We enjoyed breakfast and the view from our beautiful campsite that morning. When we were ready to leave, we enjoyed that it was mostly downhill at first, until we had to climb again under the heat of the sun but through absolutely beautiful nature. After our habitual second breakfast in a small town, where we bought some groceries too, we cycled on (mostly uphill) until we had lunch around 12:30 PM.

Once we found a nice spot for lunch, Göran realized that the can of drink that he bought had gotten punctured while cycling and spilled into the bag in which he had most of his valuables. Very frustrating! Luckily, the forum charger was still intact but as a result of this mishap our usual one-hour lunch break took two hours instead. While Göran took care of cleaning and drying his belongings, Jacques and I took a nap in the sun as there was not much else we could do to help Göran.

When everything was relatively dry, clean, and packed, we hit the road. And guess what? It went up for a change. Yes, that is sarcasm. We have been cycling up strenuous and long inclines multiple times a day and would continue doing so every day all the way to Samaipata and Santa Cruz. As the title suggests, we are still high up in the Andes, it’s just no longer as even as on the Andean plateau.

After we had reached the peak of our post-lunch climb and were cruising downhill, we were met by a pleasant surprise: a traffic jam on our side of the road due to a landslide that was blocking the road and would take a few hours to be cleared. No cars were allowed to pass.
Cyclists?
“Sure, why not. Just put on your helmets please.”
And so we did. We drove past the workers clearing the landslide (quite impressive to watch) and enjoyed a stretch of 17 km with the road entirely to ourselves. We had a blast! It was a nice feeling to cycle downhill like that because you didn’t have to worry about other traffic and therefore much safer too. We cycled until we reached Parotani. There, we were finally surrounded by vast amounts of lush, beautiful greenery.

After days of sleeping in the tent and washing ourselves with washcloths, we were very happy to finally stay in a hostal. Parotani isn’t very big so our hopes to find a hostel, let alone a nice one, were approaching zero. But to our surprise a new hostal had been built which was quite luxurious and we had the impression that we were the first inhabitants. After a delicious dinner, washing our clothes, and a nice shower (it was cold but at least it was a shower), we went into our comfortable beds and went to sleep.

distance cycled:
elevation gain:
Actual altitude:
time cycled: