Now the fun begins…. after the morning stop at the museum with the mummies we continued south on ruta 8B. This was a day of highs and lows but mostly highs as we climbed up and over two mountain ranges. Here is the elevation plot for the day.

The first half of the day was spent climbing towards almost 12,000 feet. The road started paved with beautiful vistas of the green foothills.

After a while the road was still technically “paved” but the quality was diminishing.

The scenery was outstanding everywhere we looked.

We topped out at Calla Calla pass 11,811 feet. Whew feeling the thin air for sure. I managed to place one of our stickers under the last letter A.

You can see the road to get there behind Deby, nothing but fun and light traffic.

We had to pull over a few times to take pictures of the stunning views. We were higher than some of the surrounding mountain ranges.

Complete awe about the rock outcroppings.

You can barely see the river and road on the other side, that is where we were going. Switch backs down, cross the river (bridge optional) and then switchback up. That would be the theme for the next four days.

We were lucky, we had fantastic weather and riding in an area that is usually totally in the clouds and fog in the rainy season. I took many many pictures. Here is one short video to give you an idea of the area.

One more photo for the day. One of the few places with a guard rail where I felt safe stopping for a picture.

Up in the mountains of Peru there are only small towns and no such thing as hotels.com, booking.com or Expedia. We arrived in the town of Celendin and saw a place that looked nice, Hotel Madrid. For $15USD we had a nice room, secure parking and hot water. We must have been tired because neither of us took any pictures. Distance for the day: 149 miles, moving time, just under seven hours. Average moving speed: 21.8 miles per hour. Wow, that is slow going.

The road gets rough

Ruta 3N cuts a path generally north and south through the Andes mountains. The section south of Celendin was clearly not the main route and soon there was no busses, then no trucks, then no tuk tuks then hardly any animals and pretty soon no solid road. We spent the day picking through rocky, pot holed, steep and loose terrain. It was hard work as once again we were climbing up over 10,000 feet and then steep rocky downhills to cross a river with no bridge. My legs were burning standing on the pegs for much of it.

Many of the names of the cities in the mountains end with the suffix -bama. I blew past this sign on a steep switchback and wanted to stop for a picture. Served me right for making fun of their city. I was trying to make a steep off camber U-turn and my front wheel hit a hole and the bike tipped over. Ugggg. No damage was done to me or my bike, only my pride. For the first time we proved that Deby and I could hoist up the 600+ pound motorcycle fully loaded. I stomped back and took the picture, dusted off my pride and we rode on.

It’s a sign how rough a day it was that I only took a few pictures. We arrived in the small city of Huamachuco and had enough cell signal to find a hotel called Hotel Mama Wasi. When we arrived it was totally dark, closed? Open? I called the number posted on the door and soon our host came to let us in. Dark? Yes, the power was out but don’t worry this happens all the time. He showed us to our parking spot where we had to jump the curb and jam into a narrow space between buildings. It was tight but the bikes fit.

Here is what it looked like in real life.

Both the downhill and uphill parts had some short paved sections. For some strange reason the straight sections tended to be paved and the hairpin curves were all rutted gravel. At the bottom where we crossed the river there was construction but no bridge. I left the camera off as we managed one of the tougher rocky deep water crossings.

As we started down the hill I turned on my camera. We came to our first pavement all day and were ecstatic. Too bad it was short lived….

Here is the road looking back before we started dropping down.

In eight hours we travelled 133 miles, not even a tank of gas. Completely spent we arrived at the mountain top village of Pallasera where we dutifully rode into the small town square, parked our bikes and looked around for lodging. Nothing online, nada.

Hmmm, this place looked promising.

We banged on the door and a young woman appeared. We negotiated our rate (about $10 USD) and we had a room. See that block by the curb in front of the door? That is where we rode the motorcycles into the inner courtyard. It took some maneuvering but we eventually got the bikes parked.

So, they only had rooms with two beds… ok I guess but sleeping apart is something we rarely do. The window was missing a few of the glass panes and didn’t really close tight anyhow. Remember, we were over 10,000 feet in the mountains and for most of the last few nights the rooms didn’t have heat. We were glad for thick blankets.

What more could we want???

It was only a short walk down these steep stairs to the bathroom and shower. Surprisingly, I had a nice hot shower but I didn’t like the nighttime bathroom run very much.

A few feet away was another hotel and restaurant. We didn’t stay there because I couldn’t figure out where there might be parking but we went to the restaurant.

We walked inside just as the sun was going down. The restaurant is on a cliff and we had a great view and a pretty good meal.

Before we left the hotel for dinner we asked how to open the locked outside door when we returned. Oh, no problem pull the string!

We were tired and slept pretty well bundled under layers of blankets. In the morning we returned to the restaurant with a view to get caffeinated and fed before starting the process to remove the bikes from the courtyard. We could go out another door shown here. Why didn’t we go in that way???

I like this picture because you can see how steep all the streets are. It took awhile to leave town because the woman wasn’t tall enough to reach the top latch. When I walked over to open it the door almost fell off the hinges. Arrg. We got the bikes out one by one and then they asked if I could help them re-assemble the door. I pounded with some rocks and pulled and pushed and finally got the door back on and latched. Hopefully they don’t need to use that very often.

Another crazy thing happened next….. we couldn’t find out way out of town! Seriously. Garmin, Guru and Google were all confused on which way to go. The streets were narrow and very steep cobblestones. We found out that many of them turn into stairways! People were yelling for us to turn around and trying to point the way out of town. I think it took at least a half hour to properly exit the town. Whew, what a start to the day.