Chris writes:
I am probably writing this blog from the best of our blog writing locations – more to come on that shortly.
Last night we walked the streets of Camana which when you know where to look is a fascinating small town. Among the market stalls were the hairdressing street that John sampled and shoe repair alley that I took advantage of to have some maintenance work completed on my trusty trainers (will they last 5 more weeks?) We passed hardware, ladies underwear, electrical repairs and grain stores, we found the most amazing food market and started sampling various bits but elected to eat at Chicken Willy’s who served guess what, Chicken [breast actually]
We retired by 9.30 pm having drank copious amounts of………..water in preparation for our change in altitude the following day. Suffice to say that Camara didn’t let us sleep and provided an extremely noisy firework display somewhere around 11.00pm followed by hours of horn tooting and then car alarms set off by trucks and buses whose exhausts emitted decibels far above what they were designed for.
So, up and on the road by 7.45 am, only 150 miles today to Cabanaconde, probably some 55 miles on a good ‘A’ road and then around 70 miles on a smaller road and the final 50 on a reasonable road – simple day.
As we turned off the ‘A’ road we filled the tank, we do this now before we drop below half way as the beast drinks massive amounts and has chasers when we climb. Immediately we hit a loose surface road and then started to climb through amazing scenery as we progressed into the territory dominated even more by the Andes mountains.
Our highest altitude on the trip so far has been 11,700 feet in Ecuador but we knew we would probably exceed that today before dusk.
Then, the ‘challenge trip’ similar to events on TopGear presented us with a white envelope which stated today’s challenge was to change a punctured wheel / Tyre on our ‘Two Ton Tessie’ whilst at 10,500 feet and promptly our rear near side tyre expired.
However good team work [by some while others posed and spectators looked on]
and 22 minutes later, yes I know we won’t make an F1 pit lane crew, we were on the road again, very dusty, thirsty but thankfully not suffering from any ill effects of the altitude that we had performed the task at.
Quite an eerie and lonely feeling being on the side of a gravel road at 10,500 feet. While we were working changing the wheel only 4 vehicles past us, none stopped to enquire if we were Ok. Was it because they had seen the Bolivian licence plate or that we obviously looked to be not from these parts.
On the remainder of the journey on the loose track we saw two bikers, one mini bus and believe or not a fifty seater coach , what challenge are we on compared to others daily lives.
What is the relevance of the title of today’s blog? I hear you ask, well, thanks for asking, it is because the 2019 event of the infamous Dakar rally is to be held entirely in Peru. There is no doubt that we have seen distant cart tracks and cattle trails that these guys will use on the event, it felt today that we were in the preparation stage for something bigger – we will talk about that later
We pressed on along an extremely twisty road with varying scenery and hit a peak altitude of 13,910 feet smashing our prior record (but that will be beaten tomorrow).
That altitude didn’t cause us any problems, but there is no way any of us will go for a run, fast walk or take on any other exercise because it is obvious that we will be negatively impacted. We will pray tonight that we don’t have to change another tyre at an even higher altitude.
Eventually we came off of the loose surface road, and got onto a well surfaced, but narrow and tight twisty road but with the most sensational backdrop.
We arrived into the small village of Cabanaconde and to a small hotel that was very interesting, unusual and ‘earthy’ but has the most sensational views from where to write this blog.
It’s late afternoon, we all agree that it has been another great day on the challenge drive and could even rate in the top five days so far.
Probably an early night again, gallons of water(and yes we have to stop regularly to eject it), tomorrow we find a puncture repair shed, fuel up probably twice and tackle the next 190 miles as we head into Condor land and hit Lake Titicaca by dusk.
Our America’s Challenge Drive 