I mentioned last time that we had a disaster on the way to Huanuco.
As we were going through the town of El Union, about half way through our day's journey, there was an almighty scraping sound, followed by a shattering sound and then the sound of metal hitting the floor. I was hopeful that we'd just skidded on big bit of gravel, but with the back wheel completely jammed Tom knew it was something a lot bigger.
Looking down we saw that our rear brake plate had shattered, with two pieces back on the road and one wedged under the brake arm. With a little coercion we had the 3 shattered pieces in hand, and a half empty brake plate on the bike.
At this point I had all kinds of panicked thoughts running through my head - this did not seem like the kind of town to have a hotel and we could tell by the stares it was another town not much visited by tourists.
But Tom, uncharacteristically calm for such a situation, stopped a couple of passers-by and asked if there was a place that did soldering nearby. As it happened there was one not even 100m up the road - we could see it from where we were.
So we limped up there to see if they could help. They didn't seem to think anything of it, saying they could certainly get it welded for us. So Tom took off the rear wheel to access the brake plate and dismantled it, handing them the bit that needed putting back together.
While this was going on, a little lady came out of the mechanic shop (which was ironically named 'El Gringo') and gave me not one, but two bowls of food! So I sat there happily munching away, taken aback by the kindness and generosity of this lady who quite clearly had very little, while Tom slaved away getting our bike fixed.
The man took our shattered brake plate off in his van, while we sat in the shade and contemplated the day's events. An hour later he returned, the plate all in one piece, and asked for thirty soles for his troubles (that's ten US dollars!). We'd attracted a lot of attention from local people, many of whom stopped to see what on earth we were doing, plus had some fun banter working with the mechanics. This absolute disaster had ended up being one of the best tales of our trip so far.
We think what caused it was the combination of dirt roads and frequently crossing small streams - the dust builds up behind the brake plate, and once you add a bit of water it starts to roll up into a ball that later solidifies into a small stone. It gets bigger and bigger until it manages to shatter aluminium!
Again we'd found ourselves in an extremely lucky situation - had this happened even five minutes before or after the town, or heaven forbid up in the mountains where we'd been for most of the day, this would have been a whole different story. But a combination of excellent timing and helpful-as-ever locals meant that we were back on the road in just over two hours.
Two hours was nothing in terms of the enormity of what had happened, but was a significant amount of time when we had so many kilometres still to cover.
Unfortunately there were only the tiniest of towns between El Union and Huanuco, so we had no choice but to push for our original destination. Tom also wasn't comfortable using the rear brake yet with it so recently reconstructed, so we had to watch our speed with only the front brake to slow us down.
As the road quality decreased, so did the light, and we were soon riding through the hills on severely pot-holed paving in the pitch dark with no back brake. But we made it, as we keep managing to do, and decided we'd stay two nights after the day's fiasco. But the hotel only had one night free (it was coming up to a weekend) and we weren't going to go traipsing around to find another, so we settled on one night for recovery.
We ventured out into the absolutely hectic Huanuco (it reminded me a bit of Khao San Road in Bangkok) for some dinner, settled on chicken and chips, and got an early night to prepare us for another long day of riding.
Thankfully our next day's ride went almost without a hitch, aside from having to wait in a queue of traffic for twenty minutes while a running race passed on by. The road took us up onto vast plains where the roads were poker straight, and we passed tiny town after tiny town interspersed with vast herds of grazing alpacas.
We arrived into Huancayo in the daylight, and had a very lame but very enjoyable evening in the brand new shopping plaza, treating ourselves to an Earl Grey from Starbucks and admiring the cleanliness and shininess of it all. A quick rest then off to Ayacucho in the morning!