge of Ceci’s that used to annoy me.

Ceci being impulsive by nature, every time we would live something spectacular, she would think to call her sisters or her mother or a few choice friends who would savour the anecdote with her. At first, I think this made me feel insufficient, seeing as sharing it with me was obviously not enough. Over time, however, I came to understand that it was more a result of her overflowing passion rather than my insufficiency as a vessel to contain and value it. But more precisely, observing the pattern, taught me this: once you hit the exact person who can value the experience to its exact extent and beyond; the person in whose custody, the experience gathers dimension; the cycle acquires a new, creative dimension.

I used to think: Finish living it before sharing; I used to think: Keep it sealed and place it in the cool cellar of your soul to slowly mature and acquire its unique cachet. This is my process, anyway. The same process that leads to what you are reading now.

However, by observing Ceci’s process over the years, I’ve learned to recognize its worth as a creative cycle. Living an experience that resonates deep inside you, that inspires you to such an extent that it needs, requires, demands a way out, a means of expression; is, after all, the very essence of creativity.

Letting the exact person in on it, you know, with a sly secretive smile, hey, psshhht, check this out, I’m just about to cork the cask, but I wanted you to see it first, to smell it, to taste it, to experience it and bring a little sample to your own cellar, so that as life moves on, as it invariably does, you and I, we’ll know just what kind of vintage is ageing in the cellar. We’ll share this secret knowledge of who I am and why.

We’ve forgotten what that’s like, I think. Specific sharing. Social media has made us lazy in general, which in itself is not a major secret, but it also has done so in a sneakily specific regard. Butts, cats and cars notwithstanding, we live (or manufacture) experiences and just spit the carbon copy out there on the wind and wait to see what sticks. Most times we don’t even wait. We arrogantly believe that our lives are inherently worth the split-second microeconomics of people’s attention. Throwaway content for throwaway attention. And the only thing this process does not disvalue is what has no value to begin with. (I.e. the butts, cats and cars of this world.)

My mom picks up.

‘Allô Miche.’

‘Allô. Tout va bien?’ Not how are you, mind: is everything alright. Mothers, god bless them.

Somehow, something about Ceci and me, something about our journey in life, something about who we are makes it so that we go about life gathering mothers. Somehow… Something… Of course, I know exactly what it is. But let us just say, for our immediate purposes, that exactly how far away (or perilously near) from self-harm our trips have the potential of becoming, is a margin which mothers are inherently more attuned to.

‘Oui, tout va bien.’ And by this point, I’m fully relying on the blurriness of the selfie camera to hide the fact that my eyes are crying a little. Because, here, on one side of the screen: Cotopaxi. We’ve braved the Andes to get here. We’ve braved the Andes to get here. And on the other side, my mother in bed, for years in a bed, which, if not always exactly an anchor, is certainly a ball and chain. And I can tell today is not a good day because she doesn’t rise from her pillow. I’m stealing this moment, I know, and I know that I’m using the Is-everything-alright factor, for her to even pick up, and it’s unfair of me, I know, because with chronic fatigue syndrome, you build up deficits as easily as a preoccupied thought, or too much joy. But I also know that the surprise allows me to bypass the emotional build-up of a scheduled call.

And so, I switch from the selfish camera to the outside camera and together we watch Cotopaxi unveiling itself completely. A rare moments, highly unlikely during the rainy season and we share it together. And this moment, this unique glimpse at one of Ecuador’s most beautiful sights, is now forever ours. Grounded in memory by the experience of sharing it. Sharing it specifically with the person your heart tells you is the right person.

Humble though it might seem, sharing, done right, is a type of love. To find a unique person with whom to share your experience reaffirms, first, the unique value of your experience; second, the unique value of the other person as a sharer of said experience; and third, the unique value of the thread that will bind the two of you together through the shared experience.

It’s a focusing. Pleasing a general public with a photo and a throwaway quip is diffuse. It has its place, of course. But it should come as no surprise that what you get from it is also diffuse. When is the last time you laughed or cried when clicking the share button? Whereas, when you find something you are bursting to share, and the right person to share it with: listen to the music of it. Just you try not to cry, not to laugh. Sharing even the tiniest of experiences with a loved one, becomes a form of empathy. It is a creative act. It is love.

There is another thin thread here, which I’m hesitant to share. It’s delicate and I’m afraid that if I pull on it the wrong way or too forcefully it will unravel something greater, something too dear to me to risk losing. So perhaps, instead, I’ll only try to help you glimpse it; I’ll only try to shed some light, just so, so you can see it sparkle.

After sharing the rare glimpse at Cotopaxi, we talked a bit about the trip, my mother asking about how soon our next rest day was and we laughed about the similarity of our diets, i.e. mostly bread and cheese. Hers by necessity, ours by availability. But the unspoken elephant in the chatroom was one of our most symbolic similarities: a state of constant exhaustion.

There, perhaps that was enough to see it glint? The thread binding us together? I barely breach the subject and see how it strains and twists and threatens to unravel everything. And it does so because at its core lies a strand of the vilest injustice.

However, at its core, its opposite is also present in equal measure. Twined around this thread of injustice, there is also a strand made of the most beautiful gift a person can give.

Life, you’ll say. And, of course, you’re right. But more specifically, it is the shouldering of life’s difficulties in such a way as to gift a better life to one’s child. Or, in my case, the luxury of voluntary suffering.

There is a tiny moment in the movie Amélie Poulain, I don’t know if you remember it. Nino Quicampoix walks up to a man disguised as a statue, pointing up at the horizon. After Nino contemplates the finger for a moment, the statue whispers to him: “When the finger points, the idiot looks at the finger.”

My parents shouldered a lifetime of hard work to pave the way for me to get ahead in life. And the irony at the core of our relationship, is that I learned to value hard work. I, yes, looked not at the university, the job security, the home, the family, whereto the finger pointed. No. I looked at the finger. I’m still looking at that finger. The effort behind pointing resolutely into a better future; the vision, the ambition, the empathy, the love. Some would say I’ve made it my life’s work to contemplate that pointing finger.

Voluntarily so. Following the path indicated by my parents’ pointing finger would have led me to a good life, I’m sure. However, I chose to carve my own path. Definitely not of the least resistance, but entirely my own. And all because I was free to suffer voluntarily.

