No news

You may have noticed how there’s nothing new going on here. I thought and thought it over again and decided that it’s just too much work. In between doing the picture thing, geotagging them and tracking my trip in general I couldn’t make it. So I now refer you to www.picasaweb.com/gertmans to take a look at just my pics there and if on facebook and being a friend of mine check them out there.

Now reading through my blog again I like even if nobody else did.. a pitty.

Supongo que ya se han dado cuento que aqui no pasa nada mas desde Guyana y Georgetown. Decidi que simplemente no me alcanza el tiempo para hacer las fotos y las historietas mas. Peor en dos o tres idiomas. Asi que les refiero a mi pagina en facebook o si no a www.picasaweb.com/gertmans para las fotos. Eso te da una idea que paso mientras tanto, Mas de una ano y unos cuanto paises mas alla. Nos vemos ahi…

Georgetown is dangerous. Period.

The Lonely Planet says it. Georgetown is dangerous. Period. And so I came to know.

I came from the Surinam border that day, a very tiring hot and long ride. I checked into a hotel outside the center because the ones that I tried to find in the center were closed or unfindable. The owner looked like an arab and had a particularly unfriendly air over him. I was worried about the bike being stolen even if it was on the patio. With the owner we moved it right next to the table where the guard would be sitting (read sleeping) that night. And so I tried to get some money that night, bought some remedies for my ever sore throat and did the internet thing for a few hours in the hotel room. It was hot and the airco couldn’t really cope with the heat so when it got dark and cooler I opened the glass sliding doors to let some air in. They were locked with a wooden stick. When I went to sleep I forgot to put the stick in again. So the doors were open and since I assumed the balcony was only for me I even left the curtains open. Bad judgement.

I woke up and there was a scary black guy standing in my room with my laptop in his hands. As I rushed towards him he shouted “Turn around, don’t look at me, stay on the bed or I will shoot you in the fucking head” as he reached for his gun. I was paralized and decided to be good stay on the bed nicely.  He asked me where my money was and I said “it’s in the wallet”. “Where’s the wallet”, he said. “I don’t know” I said. You can’t think much if you’re not sure you’ll live another five minutes or not. “Yeah man, you’re in Guyana now, you stay on the fucking bed or your blood will be all over this place” he went on and kept on babbling a bit more. I couldn’t  move until after a few minutes of silence. I looked around and the fucker was gone. So was my laptop (with the cable!) and the money from my wallet. There were bankcards all over the place, more money, my swiss knife and two cellphones, nothing of wich he was interested in apparently. Either he was in panic too and wanted to get out as fast as possible or he was a professional only getting what he was after.

I never knew if he actually had that gun or not. I don’t think so but it didn’t seem like such a good idea to find out at that time. One of the best part of the story was the reaction of the owner. When I called upon his office/bedroom at five in the morning he acused me of lying: “what computer? I never saw any computer!” and threatened me to be acused of lying by the police. “If you want to report to the police you will loose a day of your precious travelling time” he added. The only reason to report to the police would have been to fuck this guy over. I don’t have any insurance and I don’t think anything would have gotten my laptop back. So I fled the city in a state of numb panic, just wanting to get out of this country as fast as I could. At four in the afternoon I got to the Rockview Lodge in Annai, halfway to the border with Brasil, a small village in the middle of nowhere where I felt a whole lot safer. But only now, about two weeks after this little happening, I’m beginning to ride with joy again. Only now not every guy waving at me or trying to flag me down for an alm has my heartbeat racing in fear of an assault.

With the laptop I lost all my pics and movies of this trip except those on picasa as I had no backup. There’s a good side to that as well. It saves me from having to edit all those videos wich was going to take me hours and hours of work. I’ll spend that time on something more usefull. I have one thing less to worry about and one thing less to loose or break. And, most importantly, I was going to switch to Macintosh anyway.

