26th. Breakfast from old lady on the street . Pané con huevos and Susie declined the fermented Quinoia juice and then was Furious with herself . We climb through eucalyptus forests which really do clear your nose. We love you calyptus -the smell of burning eucalyptus is the most delicious wood smoke smell. Mostly logs split by hand but also long thin branches having their bark stripped off to make joists for houses and Scaffolding poles. Climb and climb and overcook it in the evening and when we asked in a local tiny village in the gloam where we can camp we are offered the local football pitch which is concrete and which has a game going on on it. We set up on the edge and have supper on The Terraces and I play awfully with a keen five-year-old who is a new best friend. The town crapper is at the top of a scrabbling climb and is two beams not boards quite a long way appart over a vat of shit. Kind of concentrates the mind. The game winds down, the light Fades and a group of lads are lying around and chatting and when they leave we try and make the compound dog proof as lots of them are all shagging constantly which involves all the unsuccessful males beating hell out of each other . all night. So we slide off to sleep to the sound of females having sex, a mixture of surprise and pain, not really barks, dominant males being dominant and also rans doing ouch that really hurt style Yelps. all night.
27.
The little boy comes to help pack up of the tent. He is a very bright boy and he LOVED our camping equipment. Meanwhile his mum kept an eye on him and did a little threshing with a friend before dragging him off to school.
Dirt roads swooped down to a river all morning and we met our first touring cyclist ,an optimistic and obviously very fast Canadian. Then on varied and awful roads it just kept going down through many mighty roadworks. Building a road in Peru is monumentally hard. The slopes are just too steep. In Peru there are always explosives going off in mines in the hills and there are always road works. And enormous bulldozers in every village. Rocks are always falling off the mountains and onto the roads. And roads are always falling off the mountains. Most of the houses are made of oversized mud bricks and as well as having clumps of Maize and drying carcuses hanging from the eaves they also often have enormous cracks down the side of them . Everything seems to be slowly moving down the mountain. So all the surfaces get churned up.
Susie had stopped in front of me and I saw that on one of her panniers she had a massive brown and yellow delta wing moth with great bushy antennaie which was probably 5in across. One side of the road was pretty much always lethal with a drop or a hell of a drop to it. Looking down one Cliff we found a freshly crushed big Lorry which had obviously gone over there that morning . Winding ups and downs made way for steady uphill until we were both ready to drop : at which point a little red Chinese made motorcycle come truck offered us a lift. We shared the back with a dark Peruvian farmer and I had to do sidecar style balancing swaying from side to side with the bends as there was nowhere to sit down. He really saved our bacon because the Summit was much further than we had thought. We should have learned by now. The High platteau was a really alien desolate place with the Tiny Town of Santa Rosa at the end. This was one of the Perpetual down Hills on the road I’m not going fast through Road works after the roadworks. As we descended the dust on the road made it more and more difficult to steer straight on. We realized we weren’t going to make Huanuco and camped next to a river with permission, but not from everybody and a farmer sees or hears us and is trying to find us with a powerful torch which made us feel rather fugitive, rather spy drama. There were wonderful flying glow worms around the river fringe which turned off and on in Flight which we thought at first was other people with torches. Spooky . Almost hot in the tent with the distant Rumble of Lorries going by.