The distinction might seem faint, but I assure you it’s absolutely abysmal. Planting trees in all weather conditions for 8-11 hours a day, every summer for 10 years holds real potential as a form of labor camp torture. And yet, voluntarily… Add one hour of running after work to that same regimen. And yet, voluntarily… Grant someone a 3 months of vacation from hard work, but force them to cycle all day every day in altitude, in the rain, up and down the highest mountain passes in the Andes. And yet, voluntarily…

My parents gifted me the opportunity to color my suffering with a whole palette of meaning. Gifted me the opportunity to grow from the experience. Gave me a safe harbor to return to after I took my adventures too far.

The gift of agency. There is a symbolic thread here between my constant state of exhaustion and that of my mother’s chronic fatigue. And, yes, it’s a candidate for one of the world’s most evil and most unfair threads. But since it exists, no matter what, I want to dedicate my whole heart to granting it the highest, most colourful, most meaningful value.

The Andes forces its slow, unrelenting pace on you. Millions of years of wind, of rain, of rarefied air. Slow. Slow like almost nothing is slow nowadays. Almost unmoving. It’s a humbling landscape to face every day. And yet, in the most oblique, symbolic way, it connects me to my mother.

Continents apart we share a struggle against inertia. Against the howevers of life, the little struggles, the cobblestones, the freezing rain, the altitude, the exhaustion, the brain fog, the digestive troubles, the frustrations… And the courage required to face the world when even the tiniest of obstacles can derail an entire day, a week, a month… we shared that too.

Continents apart, yes, in wildly divergent circumstances, yes, and yet I treasure this connection. Contrived and convoluted as it may seem. It makes me stronger every day for having someone to look up to, someone to think about in my lowest moments and to share little unique moments with. It reminds me that mine is a voluntary path. And, it reminds me who I have to thank for it being voluntary.

The type of fortitude necessary to brave the howevers of life indefinitely, as my mother does, is something that humbles our little attempts at wrestling a day of cycling from the Andes. Hers are involuntary howevers and yet, and however: her raging against inertia is not. Involuntary as suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome might be, it has not rested from her the agency of her courage. Of opposing her own howevers. Of shouldering a world of suffering and still pointing forward towards a better horizon.

And me, I’m still looking at that pointing finger. Still finding inspiration in the courage it takes to point so. And I believe it is no coincidence that today I’ve learned to hold in more awe and feel more pride at conquering the redoubtable Andean 1-5km than any of our biggest cycling days.

The scale of a challenge is in the courage it takes to undertake it. And in this, I am my mother’s son.

Quilotoa

There is a game we play with the Andes. The narrow paths we travel, cut into mountainsides like contour lines on a map, lead us through endless pastures where llamas graze and colourful women herd the sheep, their felt hats wrapped in plastic bags to avoid the rain. A few children huddle around a large Choza, a traditional high-mountain shelter with low adobe or stone walls, if walls there are, and a grass roof.

What high altitude is exactly, by this point, is hard to say. The highest peak in Canada is just under 6,000m and here we spent most of the day hovering around the 4,000m mark. Short of breath, of course, but after a certain amount of wrestling our loaded bikes upwards through mud and over loose terrain; mostly, it becomes a question of cardiovascular fatigue. Even the tiniest of hills or variation in incline sends us huffing and puffing, and so we busy ourselves by playing the game. We scan the horizon ahead, the horizon behind, hoping to catch a glimpse of where we’re heading, where we’ve been. How high, how low, how steep, how far. Mind games really, but the Andes play along, allowing us to convince ourselves of some sort of progress, some knowledge of our future fate.

There is something quite unique about being a foreigner in the absolute epicentre of nowhere and yet navigating alleyways and backroads—and, let’s face it: straight-up fields and rock gardens—like a local. Opening gates, following goat paths, weaving through villages… Guiding ourselves with the RideWithGps app and maps designed by previous travellers means that, even when locals tell us, “Por aquí, no!” we can reply confidently, “Oh no no, it’s fine, we know where we’re going.” And breeze off into the unknown.

Or in today’s case, through a plush 400-thread-count fog. We arrived in a tiny village where a group of men was gathered, and after exchanging salutations with the mandatory “Yo de Canadá,” “Yo de Mexico,” one of them asks, “Donde van?”

“Quilotoa,” we answer.

“Por acá no hay pase.”

After a quick knowing glance at one another, we tell them that we’ll try our luck, but thanks, and we fade away into the mist once more. Immediately drenched, we push on through dirt, then grass, then sand. And soon enough, the RideWithGps app pings into my ear. Ta-tun!

The sound a variation on the classic “Game Over” in arcade games. I stop, Ceci stops.

I shake my head. “No sé, me dice que vamos mal.”

We look around. “Viste algún camino?”

Between two shifting curtains of mists, we spy the land a few steps to our left and it’s about 1,000 sheer meters below us. Turns out, we’re standing on the edge of a vertical sandstone cliff. More sand than stone, in fact. We huddle together to get a good look at the map which clearly indicates that we should have turned left some ways back. So we spread out and try to find some kind of tapering in the cliff’s steepness, some opening or rappel anchor or zip line or something.

By now, I’m already imagining the cycling version of the walk of shame we’ll have to perform through the villagers on the way back. Oops, sorry! Not so local after all, I guess… But just then, I think I hear Ceci yelling for me. So, I bike over.

“Que pasó?” I ask, but Ceci just nods at a sort of near-vertical mudslide which would give Ceci’s Enduro races a run for their money.

“No way!” I say, but Ceci’s already smiling that Ceci Danger smile of hers… So, gentleman as I am, I let her go first. An opportunity she is only too eager to take on, and for the next 5 minutes I watch her surf down the cliff, both brakes maxed-out, both wheels locked and skidding rim-deep in the sand. I follow suit, the extra weight I carry in the front sinking my wheel all the way to the spokes, serving the double purpose of slowing me down and reminding me, from time to time, that if I would rather frontflip over my handlebars and freefall for 1,000m, the option is also there for the taking.

In some spots, I have to put a foot down to keep my momentum 0.0001% under the limit of out of controlledness. It barely helps at all. I’m tempted to just run beside my bike, but the trail is so narrow that there isn’t enough space for both my bike and my legs side by side. So, together we just drift downwards, Ceci & I, like two idiots, whooping and smiling madly into the swallowing void. The void beckoning, licking its chops, as it were, awaiting the slightest false move or brake failure to be provided with an early lunch.