Music was my first love

I can’t tell you how important the music is to me on this trip. I fire up La Bike in the morning and it seems my mood and how well things will go that day depend on the tunes. If I’ve changed the collection on the player the night before and I’m all inspired by new sounds then the day couldn’t have started any better. Do you know what it’s like to be just you and your bike in the middle of nowhere on the pampa in Argentina, the sun goes down and turns into glorious orange and then Rufus Wainwright sings Complainte de la Butte to you? It’s magical and it makes me the happiest man on earth.

Right now I’m floating on a boat on the imense amazon, dense rainforest passes by, indian tribespeople  peddal around in their canoes, sun is going down and I listen to Brasilidade by Bossacucanova. Gives me goosebumps, ants’ titties as we call them.

William Bird, masses for four voices, the Requiem by Faure, Lionel Hampton; flying at the Olympia, Ella fitzgerald and even some Acda & de Munnik stuff makes me sing and shout on the bike. I’ve been caught many times doing Travolta’s Greased Lightning move. That’s a perfect one cause you need only one hand as the right hand is busy throttling. Sometimes the ocasional foot move also comes in.  I always feel sort of sad when, after a long day’s riding with good music, I have to shut down the music when riding into urban areas to be able to hear the traffic and the honking.

And equally so when the music sucks I don’t enjoy riding half as much. I brought too little music so I’ve gone through the whole collection about six times now. The other ¾ of the Joy Ride musical heritage is sitting on some portable hard disc in Sucre. Maybe it’s time to get it over here.

For the bikers out there, make sure you get a pair of in ear, noise isolating plugs. Anything else is no good as there’s too much noise from wind and bike. I had a pair of sonys before wich were good but the hit are definitely my current Ethymotic Eri6 plugs. I can do a 100 km/h and still hear new detail in music that I hadn’t heard before. I even understand bits of the french chanson that I never got before (twenty years ago). Without these I wouldn’t know how to fight boredom. As a matter of fact I’m asking how so many round the world bikers can do without them. Get some!

At last some adventure and rough riding, some….

After that morning at Ilhabella when we did the “will you marry me” thing with Walk and Aila we decided to go to the other side of the island. Them in a 4×4 and me on La Bike. We had been warned it was going to be tough for La Bike to get through but yet again I exposed my attitude of a veteran enduro rider from Bolivia and ignored those who thought it a bad idea to try. Well, I didn’t get through. The ride was only about 30 kilometres, scheduled for two hours. It was a muddy slippery clay track with deep trails. I managed the first half up and thought that if I had made the going up bit the other half would be easy. I was mistaken and when I dropped the bike for the fourth time and was coming up to some really deep gullies I decided to leave the bike and hop on the 4×4.

skidding and sliding to the other side of Ilhabella

The driver told me I shouldn’t worry about the bike as no one does any stealing here and I left some luggage in the open pannier. It was open as I lost the lid some time ago. How stupid was I? When we got back after a short visit to the beach on the other side the stuff was gone. I lost a pair of shoes, a bermudo, a really cool rain jacket purposely made for bikers (with big raingloves!) that I had just bought in Argentina and never used, and a liner bag for the pannier. Tough shit but it wasn’t going to spoil the day nor the trip. I fired up the bike and turned around when the engine died. No gas. The thieves had wanted to steal the gasoline. That doesn’t work on a KLR as the engine needs to be running for the gasvalve to open. But they broke off the flimsy plastic (!) gas nipple right where it comes out the carburetor. So now what? We started towing the bike.

Being towed is one of the hardest jobs I know on a bike, on trails like this it is hell. At night even worse

It was getting dark, the driver was going a deadly slow pace, all the diesel fumes of the heavily smoking engine were going straight up my nostrils and if it had been hard driving the bike through this muddy shit then imagine being towed through it. But after all this is my thing, I did it a thousand times in the caravanas of Bolivia and I must say I’m pretty good at it. I managed without tipping the bike over once. Two other 4×4′s had joined us since the beach and one of them was giving me his lights from behind as I was without any lights wanting to save the battery for what was yet to come. In one of the curves Aila and the others who were in the back of the pickup pulling yelled and looked behind me with terror. The driver stopped and as I looked around I saw the 4×4 behind me hanging over a steep drop, only saved from going over the edge by a treetrunk. It was getting better by the hour!

