Intro
The sun was already hitting the curtains hard by 09:00, a massive change from the low, grey ceilings that followed me into Nasca. I hadn’t planned to be on the Panamericana anyways, and the front tires softness confirmed the decision and my brain felt even softer, so I stayed put at Edgardo’s to sort out the next nine days of desert.
Porridge and Python Scripts
- I started the morning slow, leaning into a bowl of porridge loaded with nuts, raisins, a sliced mango, and an orange. My legs were happy for the lack of movement, but my hands needed to work. I spent thirty minutes on the phone with my father in Romania, the signal holding steady enough to hear the familiar cadence of home before I dove into the logistics of the road ahead. Mapping the stretch to Arequipa is a puzzle of water and shelter; there are gaps where the desert offers absolutely nothing, but I’ve managed to carve out a nine-day itinerary that doesn’t involve sleeping behind a sand dune without a plan.
- By midday, the heat was settling into the room, and I shifted from route planning to the digital guts of the trip. I spent several hours wrestling with coding agents to fix the blogging and vlogging bots. I needed a scheduled approval feature for the blog—mostly so I don’t broadcast my exact overnight location in real-time for security. The vlogging bot was being stubborn about text length on the slides, so I reconfigured it to scroll anything longer than three lines. The biggest win was increasing the timeout for video uploads. On these slow Peruvian connections, the bot used to give up halfway through, but now it’ll wait patiently for the data to crawl across the wire. It felt like a productive grind, even if the only miles I covered were lines of Python.
The Search for Rubber and Adobo
- By 16:45, the hunger was sharp enough to pull me away from the screen. I left Edgardo’s and wandered into the Nasca streets, the air smelling of dust and exhaust. I was on a dual mission: find a spare tube and find a meal that didn’t involve a granola bar. The bike shop situation was bleak. I found one shop, but the shelves were sparse. They only had 27.5×2.2 tubes in stock, which are useless for my rims. I walked out empty-handed, realizing I’d have to rely entirely on my patching skills for the upcoming desert leg – didn’t want to use my last and only spare tube.
- The food search was more successful. I bypassed a dozen empty spots until I found a joint with a decent crowd—usually the only metric that matters. I ordered the caldo de gallina and the adobo de pavo. When the plate arrived, the heavy, vinegar-rich steam of the turkey adobo hit me immediately. It was my first time trying it, and the sauce was thick, dark, and carried a specific heat that stayed on the back of the tongue. I finished every scrap, then hit a small grocery store to grab wraps, tuna, and milk for tomorrow’s pancakes. Carrying the groceries back, the weight of the next nine days started to feel real.
The Messy Art of the Patch
- Back at the house, the atmosphere shifted. Edgardo is an astronomy professor, and his place acts as a sort of informal hub for passing cyclists. The living space became a communal workshop. I finally pulled the front tube out to face my first-ever self-patch. The rhythmic skrit-skrit of sandpaper on the rubber tube became the soundtrack of the evening as I prepped the puncture site. I could smell the sharp, chemical sting of the vulcanizing glue as I spread it over the wound. I was impatient; I didn’t wait for the glue to get tacky before I slapped the patch on. It was a disaster. The patch didn’t seat right, and the glue footprint was too small.
- I peeled it off, which was its own struggle, and tried again. This time I went overboard with the glue, creating a sticky, grey mess across the tube. The other cyclists in the room started chiming in with advice, turning it into a group project. Someone suggested a trick I hadn’t seen: using two flat pieces of plastic and a heavy-duty paperclip to clamp the patch down like a vise overnight. I spent ten minutes just pressing the rubber together with my thumbs before applying the clamp. While the tube ‘cured,’ I did a lazy cleaning of my chain and cogs using just a toothbrush and a rag. When I finally dared to remove the paperclip, the patch looked like it had actually bonded. I pumped it up, the hiss of air stopping as the seal held. It’s holding for now, but the real test comes when the weight of the bags hits the pavement.
Overnight
I’m staying at the home of Edgardo, an astronomy professor in Nasca. His house is a magnet for touring cyclists, making it a great spot to swap mechanical tips and route data over shared tools.
Reflection
A 27.5-inchx2.2 tube is not a substitute for a 27.5-inchx2.35 tube, and vulcanizing glue requires more patience than a hungry cyclist usually possesses.