In this haphazard fashion, we reach the bottom of the canyon in no time flat, exhilarated, wild-eyed and out of breath, wondering what just happened and where all that brutally hard-won elevation we’d fought for, all day, went.

Before us stretches a long serpentine road, ascending the other side of the valley. Before us stretches worse. Last night when we were studying our map, a tiny info-point informed us that there was a hike-a-bike section near the end of the day and we’ve been apprehensive about it all day. The scale of the Andes is so epic, so blown out of proportion that even the tiniest most insignificant obstacle has the potential of railroading our attempts at reaching the next point on the map.

Like… say, my chain getting stuck between the crank and the frame of my bike. It must have happened some time during the vertiginous descent. Ceci leans her bike against a tree and together we huddle around my drivetrain, the chain so crusted over in grease and sand that we can barely see the metal. Just how it got so wedged in there is anyone’s guess. We try different angles of attack but it just won’t budge.

These seemingly insignificant moments in the grand scale of things are always the ones that really help drive home the impossibility of a drive home, so to speak. The supreme remoteness of our whereabouts never so plain as when we are made to remember that everything relies on the thinnest of slivers of metal, the minutest of cable adjustments, the microscopic bubble in the mineral brake oil. Of course, backtracking up the canyon is absolutely out of the question. Not that the 20kms + Hike-a-bike left to the day is anything to look forward to either. One by one, all our expectations for the day fall like dominoes: Reaching our destination before hypothermia kicks in, cloonk, avoiding the storm looming on the horizon, cloonk, arriving before nightfall, cloonk, arriving period, cloonk, continuing with the trip, cloonk, finding a place to eat or sleep, cloonk cloonk, finding help, cloonk, surviving, clack. Okay, worse comes to worst, we can probably survive a night of sopping wet shivering in our tent.

To our great fortune and not without the help of some strategic and well-timed Québec church jargon, we finally manage to pry the chain loose. And that’s when the biblical storm that’s been biding its time to find the absolute worst moment to unleash itself upon us, does so. With sanctimonious fervour. Push but push equal, as my grandfather would say.

Suddenly, the horizon closes in on us, so that vast remoteness or not, there is only Ceci and me left in the whole world. We hop on our bikes once more and begin wordlessly to chip away at regaining all the uphill we lost and more. We pull our hoods tight around our heads and the world shrinks further. Between our visors and zippered flaps of our raincoats, there exists only the next stone and the next puddle and the day gets real quiet. We each find a dry place inside ourselves to withdraw into and weather the storm.

With time, as we age and gather experience in the art of suffering, it rather seems to become a question of simple stimuli management. Cold, pain, soreness, stiffness, exhaustion, numbness… It never seems to be so much a question of toughness, of gritting teeth or laughing in the face of the storm; but rather a question of dramalessness, of inner-silence.

Attributing emotions to stimuli—or much worse, attributing inner dialogue—is somehow to give it heft, breadth, dimensions; and so too, time into which to expand, to worsen. And with time, comes extrapolation and exponentiality and so forth.

Neither of us can feel our fingers or our toes, our legs already have 50kms and over 2,000m of elevation in them, which is about a Squamish 50k’s worth, but with loaded bikes and at altitude. If this is now, what about in one hour? What about in four? What about the increasing altitude? The sun going down, the decreasing temperature? And what about the dreaded hike-a-bike?

But stimuli are not dramatic that way. They are oddly static. Odds are, if you can weather them in the present moment, you can weather them in the next present moment. And so, we push on, slowing every so often to check in on each other.

“Cómo vas?” “Tú?” “Paso pasito, llegaremos.”

Until… Ta-tun! The gps app, which only has an off-course/on-course function chimes angrily in my ears, letting me know that we’ve been naughty cyclists again and missed a turn way back. So, we stop in the driving rain and look at each other. Ceci can’t hear the chime, but she knows. She gives me a wet puppy look because let’s face it, biking in the pouring rain is somewhat kickass, but sitting ducks in the pouring rain? Somewhat less kickass.

Ceci says, “No vi una desviación, tú?”

“No.” I say.

We haven’t crossed anything even remotely like a road or even a path. And that’s when the 20 fell on us, like they say in Mexico, for some unknown reason. Our two dimes landed on the rock bottom of the well, so to speak, and as they ricocheted, we could just make out the sound they made, even through the pounding rain. It went: Hike… hike… hike-a-bikebikebikebike.

We head back (which is always painful when you’re only going 5km/h, to begin with…) and stop when the app chimes in my ear that I’ve stopped being a naughty cyclist. Ta-ta-tan! A sound like winning at the coin slots. Minus the rattling of coins. And the satisfaction. And before us extends a grassy field that leads straight into a rock wall.

Now, what exactly hike-a-bike means to you, at this moment, is probably exactly the same as it meant to us, then.

You’ll say it took us a while, but we’re finally catching on to the fact that, out here in the Andes, there are no boundaries to our experience. At all. How bad it will get is exactly how bad it will get. There is no taking control, no worst-case scenario, no backup plan or emergency exit strategy.

Strangely enough, however, both of us being intermediate/advanced athletes and adventurers and having acquired over a lifetime post-doctorates in the art of the misadventure; it kind of opens a window for an odd sort of detached curiosity. A little bit like the whole thing is happening to someone else. “Boy, I can’t wait to see how they get out of this one” kind of thing. But since we’ve already booked a hotel in Quilotoa, there’s also a part of us (mostly our hopes and dreams) that already exists over there, which kind of adds this “Oh, he’s on the poster of season 4, so I already know he doesn’t die at the end” quality to the whole experience. You know? Delirium, that’s the word I’m looking for.

But if you have it in you not to just go into survival mode, there is something truly special that happens in boundary-less experiences. Because, at 4,000m in a freezing deluge, what else is there? Truly. What else is there than to push forward, than to help one another, than to wait, than to take periodical stock of how everyone is doing. Who else is there? It’s Ceci & Etienne against the Andes out here. And besides, who will weep if we choose to quit? Who will call foul play on the Andes? Drama requires an audience, and as we look at each other, shivering and purple-lipped, we just shrug. At this moment, Ceci & I are exactly one. Our empathy bubbles expand to a point where even selfishness includes the two of us.