got saved by the tree trunk

We spent about one and a half hour trying to get the car back on track wich didn’t work. We would have managed to get it back but the mayority of people had the firm belief that if the car would go down it would take the other car with it. I couldn’t convince them. Aila even got in a fight with some woman who was obviously freaking out about the situation and started acusing us of having caused the accident since the guy was doing me a favour. Just before they started what would have been a nice catfight Walk and some others intervened. Good thing to do so cause the women turned out to be the governour of the island.

As we were all getting pretty pissed off and more exhausted by the hour I had another try reconnecting the gas hose and the vacuum hose that also got missing. There was no way to fix the broken nipple until I asked if someone had a pen. I cut the inner ink container and it just fitted in. With a bit of tape I was able to make the gas hose fit again. Another mecanic in the crowd had the bright idea to use part of the vent hose of the battery to connect the vacuum back to the gas valve and La Bike came back to life again. From there it was an easy 15some kilometers , quite uneventfull in comparison to what had happened before. I apologized to the guy who almost lost his car and very possibly his life for trying to help me and asked the guy who had given me his pen how much he needed for that. That night I also said goodbye to Aila and Walk. It had been a really cool week hanging out with them. They’re a cool couple and I sure hope I can be back on Ilhabella for their wedding.

Cashew Fruit

I’m skipping nearly one and a half month and a few thousand kilometers since the last post but if I don’t start updating now then I never will. I had the first Cashew fruit of my life this morning. As such not a main event but still. I am in cashew country now and I need an excuse to start writing again on this blog.

Cashew fruit at the Luzeiros Hotel in Fortaleza

Let me explain a bit how things are. Ever since I got to Recife I’ve been in the hands of overly generous and hospitable people of the Brasilian biker’s scene. It started with Tacio from Topmoto, a Suzuki dealership in Recife. I got his name from a guy called Alex of the Horizons Unlimited community in Belem (if this is complicated to understand check out www.horizonsunlimited.com, the cyberbible for Round the World travellers on two wheels). Alex said “I have many friends along the coast all the way up to Belem. If you’re in Recife g0 and visit Tacio”. So I asked around in town and rolled into his Suzuki shop on a thursday morning two weeks ago. He happened to be a RTW biker too, having gotten as far as Japan and crossing Russia. That’s a strange thing to do for a Brasilian. First thing he said was “ok, so what do you need to have done on your bike?” “Well, actually there’s quite a few things, I was just passing by to salute you of Alex’ part” “No no, get your bike in and we’ll start working on it” I ended up spending a week in Recife under the wings of Tacio and his brother Giovanni, got in a new camara over the internet since mine had died a week before, had a new lid made for the pannier that I had lost in the south of Brasil, put real locks on the panniers and even had the bike washed! And all of this with Tacio taking me all over town as if he had no business to run. When I grow up I want to be like Tacio. He hates work, never wears a tie, allways in shorts and says he’s a artist. It’s the art of not having to work for a living.

Tacio and Company. I hate work he says.

