Vilcabamba, Ecuador

Key pieces of gear have been left along the route in a Hansel-and-Gretel-trail of expensive, electronic, sentimental, or mechanical bread, but the items that we´ve managed to retain now hold significant importance in our daily routine. Take, for example, the tube of toothpaste named Melissa. She cleanses our sardine-laden palettes before crawling into the tent at 8:00 and freshens our morning breath at 7:00 after an exhausting eleven-hour sleep. But if Melissa is unavailable at hygiene hour, there´s a red salt-paste that substitutes quite well. After cleaning-up to a bearable degree, we wiggle into our respective nylon enclosures, at which point the Dutch oven turns on, bearing no relation to our Dutch companion. The remnants of our pasture-camping incident can be sensed immediately upon entering, soon to be overpowered by the fumes emitted by our stench-incubating sleeping bags. If the weather outside requires our shoes to be inside, mine serve as the topnote to this active concoction.

Kickstands have also become a hallowed item, conjuring memories of our first ten-speeds that we found standing proudly at the foot of our beds at Christmas-time. Jockeying our massive rigs into position along a busy street with gusting winds can be difficult without the aid of a third point of contact. Soren wisely anticipated this before leaving home, an act which I dutifully, humbly, thankfully followed. The topic never came up in pre-trip conversations with Sven, but since then, we have talked about it daily. The quest for equipping Sven´s bike was delayed due to an unfavorable result in a rock-paper-scissors game in which I won priviledges to the one kickstand we found in Cuenca, after I had broken mine the night before. Not to be defeated, Sven found another one the next day and for the first time, we were all displaying our bicycles, hands-free, with a cocked front wheel. But not for long. Later that night as we were setting up camp on an overgrown side-road, Soren deployed his kickstand and snapped it off, and again, we were like an untrained troop of misaligned soldiers. But not for long. The next town we came to had industrial-strength, Japanese-made, steel kickstands. Yes, steel kickstands, not to be destroyed by a careless kick. Now, our bikes stand as proud as the off-brands displayed in the toy aisle at department stores. If only they were equally as shiny.