the 23rd. Okay now the tricky bit, we are headed for the top. Set off at 8 and just ground up hill past normal agriculture and into an arid area with tiny farmsteads with vast distances between them. tough hopeful Creased little hangers on battling against the odds. And us just getting shorter and shorter of breath. Up into the mining Village of Pachapaque . I was so relieved to find that there were rooms that we could stay in I said yes to a rogue with a hovel and found there was a so much nicer place in the Village proper not just on the road and we kissed goodbye to his fee and stayed in a room off a family Courtyard with a friendly but financially Savvy old bird . we wandered the very weird streets. Sheep goats chicken Etc .Peru is very much to do with mining. Almost everywhere was the sound of detonations in the mountains. it is much more interwoven with General Life and culture than I thought. The average villager will go and find let’s say green rocks drill into them and blast them out and pile them by the side of the road to be carted off by their mates in Lorries.There are also medium and larger and the vast Mines all selling the good rock. the 24th.
After this point there was no excuse we set off very early and had to be over the top by 3 to lose altitude fast before going to sleep . there was no where to sleep after this and camping at that altitude would have been not been an option . no question of Just cycling. Any Forward Motion was an effort. Loud tinnitus, headaches, eyeball ache. holding your breath to take a photo requiring 20 seconds of panting and chest pain to get back to normal . if a lorry came past throwing up dust you just had to gasp it in. Even up to 200 yards from the top we weren’t quite sure if we could get there. we got to the top at 4300m at 2:30 . no one else there. No signs to tell us the altitude. No Scenic stopping points. Just panting and changing into our warm clothes because after that it was freewheeling with the seat dropped and Frozen hands braking until as the light just started to go we cruised into the town of Huallanunca to book into a fortified hostal with children at the desk. When we went out to look for food we met a Peruvian American miner who had to be there for a year working on a mine called Santa Luisa which produced silver and zinc not gold in this case. He had had his children from Miami over to see that roots. They had hated it. I forgot to mention the fossilized trees and dinosaur footprints going over the top .They weren’t really a priority with us at the time. Haullanunca was like coming into another world. it had a brass band playing and chicken spit roasting all over the place and people enjoying themselves in a frontier kind of way. We had Jugo de Pina which is wizzed up pineapple for breakfast.
the 25th. Then down and down through deep overhanging Cuts in the rock over roads that have collapsed and been swept away where we met a nice electrical engineer logging the telegraph posts as they were going to widen the road (a lot of which didn’t exist at the moment) we told him what we were doing and he said how old are you . we have also had gringo your hair is standing up and always Gringo what country to which we reply inglaterra Man U Liverpool but we could reply Tarmac. we have had a couple of via papa which literally that means I wish you liefe old man. So then the downhill stretch ran out and we climbed through the afternoon to La Union .we stopped early and found a large Bedded but cold hostal run by the prettiest girl who appeared to just sort of exist in a single room and come out whenever you knocked on her door. The reason for the stop was to go and see the Inca ruins of Huanco viejo where it was so high and defensible that the Incas lasted there for a further two hundred years after the Spanish Conquest. the remnants of a powerful Empire gradually realizing it was all over for them. It was a largish town with high altar , Garrison and all that stuff, thousands of round houses on I totally remote High plateau of enormous size. They have just finished a paved Road up there but now there was only a tiny village at the top and perhaps six other people looking around in the setting of great Serenity which was now about to change. The agricultural system that was still there being used felt Inca. The rectilinear high mud walls that separated the fieldshad enormous driveways between them every three fields that just felt as they were there for some distant reason that had been long forgotten and was too Grand to be practical. we walked for an hour or so with our new found friends who are single mothers on a day out then quote a Colectivo and we walked to the edge of the plateau and halfway down before we realized that we were running out of light and it was starting to rain. Thumbed a ride with two footballers we’d passedplaying on the plateau earlier.