Hanging around in his workshop I got to know Luis Verbo. Luis goes around the country chasing women and selling leather goods for bikers while he’s at it. And I met Paulo who told me to visit him when I would get to Fortaleza. I left Recife the same day as Luis did and we met up the day after at Renato’s place in Campina Grande. Yet another sample of brotherhood between bikers here; I had sent a message to Renato before arrival at Campina Grande as we had never met and to announce myself. It said “Hi, my name is Gert and I’m a friend of Luis Leite (wich was the name on his card), I’ll be in Campina grande in about two hours, I’ll call you”. Renato didn’t know who Luis Leite was as he knows him as Luis Verbo, his companies’ name. He of course had no idea who Gert was and why I would visit him. So I called him when I got there, luckily he spoke spanish. I explained that I was travelling on my KLR and he then got the picture. “OK, where are you? You wait, I’ll be there in 15 minutes”. He took me to his house, no questions asked. We had long discussions of kapitalism versus socialism as Che Guevarra was all over his place, had a barbeque later on when Luis arrived and spent the weekend in his second house in Pipa Beach, my next destination up north. He told me to go look for Marcio of the B17 motoclube in Parnamerin, just south of Natal. Marcio gladly took me in, we fixed the sound in the chain that had been bugging me for the last few days, he took me around town, had me sleep in his workshop and gave me this elastic thing to tie a few bottles of gas to my luggage rack. He refused payment for anything. When I got to Fortaleza a few days later I called up Paulo to tell him I had just rolled into town. “OK, he said, stay put, I’ll come and pick you up”. When he got there he said “I wanted to have you stay in my house but it’s a bit far off. Don’t worry, I’ll make a few phonecalls” as he drove off in his fancy Chevrolet. He pulled up the vallet parking driveway of the beachfront Luzeiros Hotel. I was wondering what was going on. He then got out and said “how long will you be staying?” “Eeeuurgh I don’t know, three days maybe?” We unpacked the bike and getting up to the counter he shelled out a few hundred dollars and paid my bill in advance. So that’s a long story to explain how amazingly generous and hospitable the Brasilians are, why I am in the Luzeiros hotel overlooking the gorgeous ocean and the Fortaleza beaches and having Cashew fruit for breakfast.

My view on the atlantic these days

Ana will be coming over to Bolivia soon and I’ve skipped the plan to go there and look her up. We now changed to the plan of her coming over to Brasil so we can ride around here for a bit. The things is that if I go further up northwest transport to and throughwill be harder and conditions for riding will be harsher because of heat and road conditions. So I think I prefer to receive her here in Fortaleza. The only thing is that it might take her another ten days or more to get here and I don’t know what I’ll do in so much time. Apart from the fact that the way I’m going now it looks like I’ll never get to Colombia, or anywhere else for that matter. On the other hand I could think of worse places to hang out for a bit.

Buddy #9 Walk from Wageningen/Riberao Preto

Buddy #9 Vladimir Walk, his future wife and myself

I’ve known Vladimir Walk since university and mostly from my student fraternity. He’s a naughty little bugger and lots of fun. When I got to Wageningen and joined the KSV fraternity I lived the first few months in his and Vierkant’s (he’ll pop up later I’m sure) house in the cellar, with water on the floor, as I was not yet worthy of anything better. They got me to join the Knights of the Round Table, an infamous dispuut with worldfame all over Wageningen and later on the Dixieland Jazz Band The Able Bodied Seamen that I am sure all of you remember. Or not. I took over from Walk in that band playing the omni important role of the washboardplayer.

We lost sight of each other after graduation as he got lost in Asia and I went to Africa. When he came to Brasil I actually had the plan of flying over there with the Cessna that I was once going to buy. Didn’t happen. Anyway, as I was approaching Ribeirao Preto in Sao Paolo Province coming from Uruguay I wrote him a mail that I was on my way. No reply. So I though I might as well surprise him. Through his soulmate Vierkant in Holland I got the name of the company that he’s running in Brasil, looked it up on Google Earth, put it in my GPS and was hence ready to attack. I was going to get there just before the weekend. Some two nights before getting there I ended up in a pousada run by a an exteremely friendly Dutch couple in Bombinhas. I asked them to call the company (since my Portuguese remains crap) to find out if he would actually be there over the weekend. “Yes” said Renata, his secretary “and what’s more we, and his future wife are throwing him a surprise party this very weekend”. Now that’s cool! Not only is he there, it’s his birthday too, I’ll show up as the second surprise and to my surprise he’s getting married.