So, as one, we push off from rock bottom—which, as it turns out, is about as solid a foundation as it gets. That’s the thing about fighting for every inch, with every last hour of sunlight, once you acknowledge that the day won, it almost comes as a relief. And once you accept having lost, all there is left is sportsmanship. And from rock bottom up is how an athlete defines her/himself.

All that is left is the odd and unique opportunity to show that you can lose with dignity. That, sure, you can get absorbed by the game, but in the end, you never lose perspective on the fact that that’s all it is: a game. A chance to practice being human under duress.

And so, we head into the grassy field, weaving our way through cows on the way to a stone wall. And this time, thanks to the storm, there is no one to tell us we’re going the wrong way. Which is a good thing because this time, we’d have to agree. The wall grows and grows as we approach, until, at a certain angle, we start glimpsing a narrow canyon cut into the cliff.

We stay on our bikes until we absolutely can’t any longer and then dismount to start ever gradually-boiling-frog ourselves into a 3-hour hike-a-bikeathon which, if you’re not familiar with the term, usually refers to mountain bikers flipping their bikes onto their backs to ascend an unbikeable portion of a mountain. However, given the weight of our bikes, for us it means: push, jam the brakes, walk two steps, lift wheel over rock, push, jam the brakes, align back tire, walk two steps, push… And basically amounts to doing a bazillion standing push-ups. Or lizards, as they call them in Mexico, which actually fits since we’re halfway to being cold-blooded by this point as we slither up the mountain.

Just about when the path eases off a bit so that we contemplate hopping on the bikes once more, we suddenly reach the chamoy of Quilotoa. You know… chamoy. That slimy, sticky goo on the rim of a michelada glass? What they use to make the powdered Tajín-chili stick? That.

When we breach the edge of the forest and step towards the open vastness of the Quilotoa crater, the lake yawning about half a kilometre below, the 10km circular rim expanding on all sides, half-obscured by thick curtains of rain, that’s what we had underfoot. Sticky chamoy. Except that, to us, it was much more bitter than sweet, because the rim trail is absolutely no joke. About as wide as half a sidewalk, treacherously slippery, powerfully windy, with many washouts leading down a sheer cliff and the hiking path itself, steeper than you can imagine. The Quilotoa rim trail is a challenging hike when dry and on a good day, let alone dead on our feet, with loaded bikes and numb hands to push them with.

What exactly does quitting look like at this point? It’s a question we’ll be asking ourselves the whole trip, I suspect. Do we turn back? Do we backtrack and camp? What of season 4, our hotel reservation, which, while not exactly the 4 seasons, (tsk tsk) looks fancier than any hotel we’ve stayed in so far? And which has been only a few kilometres away for the last 2½ hours now?

Suffering is just stimuli, stimuli are static and… and the proof that they are static is that when it’s over, it’s over. Once you stop feeding it time to extrapolate into, once you arrive at your destination, it stops mattering. So why should it matter now?

We fight against the mud and push and pull and roar and sigh and make it a few inches more. And you know that point where it’s so horrible that it’s funny? Well, we’ve cycled through that loop so many times by now that it’s worn through and the needle is stuck on straight-up horrible. Arrival is all we are now. Just arriving. And when we do, arrive, we’re well past the point where the gratification feels good. We’re led to our room which is so nice that we actually believe it. Believe in a day that can be over, and that we’re on the other side, looking in.

We close the door, Ceci leapfrogs out of her clothes and… no-hot-water. The staff tries and tries, we turn the hot water tap off, then on, then off, at their command. All the while, Ceci is blue in the face and practically a cactus her flesh is so goosed and this goes on for long enough for her to put on what little dry clothes we have left at this point even though she’s soaked through… until (hooo sing the chorus of angels) a light at the end of the tunnel, we’re told we can shower in another room, which we need so much by now that we actually believe in a world where showers can be hot even if only in another room… and we actually believe in days that can end, that can just mercifully end because it’s not that much to ask given the price and the advertised hot water which is why we reserved this hotel specifically… but it’s not to be. We both get naked and the water goes instantly glacial. And it’s fine, totally fine, because the actors hired to play us are already promoting season 5. So there, we’ll just delay that gratification just a bit further and for now just focus on survival. Survival. There, that’s not too much to ask for, is it? We’ll just make our bed here on the lowest rung of Maslow’s pyramid and sleep in it.

And then, the most unexpected thing happens. My grandmother picks up the phone. We’re sitting before our dinner, still shivering, still purple-lipped, and it’s my grandmother’s birthday and she picks up the phone. And it makes us so happy and it makes her so happy that we laugh and slowly, heart-outward, we warm up. And just like that, the day comes to an end.

Chimborazo

Crraack! Crraack! Crraatch!

“Wuhu!” Ceci exclaims to herself, not even aware that I’m watching her.

Then, our eyes meet and they begin to water and we both start giggling like school girls and we can’t stop even though we can hardly breathe, what with the altitude and the rock-hard beans in our mouths. This is miserabilia. The state of being that produces some of my favourite moments in life.

Crraack! Crraack! Crraack! Craatch!

“Woohoo!” I exclaim, and we’re off again. Laughing and wheezing and tears sliding down our cheeks and into our down-jacket hoods.

“Que buen entretenimiento!” Ceci says, “Verdad?”

It’s probably 8:30pm, -3°c and everything is damp. We’re wearing every layer we own, merino, polar, feathers and otherwise and we’re snuggled inside our sleeping bags, in our breezy summer tent, listening to the thunder and the sideways snow pelting the walls of our tent at 5,000m above sea level at the foot of a volcano that might just as easily unleash lava or an avalanche down on us and what we’re doing is eating roasted haba beans. Like little pebbles. The roasting process, if anything, only made them tougher to crack. Medicinal, too. But what isn’t in Ecuador? It’s an even split whether the bean or our teeth will break with every attempt. So we celebrate. It’s the small things, you see? Miserabilia spitshines them until they glint like fool’s gold.

We were so happy when we discovered that we still had a handful of the beans ferreted away in one of our collapsible tupperwares. And now? That’s how we’re passing the time. Somewhere between laughing and crying, there’s a little crack in the fence that offers a glimpse into our childhood. A “How in the whole wide world, with all the possibilities possible, did life lead us exactly here?” whose positive or negative connotation flickers back and forth with every passing moment.

