Túnel Punta Olimpica 15,580 Feet

I had never been three miles up outside a commercial airliner but on Friday our rolling home GANNET2 putted up to the highest road tunnel in the Americas.

It was built twelve years ago to connect the valleys on either side of the White Mountain Range and until last year it was the highest in the world. It seems the Chinese have built a tunnel 65 feet higher in Tibet but that’s just being spoilsports.  

It is almost a mile long, 4155 feet precisely. I’m translating the worldwide metric numbers above the tunnel for the foreign impaired quite aside from the fact that we use US measurements aboard GANNET2.

The inside is paved though not lighted and mercifully it has two lanes so it’s not as stressful as our more recent previous tunnel exploits. 

I noticed some water raining onto the road in a couple of spots so I stopped under them to wash GANNET2’s roof. I am occasionally quite brilliant. 

To get to the tunnel it takes a 30 mile 90 minute ride into the cordillera from Highway Three in the valley floor and a couple overlanders we met in Caraz told us the road surface was excellent “after you get through the village with the horrible wooden planks.” That sounded ominous but after Duck Canyon we felt confident we could cope. 

Indeed there was a horrible wood plank bridge with bits of metal sticking up but we shall get to that in the fullness of time though I should point out it wasn’t as scary as it looked. Big trucks use it too which is always a reassurance on the sketchy bits.

Highway 3 is quite civilized the length we drove through the valley. A roadside baker put us in mind of breakfast. 

So when we saw a stall selling chicken rolls for 30 cents apiece it was time to stop. 

Mount Huascaran after which peak the National Park is named. 

Turning off Highway 3 onto Highway 107 put us on a different route, cement slabs, impoverished villages and livestock. And people hauling impossible loads on their backs. 

Firewood is stacked everywhere. The only seasons up here are dry and rainy. Nights are cold but the weather doesn’t really make huge shifts as you might expect further from the Equator.

The sun was hot but the temperature was around 75 degrees. When we got to the tunnel the temperature dropped to 50 degrees under the same bright sun that felt much cooler at altitude. 

This is the town of Shilla (“she-yah”) which enjoys a reputation for terrible roads. Note the woman hauling a load across the town square. We got lost in this little village in our usual style of not knowing where we are going and she beat us to the other end of town. With that load on her back. 

In our defense the town is confusing as hell. There are two roads through and predictably Google Maps selected the newer, straighter road that is closed for some impenetrable reason to large vehicles. Possibly because the angle at the top might tip over a large truck as it tries to turn left or right…

We came into town on Highway 107 the yellow line from the left. Google wanted us to turn right and go straight up the new road. We tried until we got blocked and I had to back down and try and find another way with no clues. In the end we followed a truck on the red line after we circled downtown a bit trying to figure it out. What a shit show. 

The new vertical street looked like this:

We started from the very bottom but we soon met these cement bollards blocking our way. A Quechua woman watched us crawling up the impossible steep slope waiting to see what we’d do. The only thing we could do was back down and find the real road. Which it turned out was as lovely as we had been told. 

And that mess gets us to the infamous wooden bridge:

We took the pictures of GANNET2 on the bridge on our way down, with Layne walking across the planks with Rusty and I following in the Promaster. 

It wasn’t as bad as it looked. 

A few more torn up bits and we were free of the bad road section. 

Check out this home made manhole cover. Do you think it would support a five ton Promaster? Me neither. 

Then the road  got much better. 


Donkey herding by bicycle did not appear to be completely successful. 

One last cheery wave from Shilla, the town with the crap roads, in the form of one last torn up section of road just beyond the town. Sigh.  

“No Passing” but in his defense I did slow down to help him along. We went up the mountain at 20 to 25 miles an hour taking it easy on our heavily loaded home. 

The entrance to the national parked posed a problem. Technically the website says no dogs but I took that to mean no dogs on the trails as this is a highway that connects areas outside the park. But to avoid any extra stress Layne and Rusty lurked in the back out of sight on the bed. I paid 20 soles ($5:50) and in we went. No one said anything about Rusty when we were inside. 

On the way back down at 1:45 the barrier was up whether for a lunch break or more likely the rest of the day I don’t know. I don’t think anyone would  have cared about Rusty had they seen him at the gate. 

At 12,250 feet we decided to stop for refreshment and to let Rusty walk.

First he scoped out the scene while we boiled water. 

Not your usual tea as we had bought a box of coca leaf tea at the supermarket to help with altitude. Natural and legal the box proclaimed. We won’t be testing that by trying to take any into Chile. 

It tastes like dried grass and is much better sweetened. My headache went away and my breathing got easier but it wasn’t cocaine as you know it in the US. 

It tasted much better than my attempts at chewing the leaves themselves which felt like licking a lawnmower with my mouth filled with grassy debris. I was fine the rest of the day so the tea worked for me if not Layne. 

We were all refreshed in our own ways for the final assault on the summit.

The grades were actually reasonable as a result of all the hairpins. But it went on and on. 

There was a spot to pull safely off the highway but why bother when you can park on a hairpin? Peru gives me a lot of gringo moments when I ask myself “why can’t they…”

The west entrance to the tunnel has a parking area and it was pretty full of people. 

We (I) decided to go through to the  other side…

Lo and behold no visitors on this the eastern side.

There were two cab drivers who brought up hikers and were waiting for their passengers to return from the heights. 

This place was heaven for Rusty. 











The two cab drivers chatted with us about our journey and we gave them

a tour to pass the time for them. 

Every day they take trekkers to various mountains to go on their hikes. Not a bad way to make a living.  

Altitude sickness was getting to Layne and she threw up so it was time to find more oxygen. 

She rested on the bed while I engaged manual first gear and went down the hairpins to the meadow in the valley below. 

Just outside the park was a restaurant listed on iOverlander as a potential overnight stop. Altitude acclimated me was hungry as it had been a while since the chicken sandwich. 

Layne wanted nothing to do with food and indeed wandered off briefly to get rid of whatever was left. I was getting more worried about her but she slept while the van was still so that was good. She had been five at the 13,700 foot lake but altitude sickness is a very unpredictable malady. 

Rusty sat under my table to keep restating dog away. He got lunch from the owner who fed him leftovers. I’d call him greedy so I gave Rusty the head tail off my trout. Good dog. 

Barley soup was delicious. Peruvian

Means always start with soup and this was a good one.

Then I had a trout pan fried crispy and perfect. When Virgilio the owner heard Layne was sick he gave her a cup of a remedy called manga. I had done and it tasted like a gentle herbal tea, nothing bitter or weird. 

He offered for us to dogs the night and I would have loved to, to be in the mph rains in the moonlight but Layne needed to get down the mountain. She was ready to get up in Shilla to photograph the bridge crossing. 

And in the village we came across a festival of some sort. It was a musical event that we should have gone down to watch but things bring the way they were we just wanted to descend. Armando the cab driver from up the mountain came to our rescue. 

A station wagon pulled alongside and an impish face appeared. Follow me he waved and he went down a steep side street. We can’t go there Layne said. She never said “veto” so I just followed the taxi and down we plunged. 

The town of Carhuaz in the valley where we arrived without further incident. 

iOverlander found us a five dollar a night campground with toilets, trash cans and a rolling rushing river. 

Layne was back to herself so we made Rusty happy and stayed two nights giving me time to sort out pictures and assemble this marathon post. Congratulations if you got this far. 

Sunday we drive for the coast I hope.