Inca Avalanche

After Machu Picchu, I slept for five hours then jumped on the 5:35am train to get back to Ollantaytambo for the Inca Avalanche race. I am not a downhill bike rider. I ride my bike down hills, yes, but I do not normally get taxi'd up a mountain or take a ski lift to get to the top of a trail. But I mentioned to KB, the organizer of the race that I was interested in checking out bike trails in the area before and after the race, he convinced me to participate in the race. Amateurs, kids, females and non-serious riders are going to be in it. "It'll be fun!" he assured me. Also, because the roads to Machu Picchu get partially closed during the competition, he needed to get as many foreigners to participate to placate the politicians to show that this is a worthy race to keep having.

I arrived into town, surprisingly pumped up for this race.  I had really low expectations for this- in fact I expected to place last or towards the bottom of the list. On the bus ride up, I was surrounded by teenagers and early 20-somethings. We would catch glimpses of where the trail crosses the road, which was no comfort to me - there were some serious drops! We got dropped off close to the summit of the road, and they instructed us to go up towards the top of the mountain.  Snow was in front of me, but at least we were not riding in snow.

just like my helmet, I approached the race half-cocked

Though the day before was supposed to be a qualifying day to determine what order people were to start the race, it really didn't happen. Everyone just got together at the starting line and started all at once- tearing down the hill towards the road and bottleneck into the first trail.

I was already at the end of the pack even before crossing the first road. Everyone was going a different direction, and of course, I chose the worst path, flipping my bike over a bump. I turned to another rider and told her, "this is going to be a long ride."  By the time I crossed the second road, I was one of the last five riders, and had already started walking my bike across certain drops on the trail. As I hit the third road (by the way, it's all the same road, it just cuts over the race course), and looked down at the next steep drop, I decided to take the road for a little bit.

This move turned out to be a bad decision, for the fact that for this detour, instead of going a half kilometer on the trail, I biked three kilometers on the road. I made another decision to just buck up and take the trails for the remainder of the course.  The trail started to getting flatter, though I still had moments of walking down some drops

On a couple occasions when the course crossed onto the road, I would miss the next trail marker. Usually, the course would jump across the road to the next trail, but these few times, the course was on the road for a turn or two. Because I did not have the benefit of trailing other riders to see where they were going, I would start thinking that I must have missed the trail marker and had to continue on until the next crossover. The only other reason that I could have missed a trail marker was that once on the road, I would pick up so much speed, that I would miss the marker. The marker was either just an arrow spray painted on the road or else some colored plastic ribbon on a shrub that could just be mistaken for a random piece of trash that got caught on the branch.


When I finally got down to the finish line, the final bus to take bikes and bikers up had already left. I really wasn´t disappointed. It was rough going down because of the constant braking and squeezing of the handles. And I am glad that I made it through with all bones intact and only a minor cut along my ankle (I think it was from contact with my high gear on the crank. Though I did not get confirmation about my placement, I can only believe that I finished last in the race. I did not see any other rider cross the line after me.

my only casualty

 

 

The finish line was in the village four kilometers from Ollantaytambo and had una fiesta giganta.  Food stands, beer and chicha were everywhere for a one block stretch. Chicha is an alcoholic beverage made of fermented corn. The traditional method to make chicha is to chew up the corn kernals and spit it out into a container. The saliva triggers the fermentation and the result is a sour, not sweet, beverage that gets a sprinkle of cinnamon. Nowadays, people just boil the corn to make chicha, instead of using spit. Or at least, that is what they are telling us.

a glass of chicha the night before the race

My first taste of chicha was by accident- I wanted fruit juice to drink with my meal, but got this instead, not knowing it had alcohol in it. It was pink in color, why would it be alcoholic? [by the way, it can also be yellow] The initial sourness was made harsher because I didn´t expect to taste sour. Then it started to grow on me, but I still couldn´t get past the sourness and did not even finish it. It was a large glass and I didn´t really like it enough to drink more than half.

Maybe a month passed since that initial drink. The day before the bike race, my roommate told me that there was alcohol in it and that just blew my mind. Had I known there was booze in it, I would have finished it at the restaurant. I found the best way to drink this stuff is to chug as quickly as possible. This way, there is less time dealing with the sourness.