The giggles, that’s Ceci’s contribution to the tilting of the scales towards a positive connotation. She’s been giggling all day, actually. Must be the altitude. This morning, for example, I slipped in the mud with my bike and fell over. It was one of those slow if inevitable falls whereby you acquaint yourself fully with your final destination before you inevitably crash into it. Still… not that long of a process, all told. And yet, somehow, Ceci managed to squeeze her nose in the middle of it to ask, “Estás bien!?” And that really got my llama. It’s exactly like when I first open my eyes after a full night of sleep and Ceci’s been watching me for 4 hours, bursting at the seams to ask me, “Como dormiste!?”

“How am I supposed to know how I slept?! I was asleep at the time!”

So when I’m good and properly done falling into the mud, still fully clipped into my bike, what I answer is this:

“Puedes por favor dejar que acabe de caerme antes de preguntar?” “Could you please let me finish falling before asking?”

Give or take the “por favor”. And this somehow is the absolute apex of mirth for our Ceci Campuzano who is still laughing about it now, in the tent, 12 hours later, even as we are busy laughing about the rock-hard roasted beans in our mouths which are threatening emergency dental surgery at the worst place and time, especially if you consider that our travel insurance only covers us up to 2,999m above sea level. Woops and yikes, but whatever, right?

Wrong. See, the thing of things is that I’m not a mountain biker. So what am I even doing here? On a good day, I can’t even unclip in time to catch my fall with my good foot. And this time I was falling on my left side.

In fact, don’t look too too closely at my whole cycling philosophy for this trip, because you’re more than likely to find that it constitutes only two words: “Don’t fall!” And to succeed in this, for 3 months straight, my one and only tool is to Mathieu Van Der Poel myself out of sticky situations by using sheer muscle and charm and pure channelled hatred for Wout Van Aert.

It works most of the time. But only when you have brute force to give, which, at four and a half thousand meters above sea level, requires too much oxygen. Never mind charm. Never mind Van Aert. Pachamama, in all her wisdom, cares not a cucumber about charm. (Although, I quite fancy she might think Wout delicious without a shirt on.)

This lack of oxygen, consequently, but don’t quote me on this, is also why our feet are freezing tonight, even though we have knee-high merino socks under our merino long-johns under our synthetic polar long-johns inside our down sleeping bags with our rainpants wrapped around it all and a tent around all that. It’s a question of oxygen in the blood… Maybe?

Anyway, at the stroke of midnight, Ceci suddenly wakes me up and I was halfway into telling her “How am I supposed to know how I slept! It’s the middle of the goddamn—“ but then I see what’s up. Or down, from our perspective. It’s dark but I can just make out how Ceci has no legs. With my high-altitude, groggy brain, I somehow manage to squeeze two neurons together… Cecilias usually come with legs… no?

Jesucito, how did she manage to lose her legs!

“Etienne, la tienda!” Ceci says. And just then, a third neuron collides with the other two: it’s the tent, I can see that now, not the legs which are completely buried under the collapsed wall of the tent. A bit frantically but also clumsy with sleepy oxygenlessness, we try shaking the frame of the tent, pushing at the walls, all of which bulge precariously inward.

There’s about a foot thick of wet snow weighing down our tent and as we start making progress shaking ourselves free, the sounds of the storm come rushing in. Did I mention it’s a summer tent? Mostly meant to shield us from mosquitoes?

That’s when a little claustrophobia sets in. We’re punching and kicking our way free, now, and some light starts coming through, and now that the roof-snow joined the accumulation on the ground, we’re officially halfway buried inside our very own Quinzhee, for those who know what that is. Snow igloo for those who don’t.

We lay back down, breathing hard and hardly breathing, both. By the glow of my watch dial I can tell two things: 1) It’s 12:10am, and 2) Ceci is deer in the headlights-ing me.

Right, I think. I’m the expert here. So I muster a lifetime’s worth of Canadian Winter Expertise, high-beam her right in her deer little eyes and… shrug.

“It’ll pass?”

Reassured by such infallible, and indeed, erudite Eskimoan wisdom, we close our eyes and fall back aslee…

“Sabes qué?” I say, sitting back up, and by the sheer tension of the coil springing Ceci’s eyelids open, I know that she knows that I know absolutely nothing about how bad this is about to get. So, we flip the fuckit coin and opt for the other side. That is to say, not the “fuckit we’ll tough it out” side, but rather the “fuckit let’s not.”

So, at fifteen past midnight, in the spewing snow, we decamp, pack the heavier stuff back into our wet drybags, plow through the snow to the nearby refugio, drop the bags off, go back for the tent, drag it against the wind and re-setup camp under the tiniest of roofs next to the refuge’s entrance. Everything is sopping wet by the time we slip back into our sleeping bags, because, here’s one thing a lifetime of making snowmen and forts and stuff has taught me: snow is really just water in disguise.

I sincerely believe we fell asleep, then. Oh, the naïveté; oh, the wishfulthinkingness… See, because while we were catching our beauty sleep under our slowly collapsing tent, all the tourists in the basecamp refugio were busy filing out like ants to try and summit Chimborazo. Of course, given the extreme weather conditions and the high risk of avalanches, this was much more a question of the guides cashing-in their fee and the tourists getting an epic story to tell about “getting sooo close” and “with snow up to here” and “I would have kept going but…”

Maybe you’re thinking I’m being a tidbit bitter, but fear not! Motives aplenty ensue because, for the rest of the night, they came trickling back into the refugio in packs of 2 or 3, taking cover under the aforementioned tiniest roofed area in the world, of which we occupied about three-quarters; slamming their mountaineering boots on the ground a half-inch from our heads, coughing their lungs out and already formulating the, also aforementioned, epic stories. The last group came back near dawn which would have been a convenient wake-up call except for the fact that by that point waking up had been thoroughly and exhaustively called.

Okay, maybe I’m working at cross-purposes here. Glimpsed from the outside, our baptism by the Ecuadoran Andes might appear an arduous affair, epic and salvaje in equal measures. One glimpse at our snow-covered bikes come morning and one might be led to conclude that the Andes, that, indeed, Pachamama herself has it in for us. But the truth on the ground is something entirely other.

