ODO: 328,304
Its day #2 on the 3N. This road is all adventure. We go from 9100ft to 7100ft and back again, with a river crossing in the middle. We get turned around by a bridge that’s out. We battle the mud, the fog, the elevation, motorcycles with no headlights. Twists, and turns, and lots of construction. Someday, this road will be a super highway, but that day is a long way off. The really thick fog settles on us around 5:30pm, making the road even more intense. And just as we are getting tired, our turn off to camp arrives. It’s more adventure than the road we drove all day. Steeper, muddier, rockier, water crossings, and somehow, foggier. Not to mention it’s a little used shelf road for most of the way. The goal, and there is no back up at this point, is a hot spring. The parking/camping area is a mud pit with large puddles everywhere, but otherwise quiet. We are too tired to care, so we set up and get quickly into bed. We’ll look for the hot spring in the morning.
It’s still raining heavily in the morning. We’re up early to try and beat the fog, but the fog is up earlier than we are. The road drops below the clouds shortly so we start to get some views. Our first adventure of the day is a large fresh landslide that has deposited a gigantic rock into the middle of the road. Nuts. We don’t have the tools to fix this. Because the road is currently under construction, a road crew truck shows up and they call in the big equipment. On our way again, we drop from 10,000ft to 7000ft into an insane canyon. Varied rock formations and lots of colors of rock line the edges of a very angry, very muddy river. We wind our way along for a couple of hours before we start the climb to camp. After yesterday, the canyon bottom was a nice break from the slippery shelf road. The climb up to camp puts us back on a narrower, windier, sketchier shelf road. At least there is no fog. But it does start to rain on the way up, making the road even slipperier. We’re in and set up before dark for once! Cozied into the tent we hear small to medium landslides all around us, and hope none of them will close the road.
Finally a warm and dry morning! Before hitting the road we need to do something about the squealers on our brakes. And by something, i mean we brake them off. Don’t worry, we have new brake pads meeting us in Lima. Our drive back down into the canyon was not as bad as we thought it was going to be, but we did drive through a few fresh landslides. The bottom of the canyon is where we spend most of our day, passing by all of the small coal mines. We pass a couple of large waterfalls, and are surprised when the angry river ends in a raging dam. Out of the canyon, it’s resupply time! This is where we learn that Peruvian grocery stores don’t always sell produce. Or meat. Or dairy. Or any fresh food. Heck, not even canned veggies! Since our resupply was not the best, we stop for some food, our first Peruvian food! We have amazing potatoes, tough but tasty steak, and too salty ham. Then we head into the Huascaran national park for the night. The fog is hiding most of the peaks, but when they poke through the fog they look pretty epic. It’s 31 degrees here, and we are so happy about our heater.
Our morning view is a beautiful mountain lake. Good start. We clean the mud off our windows, as we do most morning, so if there are views to be had we can have them! Our camp spot is ringed by waterfalls, we count thirteen while we pack up. Our drive starts by heading up into a cloud, all the way up to the 15,400ft summit. The other side of the summit has thicker clouds, so we take a coffee break, hoping they will clear. We get medium clearing. Our loop takes us to the other side side of the park, the next valley to the south. We tuck into a small spot above two lakes for the night. Berne has an idea about what our electrical gremlin may be, and checks the tightness of our battery cables. It turns out they were so loose, it was like they had never been tightened in the first place. Oops. Hopefully this helps. Our Peruvian work friend advises us to build an Apacheta for good luck in the mountains. Essentially a small Carine as an offering to the mountain spirits, so obviously we build one immediately. It’s very cold up here with the wind and altitude, but our heater is a champ, and has no problems with the altitude at all! Today was a short driving day, so hopefully we do a little recovering tonight.
When you try to sleep at 15,000ft, that’s mostly what you do…try. The thin air makes consistent sleep very difficult, and we both suffer. But we did wake up to a fresh blanket of snow, which makes everything better. The sky’s on this side of the park are extremely clear! We have all of the views of all of the peaks and glaciers, it’s perfect and extremely dramatic, like all of Peru has been. Once we exit the park it’s time to try this grocery thing again. We discover the open air market is where the fresh food lives, so we stock up before heading out into yet more different mountain passes. But alas, a landslide turns us around late enough in the day that we head back into town for a hotel night. For the first time on our trip, we pull back the covers to find mouse poop in the bed. Not a great start. The staff is very quick to strip and remake the entire bed for us, and make sure everything else is right in our room. And because we are at a reasonable 9000ft we sleep quite well.
More different mountains! The plan is to drive another mountain loop that was recommend to us, but when we arrive the gate is closed. Weather reports say there will be lighting, and another person, turned away by the park ranger, says lighting = mucha muerte (much death). And he’s right. When you’re on a mountain, above tree line, and lighting rolls in, that’s a really bad place to be. While we are deciding where to go instead, the park ranger walks over and says if we don’t go on any hikes, and just drive straight through the park, we can enter. Wooo! Extra danger mountain road here we come! We mostly listen, we do not hike to the glacier. We do, however, take a small, easy to miss, side road deeper and higher into the park. It leads to an extremely remote campsite next to a lake, but we don’t stay. It also has wild llamas on it! After our side trip, we made good on our promise and head out of the park. The backside of our loop takes us past a lake that was full of flamingos. Everyone is pretty excited about this. Then the fog rolls in. We make it to camp by feel again, well after dark. What we first thought was a bat, turned out to be a small bird trying to join us in the tent. It clung to the window screen for quite a while before returning to the night.
Wow we sleep well below 10,000ft! Feeling refreshed, we finish this road down to the coast. We wind through a canyon that looks like parts of Zion and general neat Utah rock formations. The coast is dusty, and brown and windy. The sand is sharp and angry, blowing sideways. There is a dunes area, so hoping for shelter we start exploring, and come up empty. Well after dark, again, we turn tail and head back into town for another hotel. No mouse poop in this one.
Leave a Reply