Southern Exposure

Friday, February 6

Our plan for today was to take the side boxes off the bikes and visit one of the highlights of the area, Laguna Paron.

Unfortunately, we discovered that the road into the mountains was closed, so we decided to ride to the next village of Yungay and take a dirt road to a part of the Huascaran Park called Lagunas Llanganuco, two stunning alpine lakes surrounded by high mountain peaks.

To get to the park we had to ride up a dirt road which was in a very bad shape for about 20 miles. After purchasing our tickets at the park entrance, we kept going deeper into the mountains, and the road was actually slightly better than the village road.

The scenery was beautiful and dramatic from the moment we entered the park. Riding through a glacier cut valley, surrounded by high cliffs of different kinds of rock with magnificent snow-capped peaks in the distance, the road shortly led us to the first lake. The water sparkled with deep turquoise reflecting the surrounding mountain peaks.

As we were traveling further down the road, the sky began to darken, covering most of the snow-capped peaks and we could tell the rain was unavoidable. We reached the second lake that was bright blue at one end and deep green at the other.

After marveling at it for a while, and despite the rain, we decided to ride higher up into the mountains in hopes of getting more good views of the valley. As we went up, the road was getting narrower, steeper and more rocky, while the view of the mountains was becoming more masked by the clouds.

We are here during the rain season so most likely we will not be able to appreciate and enjoy the massive arresting ridges in the Cordillera Blanca because of the clouds and the rain that take over the mountains at this time of year. It rains pretty much every day in the afternoon – that was a sad discovery for us. Not much we can do but put our rain gear on, suck it up and hope for an occasional clear view of the cordilleras.

The road and the weather conditions were becoming more dangerous, so we decided to turn around.

We met one of the locals on the road who asked Matt to give him a ride on the back of the motorcycle to the park entrance. Matt took him on as a passenger, and said later the bike felt much better with him riding on the back as the bike was set up for heavy luggage. The guy decided to get off in the field with roaming cows to say hello to his buddies. We continued on, said our good-byes to the lakes and the mountains, struggled a bit down the village road and finally made it back to our hotel back in Caraz.

Riding mountain dirt roads of Peru is extremely hard on our bodies and the bikes. We thought about staying tomorrow night at another small village nearby for another excursion into the mountains but were pretty sure the clouds would stay in the way of the views and our bikes and bodies were pretty beat up from two days on the dirt roads. We took it easy in the afternoon, Matt napped as I wrote the blog.

We walked to dinner in heavy rain, the streets were flooded with massive rivers of rain water. After dinner we had a chit chat in the lobby of the hotel with a Swiss gentleman who travelled in an RV with his wife. They have been traveling the world on and off for the last nine years in their RV, visiting all the places they had not visited when they travelled as a young couple. What a great life, is there anything better and more satisfying than this?