Puerto Lopez to Puerto Lopez, Ecuador

Not a lot to report today – we spent the day on bike maintenance, laundry, internet stuffs, and telephone calls.

We needed to clean and lube the chains which John did without incident. He also fixed Dan’s turns signal from the little mishap in the parking lot a few days ago and there were a handful of other little things to tweak and make sure were tight.

We’ve also been carrying our broken shift levers since they failed about 3 weeks ago – seems like ages. Well, we figured they could be welded if we could find a good welder and we would have some spares again. The owner of the hostel said there was a welder dude about 5 blocks away – (“soldura” in spanish) – we wandered around the town talking to auto parts stores and bike repair places looking for some parts we could bolt to the shift levers to make things work but no luck. Eventually we ended up at the welding place… Unfortunately we forgot the camera – but hopefully you can use your imagination here – the shop was just a roof over a fairly large space with maybe 7 or 8 tools – a couple of welding machines that were wired to the wall using what looked like left over wire. The welder guy was excited to fix our levers – and “no problem” he could fix them… Dan was a bit skeptical after looking at the equipment but we went ahead. The first one worked out pretty well as we guided him to just “tack” them in 4 places and he didn’t really pay attention but the weld looked like it would work. The second one didn’t go so well – he tried to get it done too quickly and the result was that he completely melted the aluminum part of the linkage… he felt bad but we laughed because its happened to us before – paid him his fee, a dollar! and we went home with one “working” spare shift lever.

The laundry went smoothly – we turned our clothes in to a laundry service and we washed our riding gear ourselves. Putting it out in the equatorial sun to dry which took about 20 minutes.

Spent several hours fighting with the Internet trying to get the blogs updated, emails and all that – had a nice dinner and a couple beers…. off to bed, we ride in the morning – I think we’ll go south this time.

Cheers.