Perhaps even, opposite. Here’s why: along our slow and mighty pilgrimage through the Andes, there has been an unbroken chain of extraordinary glimpses granted to us weary pilgrims. Every single mountain, volcano, laguna and crater along our way has revealed itself in the very nick of time. La Cordillera de Los Andes is a brutally indifferent place, one would have to be in the grips of an ayahuasca cleanse to think that merciless Pachamama would suddenly, out of the blue, take pity on us. And, what’s more, at such precisely timed intervals.

And yet… And yet, despite the hardships, the deluges, the winds, the mud, the loose rocks, the hypothermia, the sunburns, the tears, the sweat, the dehydration, the crashes, the wash-outs, the freezing river crossings… This idea that Pachamama is looking after us, persists. That in her own, unique, tough-loving way, she cares.

Granted, it takes a different, not to say cracked, sensitivity to grasp it. Let’s say, and indulge me here, that Pachamama was to choose to reveal her most precious marvels to us during the rainy season, how else would she go about it than to make it rain on us non-stop? Deluge, downpour, hailstorm, ropes and buckets, then… quick scenic respite… then back to showers and nails and cats and dogs and flurries and… voilà: hypothermia.

Randomness, you’ll have to concede, does not possess a sense of timing and much much less knows what the wonders are in the first place, and much much less when we’ll just so happen to cycle by.

And so, I ask, is it not simply logical to assume that if it snowed a historical amount overnight, it is because, in our leaky summer tent, we would not have survived a historical amount of rain? Or… or is it not only reasonable to assume that Pachamama, tough-loving Pachamama, in all her wisdom, knew that we would happily surrender a night of sleep in exchange for a glimpse of a Chimborazo dressed in a fine coat of powdered snow come dawn?

When you put yourself out there in the elements, when you make yourself vulnerable, it is never truer that a second more, a second less, would change absolutely everything. That nothing would be the same. So, how are we to know that, at every turn, without Pachamama’s charitable exhibitionism, it might not have been spectacularly worse? Especially when the odds are so impressively stacked against us?

Daily we place ourselves in the hands of greater forces. And to do so, to allow ourselves to become vulnerable in this way, it takes a certain amount of faith. Faith that, individually and as a team, we have what it takes to overcome. Or at least survive. And the greater the opposing forces, the greater our vulnerability; and the greater our vulnerability, the greater our faith must be. But in this trip, there have been so incredibly many instances when the greater forces were so mighty and our vulnerability so absolute, that our faith in our own capacity could no longer keep us afloat.

These are the moments in which ancestral Pachamama took shape for us. And believe me, it sounds woo-woo to me too. But, there is something, there. Something about participating in one of the oldest rituals known to humanity. To hold the elements in such respect, to be so humbled by them on a daily basis, that they acquire a name and a spirit of their own. And what is our journey if not a pilgrimage? And what is a pilgrimage if not a spiritual practice? Not prayers or sacrifices exactly… but, then again, how far is falling off our bikes from prostrating ourselves before the mountains; how far are hypothermia and exhaustion and muscle pain from a sacrificial offering; how far is surrendering ourselves to fate from faith?

At our level of exhaustion and at 5,000m of altitude, of course, the borders between all things great and small begin to blur. So maybe I’m—

Craaack! Craack!

“Uy!” Ceci exclaims, making my uninsured heart jump. We’re packing up the tent now, as the mountains trace themselves like sharp, hungering teeth against the horizon. And somehow she’s found one last tired-looking haba bean at the bottom of the tent, buried amongst dirt and down feathers. I shake my head. All our gear is so impossibly soaked that it looks like Pachamama tried to swallow us whole in the night, only to spit us right out come morning.

Craack! Craaack!

Eight kilometres of cycling downhill in powdered snow await us. And as we slip and slide the first few bike-lengths away from the refugio, we look back from time to time, in case the shroud of clouds veiling the majestic 6,263m high volcano since dawn might just want to dissipate. We slip and slide some more, look back. Slip and slide some more… increasingly resolved with every slip, with every slide, to lose sight of the volcano before it—

“Ahí está!” Ceci screams, almost falling off her bike with excitement.

My stiff uninsured neck pivots violently. There it is: Chimborazo, entirely unveiled. We act fast, knowing that our hardship, however formidable, will only grant us less than a few minutes. A glimpse, at most. We live it, capture it, take it all in, all of its magnificence, by the goodwill of Pachamama watching over us, and then, just like that, it’s gone. The scarf of tightly knit clouds seals the mountain from view for the rest of the day and more.

Craack!

“Ceci!”

“Qué pasó?”

“Te vas a romper un (uninsured) diente!” I chide.

“Si verdad?” Ceci agrees. And so she spits the stubborn roasted haba bean in the snow. And Ceci being the worst spitter that I’ve ever met, possibly the worst spitter in the whole world; the bean lands not very far, right next to her foot, in fact, and swiftly sinks into the snow.

And together we watch it disappear.

“So long haba,” I say.

“Que te vaya bien,” Ceci says.

And a moment later, we too disappear in a world of snow. Like little pebbles. The whole process, if anything, only making us tougher to crack. Although, with only 23% of the trip behind us… one can’t help but wonder whether Pachamama will have the last:

“Wuhuu!”

Salinas

It’s funny this idea that we’re travelling. Shivering, naked, hugging each other underneath a sputtering lukewarm shower, again… By what measure?

Daily, we make our wheels spin, they splash into puddles, then get caked over in dirt; all day like this, splash and cake, splash and cake like oversized doughnuts, dip & sprinkle, dip & sprinkle, much the same as us, our wheels splashing and caking us, oversized gingerbread people that we are. And the flavour changes with the path we travel, some days it’s grey grit, some days it’s red clay, some days it’s brown mud and some days it’s green cow pie. On most days, it’s an everything-bagel. We get fried by the sun, we get soaked in rain, we are left to marinate in our juices. The day achieves its flavour this way. We are travelling. You can tell by the way our life experience gathers colours, notes, undertones, hints… The same way an arduous path enlivens the out-of-the-way places we reach, so remote and alpine that they are barely hospitable to life itself.

Except, today, the destination is the same. How far have we travelled when we find ourselves here, again? Shivering, naked, hugging each other underneath a sputtering lukewarm shower. Does it matter whether we find ourselves in Salinas, at this point in time? Or Quilotoa? Or in Peru where the rainy season will be in full swing and where we will reach altitudes near 5,000m every day?

