B
ack on the main road things weren’t much better. Instead of slippery mud there was just
huge pot holes. I’m not even sure they can be called potholes, they were just straight up
holes. The road was a mud/clay base and clearly gets large depressions from the transport
trucks that drive the route regularly. By this time my rear rack was broken, my chain was
stretched and falling off and my rear suspension was broken so I was trying to take it easy on
the bumps but it basically felt like I was riding a pogo stick. I cringed every time I went through
a hole. For once we were one of the slowest moving vehicles on the road, slowly plodding
along in first gear switching from the right side of the road to the left side of the road to find
the flattest parts. There were no flat parts but there was less deep holes. It took us almost two
hours to reach the first town, Aricapampa, where we found a welder to fix my rear rack.
After Aricapampa the road was civilized and my rear rack was secure so we were able to
open the bikes up a bit. We were slowly descended down the mountain range and as we got
lower everything was drying out. We said goodbye to roadside eucalyptus and hello to cacti
and dust. I have never ridden a more dusty road. The entire road surface had a layer of 23cm
of fine grey dust. All you can do is hope that the trucks ahead of you are travelling the same
speed because when you reach them you can’t see and breathing in that whole mess is
terrible. The dusty road was descending sharply down to the Maranon river so it was a series
of switchbacks making passing slow moving trucks an unsafe task. If we caught up to one that
was going too slow we would just park and wait until the truck behind us caught up. It was a
frustrating way to ride, but we had little options and the whole descent was less than 45min so
we just sucked it up.
At the bottom there was a nice bridge to cross the mighty Maranon river and low and behold a
tourist sign advertizing some of the sights in the area. Boy, have we reentered civilization? The
road to Pataz was left at this intersection and the entrance to the National park of Rio Abiseo
wasn’t far down the road. There was a building but no people so we were grateful there was no
messing around with inflated gringo prices. Again, up into the mountains we
went. All within the park the scenery was magic. It started out as a dry dessert with red rocks
and bare trees. We could see evidence of landslides, but the road had been cleared enough
to pass. It was late in the day by now, so we were racing the sun to get to Pataz before dark.
We were not interested in driving twisty mountain roads in the dark.
The higher the road went the more lush the vegetation. We saw some amazing camping
locations but they were inaccessible with our bikes. There was lots of traffic coming down,
most likely it was the end of the work day. We passed through some very small towns but
there was very little camping. It still seemed like there was a lot of people employed in the
mining industry in this region. As we got nearer to the Pataz there was old mining adits at the
side of the road, and we thought we could hear blasting taking place off in the distance.