So we made the set up. I put his home address in my GPS and drove almost straight up to the gate at midday. The band was already playing it was nice and hot and a genuine live samba sound was oozing from the poolside party. A smell of asado filled the air. This spelled an excellent afternoon and I was now definitely in Brasil. I had the guard call for Renata and she managed to keep Walk with his back towards me with some perfectly futile excuses as I sneeked in. I got a beer and slid up next to him. “Hey Walk, what’s up. Congratulations, You wanna beer?” Only slightly confused he said “So what are you doing here?”. “Well now that’s kind of a long story”

Los samberos de la festa

Off took the party with plenty samba, me and Walk joining in with the band of course, plenty asado, plenty cold beer to keep temperatures down and vibes up and plenty lovely Brasilians. See more pics here or the full selection done by Ineke Broeksteeg. Bedankt Ineke!

Walk's party (and work) team. Indeed the pretty girl he's holding will be his wife soon

But the best part was yet to be had. The happy couple was to set off to Ilhabella, near Sao Paolo at the coast for a romantic weekend and to do the arrangements for their inminent wedding the end of this year. So the rest of the week I spent lounging in their lovely house, checking out a bit of the nocturnal scene in Ribeirao Preto, having some Sushi and living the grand metropolitan life. And visiting CRV Lagoa where Walk works selling bovine semen from these big bulls for artificial insemination. I set out for the island on thursday morning on la Bike, got soaking wet on my way there (I love rainshowers in the tropics as they don’t get you cold but they sure get you wet) and arrived tranquilo with yet another rainshower on the ferry. Next day I looked up Walk and Aila and we started scouting for beaches, hotels and chapels for the ceremony.

Scouting chapels for the ceremony on Ilhabella, this one any good?

But I had a secret mission. Walk secretly told me that he was bringing a children’s knights outfit to the island. If ever he had thought of asking the hand of his lady he’d have wanted to do it as a Knight. Well there you go! That’s my cup of tea. I’d rather spend a weekend on Ilhabella getting this kind of shit done than lie on the beach, for wich it was too cold anyway. So at a certain point I had four staff at the local tourist information office making phonecalls all over the island to see where we could get that horse from and we managed. Another dificult point was to try to avoid suspicion of Aila. We made up stories of me going out with the daughter of the owner of my hotel to explain my strange and unexplained crisscrossings over the island on La Bike. Things got really complicated when Aila also wanted to surprise Walk with breakfast in bed on sunday morning, his birthday and also D-day for Walk’s proposal to Aila. By then I really didn’t know what I could and could not say to who. But it all worked out gloriously. I picked them up at their hotel on sunday morning and we drove to the venue, a chapel of San Antonio (the saint of matrimony!) right on the beach. Valdemar, my horse man, was hiding his horses 200 metres down the road. I made a fake phonecall to Walks cellphone and he pretended it was a birthday call from Vierkant and lingered off. By that time I had admitted to Aila that there would be surprise for Walk at the chapel. I told her to stay put and that some beardy guy would show up soon. “Let me go and get Walk” I said and walked off. Just around the corner Walk was already coming up, with the knight outfit on, on his stalian. His horse had some trouble with the terrain and at first wouldn’t go on the beach. But it finally worked and Valdemar and me left the couple alone for some time to do their thing.

Will you marry me? Please?

Only afterwards we did the photosession for the press. And after the ceremony they went for a short but pretty ride on the horses around Valdemar’s farm where the horses had come from, a lovely, no tourist setup in the middle of a very very touristy island. An amazing place. Champaign was awaiting them in the kitchen to round the whole thing off. Mission completed!

End of ceremony

And the ride back into town afterwards

I shall write my blog. I shall write my blog. I shall..

Travelling is just too hard work and I don’t feel like writing lately. Two valid reasons not to do it I think. But I am determined to write some soon. I’m already up in Recife, getting to the easternmost tip of the continent so it’s just about time to write. I promise. I promise

Desde que escribi algo la ultima vez ha pasado como un mes y medio creo y no se cuantos miles de kilometros. Nada que ver. Les prometo escribir algo pronto. Algo? Unos 26 historietas creo porque esos kilometros suelen venir con anecdotas y eventuritas. Les voy a seguir contando….