Our bodies spin as we try and share the pitiful trickle of the crusty shower head without touching the mouldy shower curtain. Ceci eventually gives up, preferring the dry-flavoured cold of her clothes to the wet-flavoured kind. And once alone, to the distant sound of Ceci’s clacking teeth and shuddering whimpers, I find myself trying to puzzle out whether there is any space at all between courage and stupidity. With Ceci gone, I decrease the flow of water, trying to find that exact sweet spot just before the sensors turn the electrical heating off. It’s a delicate task which must be executed by ear, like tuning an instrument. Too much flow and the shower head can’t warm it all; too little and the heating turns off.

But there’s another spectrum at play here, too. At the hottest setting, there’s often too little flow to reach enough of your body to keep warm; at a lukewarm setting, more of your body gets reached but the water is often not warm enough to keep you from freezing. It’s a tricky game to play at the best of times. These are not the best of times. These are the times that often make you puzzle over whether there is any space at all between courage and stupidity. Have I said this before?

We can scarcely take credit for our ill-preparedness for this trip. The combination of inadequate gear and a severe underestimation of the savagery of the Andes during the rainy season; clearly tilt the scale towards stupidity. Not least for overestimating our own ability to wing any and everything in life. Stupid, indubitably.

Where I believe the scales even out, however, is with our capacity to do what we can with what we have. To work wonders, even. The catalyst for our being here, in Ecuador, after all, is a Black Friday Sale on bikes. Two 50% off mountain bikes, the last ones in stock on the Specialized Mexico website. Although clearly not designed or equipped for our extreme purposes, the Fuse 27.5 had the clear and distinct advantage of fitting our budget. We took them as they came, no fitting, no adjustments, the bottle cages that we co-opted into drybag-holders on my suspension, arrived the day we packed the bikes to leave, they worked because of sheer stupid luck. Because they had to. The same as the bikes. We were never sure that everything was going to fit, never tried the bikes with all the weight…

Fit our budget-ish. Purchasing the bikes more or less reduced our gear budget to 0$. Which, consequently, is why our summer tent is a summer tent, why my 15-year-old delaminating sleeping mat somehow made the gear list. It is also why our gloves are not waterproof, why half our drybags are plain old plastic bags, why I only own and operate on 1 pair of thinly-padded racing cycling shorts which are practically see-through because of everything they’ve seen over the past 3 trips of wearing them every day, why our only tool for navigation is my 5-year-old iPhone which can’t hold its charge and can barely load a map…

There essentially came a time when we had to make the choice between adequate gear or the trip itself. And we chose the trip. Rainy season and all. Because having the winters off meant that there came a time when we had to make the choice between the Andes in the rain or never seeing the Andes. And we chose the rain.

And so, to arrive hypothermic, to allow ourselves to reach this state over and over again might bear all the hallmarks of stupidity, however, our getting up every morning at 6am to face the elements again, day after day, to face the unknown which most likely would include hypothermia, exhaustion, mechanical failures and/or worse… if you whisk the metaphorical dust away with an olive branch, would you not find there some, if not all, the hallmarks of courage?

It takes both stupidity and courage to fulfil your dreams, of this I am certain. Or perhaps the truth is something more like this: It takes courage to survive the stupidity necessary to fulfil your dreams. To even believe in your dreams is an exercise in willful stupidity. Just try one morning to remember what you dreamed of the night before and spend the rest of your day trying to convince people that your dream was actually real, that it actually happened, that the elephant that was also your mom was serving you socks for dinner on a table made of tons of tiny hats. After you’ve done this, go out into the world to prove that it’s, in fact, possible. That somehow you can make this dream be true, in the real world.

Stupidity and courage are indispensable.

It takes a certain type of person to remember dreams, another to believe in them, another to be convinced that they are out there somewhere, yet another to conceive of them as attainable and one last type of person to go out there and pursue them. To believe in dreams, by definition-ish, is to believe in something that is not true. Which coincidentally is the exact definition-ish of stupidity.

Where the courage kicks in is to withstand being stupid for an indefinite amount of time. Where the courage kicks in is to believe that it is not true… yet. Where the courage kicks in is to believe that stupidity might just be a stepping stone to achieving greatness.

The way I see it, it’s a question of nuance. Mastery of any kind, be it of the self or of a craft, is indivisible from a pursuit of nuance. What is life experience but a more nuanced set of tools and lenses with which to gauge how to think and act?

Most of what we are doing here in Ecuador is who we are. It’s who we’ve been for as long as either of us can remember. Pushing ourselves to the limit opens new pathways and sheds light on the unknown in such a way that we can start adding nuance and defining what an experience holds the potential to give, what it holds the potential of taking away. It sheds light on who we have the potential of being. It goes one beyond, even, by defining what we have proved capable of being.

What are the boundaries of who we are? It’s a question we are answering every day out here, and on most days, it scares the living life out of us. To face a day with 80 kilometres of high-altitude mountain biking with 2,700m of steep and loose uphills is intimidating enough a prospect when you’re exhausted and slept poorly in a dingy room after a 9-day streak of such days and worse; but to face it, complete in the knowledge of just how much unknown you face is another level of intimidation altogether. Now open the boundaries wide so that it might very well include leading us to shudder in each other’s arms trying to share a chorritito of tepid water… again.

Just as the line between courage and stupidity is often thin and hard to pinpoint, the difference between our potential selves and our actualized selves exists only here, somewhere on the edges of experience. It is about taking what we can be and endeavouring to shape it to its highest expression. And the best tools at our disposal to achieve this are the people and the environment we surround ourselves with.

For me? Ceci and the Andes. And even though, I am standing here again, shivering and naked, if the destination is the truth at the core of who I am, then I am travelling farther than I ever have.

Notes on Miserabilia

“La panadera con el pan, la panadera con el pan.”

Ceci does a little dance in the rain. Somehow, she’s become the official panadera of the trip. Wearing my stretchy ultramarathon vest, she keeps the bread nice and toasty in the oven between her raincoat and her sweaty back all day.

There is a surprising variety of bread in the local Ecuadoran bakery, each with its own cryptic name, shape and colour. And yet, it certainly takes a finer palate than mine to distinguish any variety in taste. Most of everything is bread. Chocolatines, cuernitos, quesadillas, corn bread, salty bread, sweet bread… Bread.

