(Written 11/01 @ 11PM) This was supposed to be Ayacucho to Andahualyes (I don't have my notes in front of my so I'm sure I butchered this) but problems with Rob & Will again delayed us.
We started the morning by grabbing our mototaxis from the parking and driving over to the mechanic street. Knowing it was a Sunday we didn't expect to find anyone open, but we wanted to replace our tubes and get some spare chain. Luckily we found someone who was open and spent the next few hours working on the mototaxis. We changed the oil on both and got heavy duty chains put on Rob & Will's (I took my heavy duty chains as a spare). While all this was going on I wandered all over trying to find a cajero automatico (ATM) to get cash, what a pain… eventually I was able to pay though.
We hit the road and were rocking it out quite well for an hour or two when Rob & Will started to have problems with their mototaxi – it just didn't seem to go very well, they were having to nearly redline first gear to get up hills I was doing in low RPM's in third. After awhile they decided to turn around and head back down to Ayacucho to have a mechanic look at it, but then I managed to talk them out of it – it still worked, just not as smoothly as the others. So we loaded a bunch of their gear into mine and Rob spent awhile riding with me to lessen the weight on theirs.
This was then followed by hours upon hours of amazing beautiful roads, first climbing up to over 4500 meters then riding the tops of the mountain full of beautiful fields and amazing views. We saw packs of wild horses wandering the hill sides as well as many domestic sheep and cows while riding through the dirt. This was also the least travelled road we've been on so far, multiple times we went 30+min (the record was I think just over an hour) without seeing anyone.
Heading down towards Ocros the road turned into pure twisty insanity… dropping from 4,500 meters to 2,000 meters down the side of the mountain is apparently quite complex. We arrived in Ocros after this awesome challenge and found out we were still six hours from Andehuayles – and it was nearing 6PM. Upon finding out that the next big town was Chincheros and was three hours drive away, we decided to head on and do some night driving… with thunderstorms flashing lightning all around us…
Within a few minutes of leaving Ocros it was dark, but this time we had intense flashes of lightning to keep us company beyond our own lights. This is creepy. If you can imagine barreling quite fast down a dirt road weaving back and forth with dangerous turnarounds and random flashing illumination of cliffs, trees, gorges, or other oddities then you can imagine what this was like. It was an incredible experience but very dangerous!
On the plus side, it didn't rain on us too much and we got to Chincheros safe! I tried to use the internet here but it was so slow (only one connection for the town apparently?) and I gave up. We grabbed some snacks and ate then made plans to head towards Abancay tomorrow. If we can make it, that's the plan.
Sadly I found out that my "emergency" water bottle cracked and spilled water all inside my backpack, and my spare gas can leaked a bit as well and spilled gas over some of it also. Ugh. On the plus side, I've gone two days now with no really bad mechanical problems so my babying of the ride seems to be paying off!
I have some awesome video from the last couple days, hope I can figure out an easy way to post it!
Comments