Our descent into Tarata a couple days ago had started at an utterly-barren pass at nearly 16,000 ft., and the landscape remained dry and arid the whole way down, until we hit a section of green irrigated terraces that started just a few miles above Tarata. I had assumed that this anomalous patch was the… Read more…

Camping inside the stone hut at Calachaca Hot Spring worked just as well as we’d hoped. Perhaps some of its relative-warmth last evening was due to the sun’s energy stored in the stone walls, because by morning it had dropped to 34°F at the head of our tent, which has near the open doorway. But… Read more…

For the second ride of our 5-ride final crossing of the Peruvian Andes, we were again up at 4am, cooking breakfast inside our masonry-block motel room, which had held enough of the previous day’s sun to remain a comfortable 55°F inside. That’s “comfortable” relative to the 28°F that it was outside, which itself didn’t even… Read more…

For months we have been (on average) heading southeast through Peru, drawing an arrow that points toward Bolivia. But Bolivia doesn’t particularly want American citizens to visit for some reason, and that in turn (along with the weather, road, and economic conditions of Bolivia) negatively-polarized our interest in visiting down to zero. So instead, we… Read more…

Like Cusco, Puno has a multi-modal road corridor built within just the last couple years, though instead of running alongside the airport like in Cusco, it runs along the shore of Lake Titicaca, effectively a brand-new “Lake Shore Drive”. That meant it was even easier getting out of Peru’s 21st-biggest city than it was getting… Read more…

Today would be the real test of the Juliaca-avoiding route that we and our temporary Italian friends were attempting. Although we’d had a big hill to climb after we left the main highway yesterday, it was a relatively-short section mileage-wise, while today the entire route would be “off the (car) beaten track”, including a 10-mile… Read more…