“La panadera con el pan,” I sing, and Ceci waddles over, turning last minute so I can fish some bread from under her rain jacket.

Today, we stop in the rain. Soaked, exhausted, there is no shelter at this altitude and on the open road. And, push on as we might, waiting, hoping, praying for the rain to relent… eventually, we have to stop. In the rain. And eat wet bread together. In companionable silence.

It’s hard to exactly smudge a finger on why and quite impossible to generate or predict. But these are the moments that tell me: it’s an adventure.

The camaraderie of the miserable. Ceci walks over to the modest shelter of a pine tree and finds a way to settle herself in the ditch as if it were a couch. I crouch next to her, almost falling asleep for the sheer bliss of resting my throbbing head on my forearms.

We share a sideways glance as we chew a stale chocolatine that, for all the cinnamon-looking stuff on it and the chocolate-looking stuff inside, fails to taste like anything but bread. We laugh, shivering and move on.

It’s brief and forgettable, but I catch it. There are only a half handful of people with whom I’ve shared such moments of companionable misery. Myself included. During my first cycling voyage through Québec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, on a long stretch through fields and hills, I once fought an ant for a piece of cereal. All I had left was the bottom of a bag of Cheerios and somehow I managed to spill half of it in the roadside grit. Desperate and starved, I started picking the ‘O’s from the gravel and noticed that one had an ant attached to it. I shook and shook it, but it wouldn’t let go. And so, I ate both.

Miserabilia. The wonders only uncoverable when scratching the bottom of the barrel. The wonders only glimpsable at the end of a thousand-yard stare. The wonders only reachable when at the absolute end of one’s rope. I don’t know how else to put it. Every good adventure I’ve ever been on has had inglorious moments like these. And our path through the Ecuadoran Andes is peppered full of them.

End of note.

Identity

I asked Ceci one day at the beginning of the trip, whether, after 4 trips together in 8 years and soon to be 9 countries, 3 continents, 11 months, nearly 20,000kms (not counting trips previous to our meeting, not counting Canada & Mexico); whether she considered that cycle-travel was who Cecilia Campuzano was, and she said no.

An answer that probably surprises you as much as it surprised me. Identity is a curious creature. The closer you look, the less it makes sense. In part, I think this is because it tends to exist in different tenses for everyone. For some, identity is an amalgamation of their past failures and accomplishments; for others, it’s who they are exactly now, open to wild variations or perfect steadfastness from moment to moment. For yet another category of people, identity is who they are aiming to be. One is a foundational identity, one is a fluid identity and one is a pursuit. And if there’s an axis where Ceci and I converge, is that we are both the last of these tenses.

Who we are is out there, always somehow around the next bend and the next.

As far as I can grasp identity, it concerns the story we tell about ourselves. Writing these articles, in some respects, is my way to redress our story. To diminish the scope of who we are back to normal people-size and yet also to colour in the gaps with the unique colour palette of who we are.

You see, ours is a specific shade of future-tense identity. All future-tense identity tends to concern delayed gratification to one degree or another. However, to colour ourselves in with the specific colour scheme of our unique madness, we have to talk about indefinitely delayed gratification.

Clean your room, then you can watch tv; practice, then you can master an instrument; train, then you can run or bike farther or faster; work intensively, then you can take the winters off. Simple stuff, but to a kid—and let’s face it, to some adults too—the reaction to delayed gratification can range from a mere annoyance to the absolute end of the world! It’s why parents suck. It’s why bosses suck. It’s why, if you don’t master delayed gratification, your life will be full of authority figures that suck.

Ceci & I, we’re on the opposite end of that spectrum. Here’s our tell: whereas the equation normally goes: Desire + Work = Vacation. That is to say: Desire + Delayed Gratification = Greater Reward. Ours goes: Work + Save + Training = Cycling Trip. Now, when you “that is to say” that equation, what you get is: Delayed Gratification + Delayed Gratification + Delayed Gratification = Delayed Gratification. And that’s where the “indefinitely” comes in.

And while the cause for this behaviour varies in Ceci and in me, our delayed gratification cycles are the same in this respect: they always seem to be just on the brink of closing, granted just a little more delay and a little more delay and a little more… Until delay becomes the thing. Until gratification is fine for others, but for me? No, I have to work for it just a little more. I have to become just a little more worthy. We’ll celebrate when this happens, when that happens…

If identity for us exists in the future, the future for us also exists in the future. We don’t believe in calling ourselves athletes until we win this, or complete this. But then, if we do, we don’t believe that it was worthy of gratification because, after all, if it closed the cycle, it mustn’t have been a worthy goal since, if we achieved it, it was achievable. And so, didn’t require enough delay.

This is the specific shade of who we are when we do these trips. We cannot colour ourselves in without including these unique shades. It is a unique madness that is both a problematic behavioural pattern and a formidable tool when wielded adeptly.

The value of this path we are creating for ourselves lies in how uniquely us it has become. By uncovering and integrating who we are, we can channel our potential with greater accuracy and to greater effect. That is my Tao, anyway. My contribution to our family philosophy. To remove our path from the calculable, the comparable; and make of it that which cannot be the result of anything more or less than the expression of who we are.

This trip, more than any we’ve ever done, has proved capable of narrowing this identity gap. The size of the challenge has forced us to use the complete range of our colour palette, just to pull it off. The elements have so overwhelmed us that we’ve, time and again, been forced to relent, to force the “indefinitely delayed gratification” cycle to close. To take a day off, dry our camping gear, launder our clothes, stay warm, replenish calories, sleep in a clean bed, call home… In these moments there was so little more of ourselves that we could have given, that what we’ve managed to accomplish coincides pretty much exactly with who we are.

Cycle-travelling rivals any method as a path of inquiry into the soul. And the findings of this trip have been some of the most enlightening yet. And so, if I write my little articles, it is because I believe, with all my soul, that the more we intuit the colours, or symbolic truths of our story, the more creative we can be with our identity. And so be more.

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you in Peru!

Ecuador In Numbers

Total Distance: 1,070km
Total Elevation Gain: 28,200m
Total Cycling Days: 17
Total Days: 20
Most Distance in a Day: 90km
Most Elevation Gain in a Day: 2,733m
Most Cycling Hours in a Day: 8 hours, 7 minutes
Longest Day in Total Hours: 11 hours
Highest Altitude: 5,100m